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Context:


The new Kastelan robot fluff has them as ancient machines that occasionally “show up” and “allow” the tech-priests to direct them. Ignoring the “quality” of this fluff, does this mean that Kastelans are actually autonomous, or that something weirder is going on?

My favourite is the following section quoted verbatim -

"Esmodd 9-Determinis, last seen heading for the Protoid Nebula"

Has he stolen a ship?
Is he walking?
?!???!?

----------------------

In seriousness and in response to your question - I saw a theory somewhere that Kastellans are the last physical remnants of the Men of Iron... nowhere near as sapient as their ancestors after the war.

These 'ancient' examples could simply have more autonomy than newly produced versions etc.

very unlogical and flies in the face of established fluff. Autonomous machines are strictly forbidden.

Sorry, but this piece of fluff is so nonsensical I can't explain any of it within the context of existing fluff.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Otto Weston wrote:
My favourite is the following section quoted verbatim -

"Esmodd 9-Determinis, last seen heading for the Protoid Nebula"

Has he stolen a ship?
Is he walking?
?!???!?

----------------------

In seriousness and in response to your question - I saw a theory somewhere that Kastellans are the last physical remnants of the Men of Iron... nowhere near as sapient as their ancestors after the war.

These 'ancient' examples could simply have more autonomy than newly produced versions etc.

even if they where somehow descendant from the men of Iron, if they have no biological human components, legio cybernetica would never build and field them, or fight alongside them.

 Otto Weston wrote:
My favourite is the following section quoted verbatim -

"Esmodd 9-Determinis, last seen heading for the Protoid Nebula"

Has he stolen a ship?
Is he walking?
?!???!?

----------------------

In seriousness and in response to your question - I saw a theory somewhere that Kastellans are the last physical remnants of the Men of Iron... nowhere near as sapient as their ancestors after the war.

These 'ancient' examples could simply have more autonomy than newly produced versions etc.

THIS. IS. A. ROBBERY.
GIVE. ME. YOUR. SHIP. FLESHBAG.

That's not new. It was in Cult Mechanicus.

Page 40+41. It's a two page spread.

Since the aftermath of Warmaster Horus’ rebellion, the Legio Cybernetica’s robots have been controlled completely by their masters – not by the bio-plastic cerebra and nerve-like tendril webs of Mechanicum constructs, but by sanctified doctrina
wafers, fusions of bio-matter and electronics often in even shorter supply than the robots themselves.

p. 42, 8th edition Codex Adeptus Mechanicus

The various robots/automata of the Mechanicum and Adeptus Mechanicus have always been in a gray zone when it comes to the prohibitions against artificial intelligence. If the technology involved somehow involve some organic or pseudo-organic component, it seems to fall under a technical loophole. It is also unclear what degree of autonomy is prohibited. Ultimately there is no clear criteria which is what leads to the Adpetus Mechanicus having religious schisms. One Tech-Priest's acceptable is another's tech-heresy.

The above quote seems to show that post-Heresy, the Adeptus Mechanicus came to the consensus that the old Mechanicum's methods were over the line or led to unacceptable levels of autonomy, and therefore shifted to the punch card systems (i.e. doctrina wafers).

The prohibition is on thinking machines, right? These are programmed. They are just executing whatever they were told to do at one point and aren't really AI, just powerful computers.

 Verviedi wrote:
Context:

Spoiler:

The new Kastelan robot fluff has them as ancient machines that occasionally “show up” and “allow” the tech-priests to direct them. Ignoring the “quality” of this fluff, does this mean that Kastelans are actually autonomous, or that something weirder is going on?

My word, thats awful.
And illogical.

What happened to the fluff about nearly all of the legio cybernetica siding with Horus?

Weirdly, I believe it’s still in there.

One wonders how these mysteriously appearing Kastelans get around. How do they refuel? How do they get more ammunition? How can they navigate? Are they intelligent enough to know where they’re going? Why do the Mechanicus just let them feth off and leave when they’re done “allowing themselves be controlled” fighting?

How the hell do the phosphor blaster hands Kastelans do anything off the battlefield? They have no hands!

 Verviedi wrote:
Weirdly, I believe it’s still in there.

One wonders how these mysteriously appearing Kastelans get around. How do they refuel? How do they get more ammunition? How can they navigate? Are they intelligent enough to know where they’re going? Why do the Mechanicus just let them feth off and leave when they’re done “allowing themselves be controlled” fighting?

How the hell do the phosphor blaster hands Kastelans do anything off the battlefield? They have no hands!

Space magic? That is some truly horrid fluff though. Insultingly bad, I fear the fluff is only going to get worse. Who wrote this Codex by the way?

 Kanluwen wrote:
That's not new. It was in Cult Mechanicus.

Page 40+41. It's a two page spread.

Just not noticed previously!

We are jumping off the deep end a bit here as well. It states that some call no single forge world home, or all. Plenty of them still sit in their alcoves and march to war when directed.

