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Let me explain. The first time I saw the massive time lag seemingly ubiquitous in the Imperium was when I was looking at the Space Hulk videogame. The Space Hulk was exhibiting problems or something, yada yada. The Imperium notices, and then they send a tactical squad of Terminators to deal with the problem- more than a century later.

I've been reading throughout the wiki and this happens everywhere and all the time. I get that the tech in the Imperium moves slowly thanks to the Mechanicum's weird religion, but that doesn't mean their responses to attacks and stuff should be equally sluggish. Besides.... a couple centuries to respond to a threat is kind of late, isn't it? It allows the fester to promulgate for hundreds of years while the Imperium does what exactly? I can't imagine that Warp travel takes so long- if so, Space Marines would probably die of old age instead of battle wounds with all the zipping around they do.

'The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the bureaucracy.' - can't remember who quoted that...

Ok this is simple. The Imperium's administration wings have more people running it then there are guardsmen. It's a great big overbloated unwieldy gov't that is ponderously slow to act but wow do they deliver a payload. For the most part it can take decades for reports to make it back to the decision makers filter through all the bureaucracy untill the off chance someone of note actually reads it and makes action. His/her orders then also filter through all the bureaucracy as the orders get compartmentalized and spread out to the various appropriate depts whom are all supposed to work as one machine to get everything where it needs to go at the same time. Unfortunately most of the time order get mixed around, sent to wrong places, stuck in backlogs etc... and entire battalions can find themselves sent to the wrong place or to the right place but no equipment shows up. There are cases where by the time a Rogue Trader's report of a habitable planet with only primitive unevolved species is finally read and acted on the Guard show up to find that the species evolved into a full fledged technical society. Imperial fluff is filled with constant reminders of how ponderously slow the Imperium is.

While the bureaucracy is part of the problem (and to be fair, managing a bazillion trillion humans is kind of a tough job for a file clerk) I should also point out that Warp travel and communication isn't entirely reliable. People travel to take care of a problem and when their space ship comes out of the warp they find out 200 years have passed. An astropath's message goes to the wrong solar system, etc. That's gonna muck things up quite a bit.

 ProwlerPC wrote:
'The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the bureaucracy.' - can't remember who quoted that...

Methinks Oscar Wilde, but don't quote me on that.

Uh, no pun intended...

There are cases where by the time a Rogue Trader's report of a habitable planet with only primitive unevolved species is finally read and acted on the Guard show up to find that the species evolved into a full fledged technical society. Imperial fluff is filled with constant reminders of how ponderously slow the Imperium is.

What. They're so slow that a species' evolution is faster?? Dude, what the heck? What would the Emperor say of this?? I'm pretty sure that he would at least try to fix this, that sluggishness can mean the difference between life and being digested by a Tyranid.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 fallinq wrote:
While the bureaucracy is part of the problem (and to be fair, managing a bazillion trillion humans is kind of a tough job for a file clerk) I should also point out that Warp travel and communication isn't entirely reliable. People travel to take care of a problem and when their space ship comes out of the warp they find out 200 years have passed. An astropath's message goes to the wrong solar system, etc. That's gonna muck things up quite a bit.

I was a fan of Star Wars before 40k, and one of their most prized pieces of technology was their hyperdrive relays or whatever. In essence, it allows a pilot and crew to travel hundreds of light years and not age as he travels. Why doesn't the Imperium have at least some equivalent to this? 2 centuries is a very long time to lose it just like that...

Just in case if you missed it: in Fallinq's example, the guys in who travelled didn't really travelled for 200 years, for them, just a couple of months passed.
But, you know, warp...
Don't forget servitors in the bureaucracy who handle the messages etc... give them to their superiors, who give them to their superiors etc... until someone is high enough in rank to take a decision, this is part of the problem.
It's not just
"My lord, they need X on planet Y, can I give order ?
-Sur, do it."

 urbanknight4 wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 fallinq wrote:
While the bureaucracy is part of the problem (and to be fair, managing a bazillion trillion humans is kind of a tough job for a file clerk) I should also point out that Warp travel and communication isn't entirely reliable. People travel to take care of a problem and when their space ship comes out of the warp they find out 200 years have passed. An astropath's message goes to the wrong solar system, etc. That's gonna muck things up quite a bit.

