Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 CREEEEEEEEED wrote:


Imagine, if you will, a really loud, visceral OOF sound. That's what's in my head. I don't detract what I said earlier about Mr early bird, but this is quite oof level stuff.

me<=low level english. What is an oof?

One of the main reasons the military is hesitant to have female combat soldiers now is not sexism but biology.

Yeah I thought it was based on something like todays army/navy stuff. Females deal with concussions. So if something is going to be slamed in to with anti tank projectile weapons, a male pilot, if he has around the same bone density and muscle mass as todays man, would be a better option. I thought that they maybe changed the pilots, considering they are puting the same neural links as marines and titan pilots have. And clan female pilots are kind of that and double that for elementals. I don't think that muscle mass is unimportant. Muscles, as cruel as it may sound, help people survive blast that don't outright kill them or sever arteries. The more you have the lower the chance that imporant stuff under the muscles gets reaped. It is also why in combat situations female soldiers suffer a lot more from EXP then male soldiers.

A soldier has to carry up to 60 lbs (30kg) in their back packs, add to that body armour and weapon that's a fair weight for a man, women however due to the shape of their hips can suffer long term damage to their knees from carrying that kind of weight over protracted periods and there's no good answer how to fix the issue.

yeah we something like military classes post school, and there was a fair number of girls in them, until we started to run with backpacks. We weren't running with 30kg, but everyone had water, food etc. Few girls ever finished those runs, all that did had their stuff carried by the instructors or us.

I am not surprised. Isn´t your run of the mill mecha pilot a gorgeous female, clad in cheesecake armour and struts around in tactical high-heels?

I am sure a female Knight pilot will have perfectly adequate muscle mass for the purposes withstanding blasts. These are not average people, these are people who have trained for this from the childhood and possibly enhanced cybernetically. Just like the SoB, the Knight pilots would be comparable to world class athletes.

 Primark G wrote:
In Master of Mankind the leader of a household is a young woman and I think it’s cool.

I have no problem with it being a woman, but being young is silly... Unless everyone else was murdered or something. 40k has rejuvination proceedures, a matriarch would hold a family for AGES.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Crimson wrote:
I am sure a female Knight pilot will have perfectly adequate muscle mass for the purposes withstanding blasts. These are not average people, these are people who have trained for this from the childhood and possibly enhanced cybernetically. Just like the SoB, the Knight pilots would be comparable to world class athletes.

do they need to be athletes? The 'pilot' in a dreanought is basically a dessciated old corpse

 davou wrote:

 Primark G wrote:
In Master of Mankind the leader of a household is a young woman and I think it’s cool.

I have no problem with it being a woman, but being young is silly... Unless everyone else was murdered or something. 40k has rejuvination proceedures, a matriarch would hold a family for AGES.

It is a hereditary position. This can easily happen.

 Strg Alt wrote:
I am not surprised. Isn´t your run of the mill mecha pilot a gorgeous female, clad in cheesecake armour and struts around in tactical high-heels?

This is what female description of elementals is

" Designed and bred over dozens of generations to operate Clan Battle Armor, Elementals are the largest and strongest of the three common Clan warrior phenotypes. Elementals average 2-2.5 meters in height and are disproportionally muscular compared to even the strongest Inner Sphere warrior. While generally used as shock troops, Elementals have found use in other military roles as well, such as security personnel or marines. "

do they need to be athletes?

you can arm 12 year old ones with AKs and RPGs, but does it mean that army made out of them is going to be good?

Let's not go there please - BrookM

Please, not another discussion where basic biology is relevant to the pilot of Giant Armoured Robots that are killing Alien Monstrosities with 4 meter Chainswords.
If you apply verosimilitude, realism, and strict following of biology you try to do it as much as possible, or you don't. Other, more realistic universes could have this into account, but warhammer is not one of those.
We can't apply our suspension of disbelief to have women warriors because biology but we can to allow demons and Tyranids that broke all laws of termodinamics... yeah.

People who try to justify their misogyny by their misunderstanding of biology really annoy me.

Biologically, women make better pilots than men in modern aircraft due to the ability to handle higher acceleration.

However, before modern times and fly-by-wire systems, men made better pilots than women due to the need for upper body strength to handle power assisted systems when the power was out.

Given fictional pilot-by-thought systems we see in Knights, men and women are at equal advantage biologically, as the differences between male and female brains are noticeable but negligible.

Which means it’s a cultural thing.

SJ

Karol wrote:

Let's not go there please - BrookM

Holy Eff.

Okay people, let's PLEASE not go there again.

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
Biologically, women make better pilots than men in modern aircraft due to the ability to handle higher acceleration.

However, before modern times and fly-by-wire systems, men made better pilots than women due to the need for upper body strength to handle power assisted systems when the power was out.

Given fictional pilot-by-thought systems we see in Knights, men and women are at equal advantage biologically, as the differences between male and female brains are noticeable but negligible.

Which means it’s a cultural thing.