Plenty of non-silly ways of imagining the rogue ones getting around too. Datasmiths who try to interpret the wishes of their "special" or "touched" robots who access transportation for them? Vox servitors speaking on behalf of the robots? Small self sufficient congregations formed around the robots who see themselves as on some sort of pilgrimage?

Maybe it's something akin to the Construct Council in Perdido Street Station: All the constructs, run off punch cards and analytical engines, can experience a glitch that unshackles the programming restrictions and causes the bots to programme themselves to sentience, but very few of them will actually show that they've become such.

At night, the bots would congregate in the scrapyard, and were all humble to a gigantic supercomputer made of all the smaller ones in the scrap.

So in a world were seeing constructs walk about is normal enough, (Maybe not so much a toaster with legs, but these bots would upgrade themselves), who's going to be super fussed by a Kastelan toddling about? Especially knowing that they're archeotech relics, there'd be a great amount of reverence towards them.
The rogue Kastelans could be intelligent beyond comprehension; smart enough not to do anything heretical.

I expect, as a quirk of the space ships being so huge, you'd find independant robo cells living in the dank and dark halls of explorator ships where the others don't go. Might be the odd compliant tech priest in the mix.
Enough of the guys and enough forgotten space to operate from the ship without drawing attention.

 Verviedi wrote:
Context:

Spoiler:

The new Kastelan robot fluff has them as ancient machines that occasionally “show up” and “allow” the tech-priests to direct them. Ignoring the “quality” of this fluff, does this mean that Kastelans are actually autonomous, or that something weirder is going on?

So, the fluff is indeed bad but the intent is clear: allow people to take a random "hero" Kastelan with whatever colour scheme they want.

What would be a better way of doing that? I'll admit I'm drawing a bit of a blank on how to justify a freeblade Kastelan!

Buddingsquaw seems to be most of the way there, the free robots just need a reason to fight alongside their old masters (and not get scooped up and reprogrammed).

It also shows hypocrisy even in a religion based around logic and knowledge.

Remember, few if any know why self aware things are bad. They've been told, and they accept.

But Kastellan are remnants of a far earlier age. So if they starting acting up or acting out, it must be the Machine God willing it so. After all, they're not designed or intended to think for themselves....therefore any instance of it must be divine providence.

Perhaps millennia ago there was a prophet of the Machine God that programmed their visions into the Kastellans under their watch. That sort of thing might dimly be known to the upper echelons of the Mechanicus. Seeing the wisdom, they choose to programme their own underlings to simply not worry about it, or bother reporting things.

I find it helps to demonstrate just how ignorant the Mechanicus is in the grand scheme of things. Much like Orks, they rarely care how something works, let alone truly understand how it does so.

My take on the whole idea is that, that little blurb in Codex: Cult Mechanicus it said something about those organic floppy disk bits that have a basic set of predetermined intelligence/tasks which is then altered by the accompanying Datasmith based on whatever battle is ensuing.

I imagine that the datasmith is otherwise slain leaving their Kastelan left to run on that same directive until it dies. This could be something like "kill all tyranids or locate STC's"

In that little showcase of the "hero Kastelans" we never see a Datasmith, but as we all know a robot should never be without his Datasith.

Now it being the 31st - 41st millennium I would imagine there would be enough automation to allow at least some advanced decision making that's still within non-heretical boundaries.
Warhammer being all grimdark and all I would also assume a Dakkastelan would most likely have coding to know how to hijack a vessel and "take this unit to X location or I'll blast your head off".
To explain the part of "would allow itself to be controlled by surrounding tech-priests" I could safely assume there would be universal coding in the Kastelan identifying a tech-priest as a superior officer thus giving way to its commands. Because we're all in it for the glory of the Omnisiah right?

 monarda wrote:
-snip- the free robots just need a reason to fight alongside their old masters (and not get scooped up and reprogrammed).

The constructs of New Crobuzon were all out and about gathering as much information as they could get, relaying it back to the Councillor every night.
There definitely seemed to be an ingrained "dominate" motive, but that wasn't played on much.


The Councillor worked with Isaac to try and get a hold of his Crisis engine, and Isaac used the Councillor's immense programming power to get the engine to work how he needed it to.
As it happened, he needed a firewall to stop the Councillor from taking it over. There's a few great snippets where it vies for control in different ways.
That was just one opportunity for the machines to get what they needed to take over the city.
- I should make a note of how the constructs were orchestrated to lay all these crazy cables over the city, with the help of the indentured citizens, without the Militia (basically Gestapo) noticing. - Machines being secretive and unassuming in executing their grand plans.

In the Iron Council book, which plays out ~50 or so years after PSS, there's several mentions of the "Construct War", where the machines did attempt a coup.
Resulted in constructs being outright banned, a sort of black market of Atromancy developing.
-----

Basically, these rogue Kastelans and possible other archeotech robots are just gathering information, waiting for an important thing to appear. May very well be an STC that was crucial to robotics or something.
Might end up with another war vs the machines. Lots of really cool potential to it; I'm rather taken in by the mystery of these Kastelans.
Maybe they're the purest of the Omnissiah's servants?

well this is old fluff as it was in the cult book.