I was a fan of Star Wars before 40k, and one of their most prized pieces of technology was their hyperdrive relays or whatever. In essence, it allows a pilot and crew to travel hundreds of light years and not age as he travels. Why doesn't the Imperium have at least some equivalent to this? 2 centuries is a very long time to lose it just like that...

Why don't WE have "at least the equivalent" of a hyperdrive RIGHT NOW? The same reason the Imperium doesn't. We don't have the technology. We don't know how. Also, different sci-fi universe, different rules. In 40k, travelling faster than light WITHOUT jumping through some kind of alternate dimension is thought to be completely impossible... except of course, that the Necrons can apparently do it somehow. But they're the only race that can, and they're infinitely older and more advanced than humans. Eldar avoid the problems of Warp travel by using a DIFFERENT dimension, the Webway, which is safe(er) and stable(ish). But again, no human knows how how to access it (except for Ahriman, who isn't sharing without a fething good reason) and the Eldar work pretty hard to keep humans and other "lesser" races out.

Except for a proud few ancient and highly advanced races, most of the galaxy has to use Warp travel to get around because, despite it's problems, it's the ONLY way to travel across the galaxy without going at sub-light speeds, which would literally take millennia.

GW also has no sense of scale. They're all "ok, there's this galaxy spanning empire, and they'll have... a million Marines to fight their battles. That's a lot of Marines, right? That should be totally enough, 'cause those Marines are badass, one of them can fight an entire planet on their own, and they've been fighting for a really, really long time, like, 10,000 years, and..."

Honestly, I'm pretty sure whenever they need to think up a number such as the number of years between an event, the number of warriors involved in a battle, etc, they just pull a completely random number out of a hat.

urbanknight4 wrote:

 ProwlerPC wrote:
'The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the bureaucracy.' - can't remember who quoted that...

Methinks Oscar Wilde, but don't quote me on that.

Sounds like something either he or Mark Twain would say.

 DarkLink wrote:
GW also has no sense of scale. They're all "ok, there's this galaxy spanning empire, and they'll have... a million Marines to fight their battles. That's a lot of Marines, right? That should be totally enough, 'cause those Marines are badass, one of them can fight an entire planet on their own, and they've been fighting for a really, really long time, like, 10,000 years, and..."

Honestly, I'm pretty sure whenever they need to think up a number such as the number of years between an event, the number of warriors involved in a battle, etc, they just pull a completely random number out of a hat.

urbanknight4 wrote:

 ProwlerPC wrote:
'The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the bureaucracy.' - can't remember who quoted that...

Methinks Oscar Wilde, but don't quote me on that.

Sounds like something either he or Mark Twain would say.

Still better than Star Wars, which went with starting the "Clone" Wars with only 200,000 clones for the entire galaxy.

 fallinq wrote:
While the bureaucracy is part of the problem (and to be fair, managing a bazillion trillion humans is kind of a tough job for a file clerk) I should also point out that Warp travel and communication isn't entirely reliable. People travel to take care of a problem and when their space ship comes out of the warp they find out 200 years have passed. An astropath's message goes to the wrong solar system, etc. That's gonna muck things up quite a bit.

There's also the case where they've come out something like 200 years before they went in as well.
There's an entire order in the inqusition about dealing with time issues from warp travel.

Yea, Ordo Chronos.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Well, it's already said that managing a country of that epic size is really hard + bureaucracy. For quick reactions there are Inquisition.

Well, you see, if you have any sense of scale you'd know that to travel 100 light year at the speed of light takes -- wait for it -- 100 years. See, if two systems are 2 light-years away and one sends a message to another using light signals, it'd take 2 years for the other to receive it. Since physically traveling at the speed of light is a technical impossibility -- the mass itself prevents the mass from reach that speed, regardless of energy input. Sci-if universes had to come up with many excuses to make an empire that's larger than one system work.