SJ

unless am wrong, which could be possible, I don't think the knights are moving at even sub sonic speed. They are more like tanks or Armored carriers. Sure they don't have tracks, but being stuned while in one is still a problem. It is even a problem to tank crews today. You more or less would have to have knights that always outrange and out shot the opposing "armored" units and have airial superiority. Which is possible for some armies on earth today, it does not seem to be the case of in the w40k universe. Am not saying that a female would not be able to pilot a knight, but that in a knight household this would be something more kin to Onna-bugeisha. And those outside of legends were never expected to be front line troops unless something REALLY bad happened or someone droped the ball on defense.


Also child soldiers are considered ok, but breeding programs which clearly exist in the fluff are not

We can't apply our suspension of disbelief to have women warriors because biology but we can to allow demons and Tyranids that broke all laws of termodinamics... yeah.

I have no problem with that. I showed that this does exist in mech warrior univers. What my questions were, was how? How is the interesting part to me. The something X happens is boring. I could write that primaris space marine have the ability to create a copy of themselfs through cell division, and everyone would be interested in the how the most, and not the fact that they do. The fact female knights exist is clear as day, they are in the codex, they are in the fluff. It would be interesting though to know how it works. Are female pilot knights better armored or are they gene modified like marines, titan pilots, assasins or nobles, to survive the strain of being in the field.
Those are imo very interesting questions, and I have no idea why they are somehow how considered to be mysogenic.

The noble sons only thing in the first Codex was hopefully just GW sticking to closely to the source with the medieval knights in spaaace trope. The 2nd Codex IIRC just failed to mention it at all. But its nice to see the 3rd book(hard to believe IK have had so many books already) explicitly altering the fluff in this way before there is to much inertia behind the concept to change things.


Re nobles biology Another bit of fluff from the first Codex did mention that a combination of genetic alteration and re-juve treatments allowed nobles to live much longer than baseline Humans. Not sure if that has since been dropped or contradicted though. But having the pilots adapted for there role beyond the implantation of mind impulse connectors would not surprise me.

See this is what I was asking. They are gene moded, and they probablly harvest the eggs from the female pilots, so their deaths don't drop number of possible future pilots.

To be surogate mother to such a pilot could even be a way for a lower cast knight planet female to boost her family status.

And there could be some cool mech warrior style stuff, like free born knights that are from "normal" birth that aren't gene moded. IMO it could be a good source of stories.

 Strg Alt wrote:
I am not surprised. Isn´t your run of the mill mecha pilot a gorgeous female, clad in cheesecake armour and struts around in tactical high-heels?

Nope, I think you have them confused with the Sisters of Battle ;D


Also on a side note I love how some people are trying to treat GW fluff as being a thing of consistency in this thread of great win,

 Phobosftw wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
I am not surprised. Isn´t your run of the mill mecha pilot a gorgeous female, clad in cheesecake armour and struts around in tactical high-heels?

Nope, I think you have them confused with the Sisters of Battle ;D


Also on a side note I love how some people are trying to treat GW fluff as being a thing of consistency in this thread of great win,

I was thinking of anime mechas but I have to admit that I am not an expert in this field. By the way, apart from those chainsaw loonies, SOB wear proper boobplate and not cheesecake armour.

I would also like to point out to everyone quoting 'Biology', it's 32 THOUSAND years in the future, for all we know women could have titanium muscle strands.

 TheoreticalFish wrote:
I would also like to point out to everyone quoting 'Biology', it's 32 THOUSAND years in the future, for all we know women could have titanium muscle strands.

In there defence the setting does often treat the events of the Horus Heresy as if they happened two weeks ago last Tuesday

I dont buy into anything relating to physical requirements. AFAIK titan pilots can be as little as a brain in a jar if need be.

The Warlord Titan princeps in the Priests of Mars trilogy was withered and without limbs. He lived in a jar of fluid.

 TheoreticalFish wrote:
I would also like to point out to everyone quoting 'Biology', it's 32 THOUSAND years in the future, for all we know women could have titanium muscle strands.

There aren't as many changes between us and the people leaving in paleolitc times, I think you over estimate how fast evoultion works for hominids. To get something like chimps or gorilas have it would take a lot more time then 38k years.

The Warlord Titan princeps in the Priests of Mars trilogy was withered and without limbs. He lived in a jar of fluid.

It would be a good idea. direct uplink to the brain would work faster then trying to use some sort of human-machine nervous system hybrid, and a gel enviroment would help greatly against armor transmited shock. The only problem would probably, how to keep the brain from going insane. The body is integral to human well being, and even the prospect of losing part of body can generate a large does of stress. I guess they could clone the brains, there would be problems with teachning them how to see the world. Humans without a body interaction, specially children under 2 years, just wither and die. They did tests on kids like that in Rumania in the 70-80s. I guess the machine part of a knight/titan would have to teach the brain how to work. It would have to be a very sofisticated machine, and the brain would have to be very specific too, because a normal human brain, the way we have them now would not work.