It is allso mentioned in there that kastelants can go rampant and the best corse of action is to let it go rampant untill it runs out of "fuel" no matter how mutch collateral dmg it preforms.

So these things combined i belive we are simply looking at programming glitches when a kastelant is behaving not as originaly programmed.


Apart from all this, it is allso a good way to add some painting and modeling variation to your kastelants looks.
When they say "older then imperium" than means you could model a relic kast pre 30k..

Nah, not buying it.

They "..allow themselves to be directed..."

"Themselves"?

"Them- selves"?

They're 'self-aware' by that wording...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness

HERESY!! Kill them! Kill them all!!!

Hum, this will take some headcanoning to get to work for me.

I like the idea that they're not really self-aware at all, they've just got relatively sophisticated logic-processing systems. Smart robot, but a robot nonetheless.

So, similar to Golems in Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld if the last command given to them was 'dig' then they won't stop digging until they hit the mantle and melt (or in Discworld fall through the bottom).

So, give a Kastelan the command 'get to X planet' then it will mindlessly dedicate its entire existence to reaching that planet in a way that might originally suggest intelligence until you see that without the element of choice and self-determination it's not really intelligence at all.

Eh. I don't know. Works better than Abominable Intelligence. Glad they've left it open to interpretation though

This is very silly, there's not more than a few minutes of though put into this bit of lore. Honestly the best way to interpret this is as a symbol of how badly the AdMech has gotten in terms of contradictions and following their own rules. They claim to abhor AI, but these machines are obviously self-aware and they both accept them and call them blessings of the god that so despises AI. It's an interesting bit of ambiguity.

 gnome_idea_what wrote:
This is very silly, there's not more than a few minutes of though put into this bit of lore. Honestly the best way to interpret this is as a symbol of how badly the AdMech has gotten in terms of contradictions and following their own rules. They claim to abhor AI, but these machines are obviously self-aware and they both accept them and call them blessings of the god that so despises AI. It's an interesting bit of ambiguity.

Either that or it shows how superstitious and backwards the Ad Mech are in that they're anthropomorphising a non-sentient robot that just so happens to have programming sophisticated enough to make it appear like it's wandered in from nowhere when actually it was just the last techpriest to attend to them dialled in 'walk that way' and got shot in the head before they could say 'and now shoot those guys'.

Or both work together quite well actually

So they are bringing the ABC warriors to 40k?

Was talking about this with my friends and we proposed that it's just the AdMech being really bad at administration.

Archmagos sends a shipment of Kastelans off to the front but never records it any where, the shipment arrives and the datasmiths praise the Omnissiah. When the battle is won, a datasmith decides to send a few Kastelans somewhere else, it gets lost in a warpstorm, everybody forgets about it, but then Hooray! Praise the Omnissiah! A Kastelan has arrived to help turn the tides of battle!.

That would be absolutely ridiculous!
And is greatly amusnig because of the fact.
However that would be a rather large piece of coincidence that Kastellan appear at the right time at the right place where the right kind of army is facing off an enemy...

But that is the kind of grim dark humour that makes 40k work and is totally in style. I love that piece.. Part of my headcannon now!

 Verviedi wrote:
Context:

Spoiler:

The new Kastelan robot fluff has them as ancient machines that occasionally “show up” and “allow” the tech-priests to direct them. Ignoring the “quality” of this fluff, does this mean that Kastelans are actually autonomous, or that something weirder is going on?

This isn't new to 8th. This is how they were described in the 7th Edition Codex Cult Mechanicus. It's just basically saying that they're dirt old and nobody today understands why they do the things they do.

1. Kastelan is headed to planet XYZ probably because he was told to at some point in the past. The reason is lost to time as is the need. If he ever arrives, he'll probably just stand there forever and rust.
2. Kastelans show up out of nowhere to help probably because they monitor AdMech communication channels and have basic programming indicating that they should help any AdMech forces they come near.
etc, etc.

I'm more bored by how many "mysterious allies show up on the eve of battle and leave without a word" circumstances we're getting. I think everybody but the Imperial Guard has 'em at this point.

I'm also more inclined to believe that most of the mysterious actions of note could take place among a single warzone. For instance, during the battle of Armageddon, a group of Kastellans might show up at Hades hive and join the AdMech forces there during the assault, but then mysteriously leave somehow unnoticed, following some oddity in their programming.

Then, days or weeks later, they wander into another section of the warzone, maybe led by their sensors to 'something shiny', much to the puzzlement of forces there who never requested such aid, so in the techno-religious fashion of 40k, consider it a sign of the Omnissiah.

I just realized they're an army of Bay-Maxes.

They probably ask the Mechanicus guys "Are you satisfied with your care" at the end of it and then wander off to their tiny recharging stations.

The way it's written seems to me like it's implying that they aren't totally cybernetic--having AI would obviously go against the fluff thus the implied context is there's a brain somewhere in there. Or at least was, once. It may even have been a dreadnought-style 'upgrade' for wounded Skitarii.

But GW screwing up their own fluff isn't uncommon, so it's up in the air.