Around the time wormhole theory came into light, a wormhole-based space travel was all the rage. Therefore the hyperspace was used for Star Wars. GW decided it'd be cool to use the wrap they took from Moorecock and used in the Warhammer universe as their version of the hyperspace for 40K. Therefore it's unpredictable and dangerous, but it's the only option available to most civilizations. Even the eldars relied on a semi warp-based tech, except it's relatively safer.

Later fictions have the advantage of having the benefit of decades more academic discussions for reference. Mass Effect got around the problem by applying an unobtainium to magically reduce mass. And that's fine, because no one has the solution, and everyone is free to invent their own spacefaring systems with their own advantages and drawbacks. But that means no two universes can mix together -- even if both use hyperspace/warpspace -- there is no telling if both are the same thing. No two universes may have the same sci-fi property to support a particular technology. That's why WH40K does not have a Warp beacon that's as reliable as the Hyperspace Beacon in the Star Wars universe.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'd also like to add, having been stuck at an Chinese Vehicle Registration office for 4 hours (basically I forfeited my entire afternoon to renew my car's "roadworthy" identifications), as well as having spent an entire morning paying for a 100 RMB traffic violation fine a few days back, I can see how a Million-strong stellar empire would be impossible to function with a centralized government of any size. First you have this one department to manage all the stuffs, with more people there comes greater demands for management and red tapes, and it turns out all the paperworks become too much for one network to process fast enough. So you start another department to take over some of that duty, like communications between settlements, and then you need to specify what type of communications for what department to manage as settlements become cities, and cities become states/provinces...

Even the GW writers knew when they wrote Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and specified that the Imperium is basically a collection of empires, almost entirely independent from each other, with only some obligations to Terra. Yet the Adeptus Terra is still overwhelmed as it must maintain its authority and enforce its laws and tithe that reminds the imperialists that they are still subjects to the Emperor of Mankind.

In such a system, which an order must be queue behind a million other orders; there's probably a dozen thousand priority one orders that needs sending. So let's say there's a plea for investigating a Space Hulk from a Rogue Trader/Patrol ship, etc, the Rogue Trader/Captain sends a report to sector command via his ship telepath. So the telepath sends a psychic message and maybe hours or days later the sector command telepathic chorus received it. The chorus had to put this plea down on a datapad, a message tube, or something, along with a thousand other messages, not to mention the possible millions of other messages pending ahead of them, to a Sector Command department to sort the messages to send to appropriate departments for handling. A trade management department would have no idea what course of action should be taken for handling a Space Hulk, after all. So that's another queue for the sorting. After passing the tens of thousands of priority message the plea got passed to an appropriate department for response. Now -- the department still gets tens of thousands of priority requests pending, as each must be reviewed and approved. Now imagine, if the department also has a peer-review system, when a prior decision, like blow up the Space Hulk with Cyclopean Missiles, got revoked, it gets put back on the very back of the priority queue again! So it's no wonder the whole thing would take forever, as new and old requests keep stacking up over, what, several Millenniums? For all we know, there could be billions of priority requests pending review at this point.

Although, honestly, dealing with Space Hulk should be left to system authorities, like "just blow that up!". But no, the AdMech and the Imperium both want the Archeotech inside so it's "send message to us". This kind of just clog up the poop pipe, figuratively.

Isn't space, like, huge?

Taking in all you guys answers, I've just come into a realization of how big this universe really is. The Warp technology makes sense that it'd disrupt travel and communication- it provides a way for it to happen, but not very reliably. The high bureaucracy also keeps the whole theme the Imperium has going for it of being like a big dumb ox: slow and dim, but pretty powerful if you anger the big lummox.

