Has tau technological advancement been.. stalling?

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**Gamgee**

In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

**Mr Morden**

Gamgee wrote:
Mr Morden wrote:
They can be in both and can engulf whole worlds or even star systems

They open small often temporary rifts as per lexicanum page on it. So it can happen. That doesn't mean they are in the warp and thus all its time displacement affects happen. That's ridiculous even by 40k lore standards. That would go against most lore I've heard.

Edit
If a rift was so large to fill the entire Tau sector and affect time it would be akin to a smaller eye of terror and the Tau would not exist or definitely be chaos monsters.

You realise that the eye of Terror is bascially a permanent Warp Storm along with the malstrom and many others?

I didn't say it was - I was pointing out that Warp Storms are not just in the Warp as you had asserted.

Lexicanum is not always right either.

**fresus**

Gamgee wrote:
In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

I assume the skimmers use some type of anti-gravity. So weight doesn't really seem to be an issue for them. Inertia might still be a problem though (I don't know if they give any justification on how their anti-G is supposed to work).

**Gamgee**

Mr Morden wrote:
Gamgee wrote:
Mr Morden wrote:
They can be in both and can engulf whole worlds or even star systems

They open small often temporary rifts as per lexicanum page on it. So it can happen. That doesn't mean they are in the warp and thus all its time displacement affects happen. That's ridiculous even by 40k lore standards. That would go against most lore I've heard.

Edit
If a rift was so large to fill the entire Tau sector and affect time it would be akin to a smaller eye of terror and the Tau would not exist or definitely be chaos monsters.

You realise that the eye of Terror is bascially a permanent Warp Storm along with the malstrom and many others?

I didn't say it was - I was pointing out that Warp Storms are not just in the Warp as you had asserted.

Lexicanum is not always right either.

That is the friggen eye of terror. Pretty much the sole exception (there are a few others but they are tiny speks compared to that). I really doubt a warp storm in a tiny sub sector has that potency to make a rift that big and the evidence as I said would be no tau or anything existing in that sector or chaos Tau. Neither of which has happened.

**Mr Morden**

I think you ae underestimating the scale of the 40k Universe and just how small the Tau are.

The Crusade of Fire campaign was set against a backdrop of a warp storm (the Crows eye) that envolped an entire sub sector - its not unique in this.

The Maelstrom is vast, scond only to the eye of Terror.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/List_of_Warp_Storms

**Vaktathi**

The Tau are a tiny, insignificant power in a gargantuan universe. A Warp Storm doing weird things would hardly be out of character or unrealistic for 40k.

**Gamgee**

Except when warp storms do affect unprotected people it causes them to chaosify or be invaded. Neither of which has happened to the Tau. The point of this debate was never warp storms and how they function but how likely it was the Tau were affected by them. As a matter of fact they don't even believe in deamons or the warp and call psy power "mind science" which shows how rare that stuff is in their culture.

This is getting off topic and no one has brought up any evidence to support the Tau were in fact affected by the warp. Basically this is becoming a strawman fallacy. There is far more evidence to suggest Necron or Eldar tampering or possibly old ones.

**Mr Morden**

Gamgee wrote:
Except when warp storms do affect unprotected people it causes them to chaosify or be invaded. Neither of which has happened to the Tau. The point of this debate was never warp storms and how they function but how likely it was the Tau were affected by them. As a matter of fact they don't even believe in deamons or the warp and call psy power "mind science" which shows how rare that stuff is in their culture.

This is getting off topic and no one has brought up any evidence to support the Tau were in fact affected by the warp. Basically this is becoming a strawman fallacy. There is far more evidence to suggest Necron or Eldar tampering or possibly old ones.

I only popped in to correct the errors you were stating as fact, that as you say is done.

**Vaktathi**

Gamgee wrote:
Except when warp storms do affect unprotected people it causes them to chaosify or be invaded. Neither of which has happened to the Tau.

Not necessarily. If they're deep within it, yeah. If they're essentially just behind a warp storm however, preventing normal travel to them, and not totally engulfed by it, they could be ok. Thats happened before with Warp Storm stuff.

This is all conjecture on something I'm sure GW will never see a need to address, but wouldnt be out of the bounds of 40k fluff.

**Gamgee**

If they are just behind it then how could it possibly affect their time and by that much? It needs to be at least partial immersion which would see an affect on the populace of some sort. At the very least they wouldn't be able to cover up the massive maw in the sky where horrific deamons pop out of.

Is it impossible by 40k standards? No. Is is impossible for Tau to have been affected by their warp storm in such a way? I would say almost certainly impossible given what we know. The odds of this having been the case are near impossible barring full retcon of the Tau backstory.

**Vector Strike**

Regarding the main topic, I don't belive this is the case. The new codex lifted some limitations we had in the 6th codex, brought up some new stuff and also the fluff embraces even more the new things from previous book.