Karol wrote:
The only problem would probably, how to keep the brain from going insane

lol, I really dont think anyone in the 40k imperium cares all that much if a giant death robot goes a little flying rodent gak.

 davou wrote:

Karol wrote:
The only problem would probably, how to keep the brain from going insane

lol, I really dont think anyone in the 40k imperium cares all that much if a giant death robot goes a little flying rodent gak.

Nah why would anyone worry about a heavily armed death machine going nuts even if it does happen to have a can of instant sunshine on its shoulder and an itchy trigger finger!

 TheoreticalFish wrote:
I would also like to point out to everyone quoting 'Biology', it's 32 THOUSAND years in the future, for all we know women could have titanium muscle strands.

Human evolution has largely ended because we've stopped letting people die to disease and congenital problems.

Survival of the fittest no longer applies we became the apex predators when we learnt how to fashion tools.

So even 38 thousand years from now well mostly be the same because we use tools to supplement our forms.

hobojebus wrote:

 TheoreticalFish wrote:
I would also like to point out to everyone quoting 'Biology', it's 32 THOUSAND years in the future, for all we know women could have titanium muscle strands.

Human evolution has largely ended because we've stopped letting people die to disease and congenital problems.

Survival of the fittest no longer applies we became the apex predators when we learnt how to fashion tools.

So even 38 thousand years from now well mostly be the same because we use tools to supplement our forms.

The use of tools and the change in our diets has already changed us in evolutionary terms, to think they'll leave us in an evolutionary stasis seems a bit naive. Death through disability or disease and thus exclusion from the gene pool is only one of a myriad of selection factors! We are much more likely to destroy our species or be destroyed by an external factor than stay in an evolutionary limbo... which funnily enough would also result in our deaths.

 Galas wrote:
Wha?! Is that really a black man for you?

Ahah you know, before writing the message, I went back to look at a still of his face and wondered if he was black in the US sense (aka had *some* sub-Saharan African descent that made people view him and treat him differently, rather than exactly the shade of his skin) or from the Indian peninsula, or something else, and thought it was hard to tell because of the lightning, and then I got like “Wait why am I doing thing noone will ever care about such details lol just stop wondering and just call him black!” Seems I was dead wrong .

Anyway someone mentioned discussing how to paint different shade of skins as a joke, but if there's some tutorial on that I'd be interested! Because I mostly use the same shade of black for my Sisters (mostly close to some sub-Saharan African population I guess, can't give more details I never did research on this I just painted them in ways that looked good to me ) but now that I have tons of Victoria Miniatures imperial guardsmen and guardswomen from 4 different regiments I got a lot of room to experiment!

 Galas wrote:
I know not everybody is like that, and probably the original poster had the best of the intentions with his post.

I certainly didn't have bad intentions with my post .


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sasquatch wrote:
Nah why would anyone worry about a heavily armed death machine going nuts even if it does happen to have a can of instant sunshine on its shoulder and an itchy trigger finger!

Can I point out that the Imperium literally strap HERETICS, and crazed one at that, to a GIANT machine OF DEATH with FLAMETHROWERS and GIANT BUZZSAW already? I really want to to it!

 Sasquatch wrote:

 davou wrote:

Karol wrote:
The only problem would probably, how to keep the brain from going insane

lol, I really dont think anyone in the 40k imperium cares all that much if a giant death robot goes a little flying rodent gak.

Nah why would anyone worry about a heavily armed death machine going nuts even if it does happen to have a can of instant sunshine on its shoulder and an itchy trigger finger!

yeah that. They would probablly would have some sort of fail safe mechanism that lets them either "flush" the brain real fast or just kill it, with lower level protection in form of drugs or electric shock. you can erase short term memory with electric shocks even today. They would probablly have 2 or more brains per walker though. One main pilot and one "brain" in training that is mostly offline or just watchs through an uplink .

The use of tools and the change in our diets has already changed us in evolutionary terms, to think they'll leave us in an evolutionary stasis seems a bit naive. Death through disability or disease and thus exclusion from the gene pool is only one of a myriad of selection factors! We are much more likely to destroy our species or be destroyed by an external factor than stay in an evolutionary limbo... which funnily enough would also result in our deaths.

For example humans in more developed countries specially those that got smart phones first have longer fingers, then those that live in other areas, or even they own paranets or grand parents. Some even say that the fact that there is both a group of people that can eat anything and those that get fat from looking at foot, is part of a "leming" kill switch in the population, and that it is not just the food that is making people fat, but also the percived stress or to be even more precise the ability to deal with it without farmaceutical help.

 davou wrote:
I dont buy into anything relating to physical requirements. AFAIK titan pilots can be as little as a brain in a jar if need be.

Yeah, pretty much this.

Pretty sure, there is a picture of a female knight in the Codex itself. Yep, here we go, sorry if posted before.

phillv85 wrote:
The Warlord Titan princeps in the Priests of Mars trilogy was withered and without limbs. He lived in a jar of fluid.

Similar to the Crone in Helsreach who commanded the Emperor Class Stormherald