I wish things could be better in the Imperium. Bureaucrats in Terra shouldn't be making combat-related decisions, especially in far away sectors when the local squads or Astartes van do it better. As for the tech, all I know is that we're the only race that looks for ancient tech to power the great majority of their development (except the Orks and Necrons, because they're already pretty formidable).

The thing about looking for ancient tech is that humanity, as a whole, have awesome archeotech to discover, while the other races' technology is the pinnacle of their species' advancement.

It gets truly ridiculous: Human Dark Age tech makes the Eldar, a proud and ancient race who retained their technology, if not their numbers, during their own imperial collapse look like homo erectus proud of his new wheel.

If something is worth doing it is worth doing well bogged down in bureaucracy whilst struggling with logistic and communication errors.

 urbanknight4 wrote:

There are cases where by the time a Rogue Trader's report of a habitable planet with only primitive unevolved species is finally read and acted on the Guard show up to find that the species evolved into a full fledged technical society. Imperial fluff is filled with constant reminders of how ponderously slow the Imperium is.

What. They're so slow that a species' evolution is faster?? Dude, what the heck? What would the Emperor say of this?? I'm pretty sure that he would at least try to fix this, that sluggishness can mean the difference between life and being digested by a Tyranid.

I think that example is down to hyperbole, warp f*kery and time distortion. But a 6 month travel time from one combat zone to the next seems to be a common rough estimate.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
The thing about looking for ancient tech is that humanity, as a whole, have awesome archeotech to discover, while the other races' technology is the pinnacle of their species' advancement.

It gets truly ridiculous: Human Dark Age tech makes the Eldar, a proud and ancient race who retained their technology, if not their numbers, during their own imperial collapse look like homo erectus proud of his new wheel.

While the Craftworld Eldar didn't get it as bad in terms of loss of tech as mankind did, it's misleading to say that they've "retained their technology." The Eldar who are around today are the equivalent of a group of survivalists who have ridden out a nuclear holocaust in a bunker stocked with weapons and supplies (or a BDSM club, for the Dark Eldar). They are nowhere NEAR capable of what they could do at the height of their empire. When Eldar say the stars lived and died at their command, they're not using hyperbole. And the Eldar still have access to ancient weapons that can wipe out WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEMS, but they haven't used them yet for fear of what they might attract. Eldar also have devices that SLOW DOWN TIME or create POCKET SIZED BLACK HOLES. Humans at the height of the Dark Age of Technology NEVER challenged the Eldar empire for supremacy. Just cause we haven't seen much crazy Eldar "archeotech" doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The Eldar are just smart enough to know what it does, so we don't have stories where they accidentally turn on a device that implodes a star or creates an endless army of demonically possessed robots. Notably, unlike human Dark Age tech, Eldar tech has never turned on them.

Well, insanely big bureaucracy:
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Adeptus_Administratum
http://darkreign.org/sites/default/files/The%20Adeptus%20Administratum.pdf
http://images.dakkadakka.com/gallery/2010/1/2/73454-Adeptus%20Terra,%20Background,%20Disposition,%20Emperor,%20Fluff,%20Imperial%20Guard.jpg
I think the running joke is that when a "request" hits the stack for a given clerk, his inherited successor processes it.

 fallinq wrote:
While the Craftworld Eldar didn't get it as bad in terms of loss of tech as mankind did, it's misleading to say that they've "retained their technology." The Eldar who are around today are the equivalent of a group of survivalists who have ridden out a nuclear holocaust in a bunker stocked with weapons and supplies (or a BDSM club, for the Dark Eldar). They are nowhere NEAR capable of what they could do at the height of their empire. When Eldar say the stars lived and died at their command, they're not using hyperbole. And the Eldar still have access to ancient weapons that can wipe out WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEMS, but they haven't used them yet for fear of what they might attract. Eldar also have devices that SLOW DOWN TIME or create POCKET SIZED BLACK HOLES. Humans at the height of the Dark Age of Technology NEVER challenged the Eldar empire for supremacy. Just cause we haven't seen much crazy Eldar "archeotech" doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The Eldar are just smart enough to know what it does, so we don't have stories where they accidentally turn on a device that implodes a star or creates an endless army of demonically possessed robots. Notably, unlike human Dark Age tech, Eldar tech has never turned on them.