In fact, one of the things I like in Tau is that they are progressing not only in fluff, but in rules as well.

**Pouncey**

I wonder if, in real life, if humanity doesn't ever get wiped out, we'll end up peaking in weapons technology. As in, get to the point where we literally cannot make better weapons than the ones we already have.

It's far beyond anything I'll see in my lifetime, but... is there a theoretical limit where the weapons you can actually arm an individual soldier with literally cannot be improved in any way?

**Gamgee**

Pouncey wrote:
I wonder if, in real life, if humanity doesn't ever get wiped out, we'll end up peaking in weapons technology. As in, get to the point where we literally cannot make better weapons than the ones we already have.

It's far beyond anything I'll see in my lifetime, but... is there a theoretical limit where the weapons you can actually arm an individual soldier with literally cannot be improved in any way?

Impossible to know for sure, but I doubt it. As we discover one thing we find new things. From one thing know ten thousand things. However at some point the weapons will stop looking like stuff we can recognize today since we have no grasps of the concepts of how to make them yet.

**carldooley**

Pouncey wrote:
I wonder if, in real life, if humanity doesn't ever get wiped out, we'll end up peaking in weapons technology. As in, get to the point where we literally cannot make better weapons than the ones we already have.

It's far beyond anything I'll see in my lifetime, but... is there a theoretical limit where the weapons you can actually arm an individual soldier with literally cannot be improved in any way?

There are no limits. Only in what we choose to build. While I hate to dip into sci-fi, consider Dr. Who's Osterhagen Keys. Then there are gravity warheads that can delete planets or make suns go supernova. We certainly have the knowledge to build something like the Osterhagen device, but it is one of the times that I pray to God that no one is foolish enough to do so.

**Gamgee**

Or the deadly krikket bomb. No one could forget that badboy.

**Peregrine**

Gamgee wrote:
In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

Why would you assume that the Tau would have some equivalent to whatever technobabble thing exists in some other universe? Advancing in tech doesn't mean getting all your favorite setting's toys, nor does lacking those toys mean the Tau are below your favorite setting in tech level.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Pouncey wrote:
It's far beyond anything I'll see in my lifetime, but... is there a theoretical limit where the weapons you can actually arm an individual soldier with literally cannot be improved in any way?

Yes, but it's pretty huge. At some point you simply run into physical limits on how much energy you can get. Magically converting the entire mass of the gun into energy for a single shot is the limit, and there's a limit on how much mass you can bring while still counting as an individual-soldier weapon.

The more relevant question is whether we'll reach a point where developing more powerful weapons has no real purpose. A pistol that fires 500 MT nukes is useless for pretty obvious reasons. Once you reach a certain point in firepower you're already killing everything thoroughly enough that adding more firepower no longer produces any meaningful benefits. And that threshold is likely fairly low. Once you get into the kind of advanced scifi setting where theoretical firepower limits are relevant you're almost certainly dealing with things like space battleships that can kill whole planets or snipe individual targets from orbit. The war ends once the battle in space is over, and ground troops would have little purpose outside of occasional police-type missions where an objective has to be taken intact. And once your guns start destroying everything with collateral damage you kind of have to stop adding more firepower.

**oldravenman3025**

Gamgee wrote:
Except when warp storms do affect unprotected people it causes them to chaosify or be invaded. Neither of which has happened to the Tau. The point of this debate was never warp storms and how they function but how likely it was the Tau were affected by them. As a matter of fact they don't even believe in deamons or the warp and call psy power "mind science" which shows how rare that stuff is in their culture.

This is getting off topic and no one has brought up any evidence to support the Tau were in fact affected by the warp. Basically this is becoming a strawman fallacy. There is far more evidence to suggest Necron or Eldar tampering or possibly old ones.

The Tau have a minimum presence in the Warp from a psychic standpoint. That's why they didn't attract the attention of Chaos, when that region was shrouded by the Warp Storm in question. And they are not far along enough in the evolution toward becoming a psychic race, which also works in their favor.

And the Tau were hidden far longer than two to three thousand years. The Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator vessel Land's Vision first encountered the stone age level Tau in the late 35th Millennium. The Warp Storms consumed the region shortly after their discovery. Thanks to this, and the chaos of the Age of Apostasy, the Tau got a reprieve from execution. When the storms abated after 6000 years, the Imperium discovered a space faring empire spanning 300 light years. Not too shabby, to be honest.

As for the thread topic, the Tau ARE advancing. It's just not noticeable from a tabletop perspective (and understandably so). And from a fluff perspective, they are prioritizing development in the face of new realities on the galactic stage. So, new developments and technologies will be more noticeable in those key areas, rather than in the lower priority areas where advances will be a bit slower in coming.