Why don't the Eldar use this tech against the forces of Chaos or whatever? You'd think that pocket sized black holes would be a cool alternative to emptying round after round at a mass of Tyranids when you can instead suck them up to another dimension.

fallinq wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
The thing about looking for ancient tech is that humanity, as a whole, have awesome archeotech to discover, while the other races' technology is the pinnacle of their species' advancement.

It gets truly ridiculous: Human Dark Age tech makes the Eldar, a proud and ancient race who retained their technology, if not their numbers, during their own imperial collapse look like homo erectus proud of his new wheel.

While the Craftworld Eldar didn't get it as bad in terms of loss of tech as mankind did, it's misleading to say that they've "retained their technology." The Eldar who are around today are the equivalent of a group of survivalists who have ridden out a nuclear holocaust in a bunker stocked with weapons and supplies (or a BDSM club, for the Dark Eldar). They are nowhere NEAR capable of what they could do at the height of their empire. When Eldar say the stars lived and died at their command, they're not using hyperbole. And the Eldar still have access to ancient weapons that can wipe out WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEMS, but they haven't used them yet for fear of what they might attract. Eldar also have devices that SLOW DOWN TIME or create POCKET SIZED BLACK HOLES. Humans at the height of the Dark Age of Technology NEVER challenged the Eldar empire for supremacy. Just cause we haven't seen much crazy Eldar "archeotech" doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The Eldar are just smart enough to know what it does, so we don't have stories where they accidentally turn on a device that implodes a star or creates an endless army of demonically possessed robots. Notably, unlike human Dark Age tech, Eldar tech has never turned on them.

I know that.

I also know that Human archeotech includes weapons that shoot black holes backwards through time.

Surely a pocket sized black hole is a normal blackhole?

Terminators are probably in high demand and short supply, not only that but you have to ship them long distances through a time bending dimension.

The Administratum has to process billions of trillions of statistics everyday, all of which is sent through the warp. 6 months to wait for the reinforcments to turn up is pretty quick considering. Emperor knows what happens if someone puts the decimal point in the wrong space...

 n0t_u wrote:

 fallinq wrote:
While the bureaucracy is part of the problem (and to be fair, managing a bazillion trillion humans is kind of a tough job for a file clerk) I should also point out that Warp travel and communication isn't entirely reliable. People travel to take care of a problem and when their space ship comes out of the warp they find out 200 years have passed. An astropath's message goes to the wrong solar system, etc. That's gonna muck things up quite a bit.

There's also the case where they've come out something like 200 years before they went in as well.
There's an entire order in the inqusition about dealing with time issues from warp travel.

You mean there was an entire order in the Inquisition dealing with time issues. Unfortenately they dissapeared to a man (which is another issue the Imperium suffers from every now and then)

Also, it should be noted that time disruptions due to the Warp are relatively rare. Usually astropaths can calculate the travel time pretty accurately. It is only with rare freak currents (which happen when there are major disturbances in the Warp) that a ship gets blown of course and appears at a completely different location or time than intended.

The reason for the slowness of the Imperium is mostly its incredibly huge galaxy-spanning size combined with ten thousands of years of accumulated bureacracy.

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Surely a pocket sized black hole is a normal blackhole?

Terminators are probably in high demand and short supply, not only that but you have to ship them long distances through a time bending dimension.

The Administratum has to process billions of trillions of statistics everyday, all of which is sent through the warp. 6 months to wait for the reinforcments to turn up is pretty quick considering. Emperor knows what happens if someone puts the decimal point in the wrong space...

I dunno. I feel like things ran way smoother when the Emperor was in charge. There are a lot of dumb and outright detrimental policies in the Imperium, but I can't be too sure what was enacted by him and what was passed by the High Terran Council. Certainly their creation only serves to obfuscate the bureaucracy even further. During the Great Crusade I assume that whatever the Emperor oversaw personally got done instantly.

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Surely a pocket sized black hole is a normal blackhole?

Well they have a pocket sized device that can create a black hole. As for why they don't start chucking black holes everywhere as soon as an enemy attacks, black holes tend to be very indiscriminate in their destruction. If you're trying to SAVE lives, (say, on a craftworld that's getting invaded) you have to be a little more delicate.

I know that.

I also know that Human archeotech includes weapons that shoot black holes backwards through time.

Yes but:
1) You're comparing peak of Dark Age human tech to post fall Eldar tech, again, under the assumption that the Eldar lost NO tech knowledge or capability when 90% of their civilization got annihilated.
2)Sending a black hole back in time seems ridiculously dangerous to temporal stability. How do you know what you're going to wipe out of existence by doing that? You could accidentally cause a temporal paradox and render your entire species extinct! It's probably less a matter of the Eldar being unable to make something like that, and more a matter of them looking at the humans who did and thinking, "WHY WOULD YOU EVEN?!?! "
3) It's been stated multiple places in the fluff that the Eldar empire was the most powerful and advanced empire before the fall. There are NO places in the fluff that state that Dark Age of Technology humans were more advanced, which is why this particular bit of fanon is one of my pet peeves.

 urbanknight4 wrote:

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Surely a pocket sized black hole is a normal blackhole?

Terminators are probably in high demand and short supply, not only that but you have to ship them long distances through a time bending dimension.

The Administratum has to process billions of trillions of statistics everyday, all of which is sent through the warp. 6 months to wait for the reinforcments to turn up is pretty quick considering. Emperor knows what happens if someone puts the decimal point in the wrong space...

I dunno. I feel like things ran way smoother when the Emperor was in charge. There are a lot of dumb and outright detrimental policies in the Imperium, but I can't be too sure what was enacted by him and what was passed by the High Terran Council. Certainly their creation only serves to obfuscate the bureaucracy even further. During the Great Crusade I assume that whatever the Emperor oversaw personally got done instantly.

Too bad Horus kicked the crap out of him.

If you're looking for an efficient bureaucracy that serves the good of all its members, perhaps you'd be interested in the Tau Empire.

Horus only managed to wound the Emperor so much because the Emperor had compassion towards him and didn't want to use his full power against his son.

As for the Tau... there's something wrong with them. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm sure the Ethereals are pulling a hat trick. You can't possibly obtain respect and obedience from an entire race the way they did. Its not grimdark enough for 40k. There's rot under their glory.

Furyou Miko wrote:The thing about looking for ancient tech is that humanity, as a whole, have awesome archeotech to discover, while the other races' technology is the pinnacle of their species' advancement.

It gets truly ridiculous: Human Dark Age tech makes the Eldar, a proud and ancient race who retained their technology, if not their numbers, during their own imperial collapse look like homo erectus proud of his new wheel.

The Eldar most definitely did not retain their technology. The Eldar use fething knife-shooting guns - they once had access to weapons that could annihilate an army with a single magazine or kill an Astartes with a twitch of the wrist. Eldar fell far from their peak, the fact that they still have highly advanced technology just bespeaks how advanced they once were.

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Surely a pocket sized black hole is a normal blackhole?

A pocket-sized blackhole is the difference between 4.9 E 19 Newtons of gravitational force in a ten thousand KM radius and 4.9 E 29 in a ten million KM radius. Both bend time and space, but one of them is significantly more powerful than the other. It's like comparing a C'tan (pocket-god) and Khorne (full-sized God)

I dunno. I feel like things ran way smoother when the Emperor was in charge. There are a lot of dumb and outright detrimental policies in the Imperium, but I can't be too sure what was enacted by him and what was passed by the High Terran Council. Certainly their creation only serves to obfuscate the bureaucracy even further. During the Great Crusade I assume that whatever the Emperor oversaw personally got done instantly.