**123ply**

Gamgee wrote:
We just got Breachers, Stormsurges, Riptides, Tidewalls, and the new Barracuda (in lore) within less than a decade. We're also in lore getting an entire array of titan class platforms and we currently have the Taunar and this is within only a few short in lore years. The XV8 is now obsolete as our main assault mech (other than cheap mass attacks) since Riptides are being fielded more and more in lore and on the tabletop.

Also we gained perfect weather control in Mont'ka and super planetary shields that can withstand super exterminatus and in the FSE codex (6th ed) their feats of engineering are insane. One planet has been hollowed out and made into the perfect city planet to live on and is made out of hexes. We can put up nearly completely automated space defense stations that can rival the IoM's within weeks. We made a virus that destroyed a hive fleet.

There is also apparently some sort of stealth variant of the Manta dropship mentioned only in a single line of Mont'ka used by Farsight to land on the planet.

Tau technology is rapidly advancing. I would like to see a next generation battlesuit. Perhaps the YX class of battlesuit. YX-8 can fire three guns at once and comes with a 2+ save standard and have two wounds.

Edit
If the rumors of next years 13th black cruasade are correct. The Tau are about to make a huge breakout during the campaign. Sounds like FTL drives to me. Full proper ones. There is the long going sub plot of them trying to develop faster FTL.

Edit2
Also in lore it was said for a long time before the IoM our current military at the time was more than sufficient. We basically curb stomped any and all races that didn't join us (the few). There wasn't really a need to develop new stuff. We also got Ion weapons in a trade deal with the Demiurg.

The "exterminatus" in montka wasn't actually exterminatus, which it clearly states in the book. Cyclonic torpedoes, let alone an actually exterminatus would have destroyed agrellan no doubt.

And according to the Deathwatch codex, the Tau have finally managed to cross the damocles gulf with the new "ZFR Horizon Accelerator Engine" which i believe means the Tau have finally managed to figure out real FTL travel. Although I highly doubt it's faster than the inperium's warp drives

**John Prins**

Weapons technology gets stuck in sweet spots of efficiency vs cost for long periods of time. The assault rifle of today isn't markedly better than the assault rifle of 50 years ago - at least on the kind of scale WH40K deals with. Weapons cost money to make and supply, so upgrading the choice of main trooper weapon is a huge burden in terms of money and logistics. The AK-47 is the most popular assault rifle b/c it's so easy to manufacture and it's fault tolerant to use, not because it's ultra-deadly.

When you've pushed past all the 'easy' technology and found the 'sweet spot' to make/use Pulse Rifles, it will be hard to push past it. The only reason it seems slow is because our own society is in a phase of rapid technological advancement.

**Pouncey**

Gamgee wrote:
In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

...How do you reduce the mass of an object without partly destroying it?

Are you sure it doesn't just reduce inertia?

Automatically Appended Next Post:

123ply wrote:
The "exterminatus" in montka wasn't actually exterminatus, which it clearly states in the book. Cyclonic torpedoes, let alone an actually exterminatus would have destroyed agrellan no doubt.

And according to the Deathwatch codex, the Tau have finally managed to cross the damocles gulf with the new "ZFR Horizon Accelerator Engine" which i believe means the Tau have finally managed to figure out real FTL travel. Although I highly doubt it's faster than the inperium's warp drives

:: chokes on drink ::

They figured out how to go faster than light?

Like, not just find a way to create the effect of going faster than light, but literally travel faster than c?

So they were not only able to get around needing infinite energy (which, by the way, you would not have if you had the entire universe's combined amount of energy), but they also pushed past c and are now traveling back in time whenever they go anywhere by starship?

**EnTyme**

Pouncey wrote:
Gamgee wrote:
In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

...How do you reduce the mass of an object without partly destroying it?

Are you sure it doesn't just reduce inertia?

In that universe, Element Zero is basically the Magic McGuffin/God Particle. When a negative current is applied to it, it reduces in mass. When a positive current is applied to it, it gains in mass. It's the basis for more or less all advanced technology in Mass Effect. The completionist in me found the games too daunting, but I always loved the universe.

**Baldeagle91**

The main mistake here is people are stating war slows development.... this isn't really true.

All the major military developments over the last 2,000 years are direct results of large scale wars.

What the most likely explanation is the TAU are experiencing something similar to the Germans in WW2. They need every rifle they can get and their production is already set up to produce their current equipment. Minor modifications are easy to put into production, but replacing the entire production of their basic soldiers kit would result in a drastic slow down in production. Also add the fact that they don't produce stuff on the same industrial scale as larger nations, it means they simply cannot afford to change the smaller equipment.

However what they can do is upgrade the more niche equipment such as tanks and aircraft, stuff that is needed in smaller numbers and they wouldn't be able to keep up with their opponents production anyway. Plus soldiers need guns no matter how outdated, there is a reason most troops outside the US still used bolt action rifles until the early to mid 50's.

Then you have the issue of, do pulse rifles really need upgrading? They're possibly the best rifle given to common troops in the 40k universe anyway. Plus atm we only see the current variant, which I presume has been upgraded vastly since the 38M.

**Pouncey**

EnTyme wrote:
Pouncey wrote:
Gamgee wrote:
In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

...How do you reduce the mass of an object without partly destroying it?

Are you sure it doesn't just reduce inertia?

In that universe, Element Zero is basically the Magic McGuffin/God Particle. When a negative current is applied to it, it reduces in mass. When a positive current is applied to it, it gains in mass. It's the basis for more or less all advanced technology in Mass Effect. The completionist in me found the games too daunting, but I always loved the universe.

Okay, mass is essentially the things that stuff is made of. If you reduce something's mass, you have to physically take away parts of it. It's a requisite of how mass works. If you reduce the mass of an atom, you have to take away part of the atom, which, at that scale, drastically feths up what kind of atom that is. If you remove, say, a quark from a hydrogen atom, it is not going to be a hydrogen atom anymore, but instead probably something that is not useful as hydrogen.

**EnTyme**

Pouncey wrote:
EnTyme wrote:
Pouncey wrote:
Gamgee wrote:
In the mass effect universe element zero (a fake elements for the purposes of the sci-fi) can reduce the mass of objects. I'm assuming the Tau have something like that or can discover it. It would be cool to see their tech advance.

...How do you reduce the mass of an object without partly destroying it?

Are you sure it doesn't just reduce inertia?

In that universe, Element Zero is basically the Magic McGuffin/God Particle. When a negative current is applied to it, it reduces in mass. When a positive current is applied to it, it gains in mass. It's the basis for more or less all advanced technology in Mass Effect. The completionist in me found the games too daunting, but I always loved the universe.

Okay, mass is essentially the things that stuff is made of. If you reduce something's mass, you have to physically take away parts of it. It's a requisite of how mass works. If you reduce the mass of an atom, you have to take away part of the atom, which, at that scale, drastically feths up what kind of atom that is. If you remove, say, a quark from a hydrogen atom, it is not going to be a hydrogen atom anymore, but instead probably something that is not useful as hydrogen.

We're starting to get off topic here, but I'll go ahead and post one last reply and then leave it be. I understand physics, but you're applying real-world physics to a science-fiction universe where they are using a fantastic particle (Element Zero) to explain how they are able to overcome the limitations of our current understanding of physics. The reason it is impossible for us to break the speed of light is that by our current understanding of physical law, as an object approaches the speed of light, it becomes infinitely massive. This means it would require infinite energy to continue moving. The laws of Conservation of Mass and Conservation of Energy prevent either of these things from being possible. In the Mass Effect universe, a quantum particle known as Element Zero is discovered that allow for the reduction of mass without the destruction of the containing matter. It doesn't really exist, but this is how Bioware explains the ability to travel faster than light. As an object in that universe approaches the speed of light, if it contains Element Zero, a negative energy current can be applied to that object to reduce its mass, thus meaning that it requires less energy to move.

**Pouncey**

EnTyme wrote:
We're starting to get off topic here, but I'll go ahead and post one last reply and then leave it be. I understand physics, but you're applying real-world physics to a science-fiction universe where they are using a fantastic particle (Element Zero) to explain how they are able to overcome the limitations of our current understanding of physics. The reason it is impossible for us to break the speed of light is that by our current understanding of physical law, as an object approaches the speed of light, it becomes infinitely massive. This means it would require infinite energy to continue moving. The laws of Conservation of Mass and Conservation of Energy prevent either of these things from being possible. In the Mass Effect universe, a quantum particle known as Element Zero is discovered that allow for the reduction of mass without the destruction of the containing matter. It doesn't really exist, but this is how Bioware explains the ability to travel faster than light. As an object in that universe approaches the speed of light, if it contains Element Zero, a negative energy current can be applied to that object to reduce its mass, thus meaning that it requires less energy to move.

It doesn't matter if you have less mass. You still can't push it to light speed without an infinite amount of energy. You cannot push a single proton to actually reach light speed without an infinite amount of energy.

And it's science fiction, not science fantasy. Real world physics fully apply.

**Torquar**

Pouncey wrote:

:: chokes on drink ::

They figured out how to go faster than light?

Like, not just find a way to create the effect of going faster than light, but literally travel faster than c?

So they were not only able to get around needing infinite energy (which, by the way, you would not have if you had the entire universe's combined amount of energy), but they also pushed past c and are now traveling back in time whenever they go anywhere by starship?

Wouldn't surprise me if the Horizon Accelerator was an early form of Inertialess drive.