Most of that gak was passed after the Emperor's fall. The Emperor layed the groundwork by creating his massive bureaucracy, but it was just barely coming into power during a highly enlightened period (Great Crusade, enlightened in comparison to Old Night), which degenerated into a state of superstitious idiocy that was only slightly better than Old Night in its civilized-ness.

fallinq wrote:
3) It's been stated multiple places in the fluff that the Eldar empire was the most powerful and advanced empire before the fall. There are NO places in the fluff that state that Dark Age of Technology humans were more advanced, which is why this particular bit of fanon is one of my pet peeves.

It's less fanon, and more that most of the badass tech is human Archeaotech, whereas 90% of Eldar Archeaotech is back on the Crone Worlds, and the other 10% is on Craftworlds (i.e. completely unused because the Eldar are too big of pansies to try to use it and develop better tech)

urbanknight4 wrote:Horus only managed to wound the Emperor so much because the Emperor had compassion towards him and didn't want to use his full power against his son.

As for the Tau... there's something wrong with them. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm sure the Ethereals are pulling a hat trick. You can't possibly obtain respect and obedience from an entire race the way they did. Its not grimdark enough for 40k. There's rot under their glory.

I agree with the first part, but I hate it when people try to change the Tau to be grimdark. Why can't fans and dumbass BL writers just leave the one honest-to-god good faction alone? I mean, seriously, the Tau are the only Empire that isn't a big, steaming pile of gak (which defies the odds, as there would likely be at least a few Empires who at least tried to give their citizens basic sentient rights and freedoms)!!!

 urbanknight4 wrote:

 fallinq wrote:
While the Craftworld Eldar didn't get it as bad in terms of loss of tech as mankind did, it's misleading to say that they've "retained their technology." The Eldar who are around today are the equivalent of a group of survivalists who have ridden out a nuclear holocaust in a bunker stocked with weapons and supplies (or a BDSM club, for the Dark Eldar). They are nowhere NEAR capable of what they could do at the height of their empire. When Eldar say the stars lived and died at their command, they're not using hyperbole. And the Eldar still have access to ancient weapons that can wipe out WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEMS, but they haven't used them yet for fear of what they might attract. Eldar also have devices that SLOW DOWN TIME or create POCKET SIZED BLACK HOLES. Humans at the height of the Dark Age of Technology NEVER challenged the Eldar empire for supremacy. Just cause we haven't seen much crazy Eldar "archeotech" doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The Eldar are just smart enough to know what it does, so we don't have stories where they accidentally turn on a device that implodes a star or creates an endless army of demonically possessed robots. Notably, unlike human Dark Age tech, Eldar tech has never turned on them.

Why don't the Eldar use this tech against the forces of Chaos or whatever? You'd think that pocket sized black holes would be a cool alternative to emptying round after round at a mass of Tyranids when you can instead suck them up to another dimension.

A lot of the surviving pre-fall tech is held by the surviving 'true eldar', i.e. by dark elder that were hiding in the webway. Most of it is lost to the chrone worlds

Why don't the Dark Eldar use it? Well it's psychically controlled and Dark Eldar supress their psychic nature. As such, it takes a CWE/DE alliance to use such artefacts (assuming anyone is able to work out how they work), and even when the artefacts are used they can take a considerable time to fire up, and often require multiple eldar with the weapon to 'pull the trigger'.

Warhammer 40K is not a sci-fi setting like Star Trek, with a bunch of fancy, whiz-bang tech and speedy ships...

.... it's the Dark Ages, in space. An age of fear, superstition, zealotry and persecution of the "Other".

 Psienesis wrote:
Warhammer 40K is not a sci-fi setting like Star Trek, with a bunch of fancy, whiz-bang tech and speedy ships...

.... it's the Dark Ages, in space. An age of fear, superstition, zealotry and persecution of the "Other".

*raises hand*

B-b-b-but there were Dark Ages in history, and no technological regression in the times.