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I hope we never see it too. GW just make things worse when they try 'improving' it. For example they tried improving Necrons with personalities and made them a weird combination of unbeatable and complete idiots.

Do Broodnests actually generate Tyranids or do they just store and gestate Tyranid seeds that landed already?

Are the important guys in the Imperium of Man immortal?
Space Marines
Inquisitors
Leaders of the Imperial Guard
Sisters of Battle
etc.

roboemperor wrote:
Are the important guys in the Imperium of Man immortal?
Space Marines
Inquisitors
Leaders of the Imperial Guard
Sisters of Battle
etc.

Marines are likely longer lived, somewhat to the point of absurdity in the singular case of Dante of the Blood Angels holding the record at 1000-odd years of continuous service.
Also the absurdity that is Cawl, but he's got the more machine now than man going for (against) him. It isn't clear if anything of the original man is even left.

Most high ranking people have access to rejuve treatments, which effectively resets physical age.

But no, immortality isn't in the cards for the Imperium. There are undefined limits to rejuve, but if they survive, they tend to end up in a teaching retirement/old folks home, if the Ciaphas Cain novels are any indication.

Can the Gue'vesa be part of the Earth Caste and create battlesuits and weaponry?

edit: There seems to be Gue'vesa Crisis Suit pilots in the Damocles Anthology so i don't think there is any reason there can't be.

Regarding Q1: Eldars, at least the playable not dark kind, as mentioned before no longer inhabit any worlds. Their massive sub-light spacefaring craftworlds can contain... however many Eldars you need for the plot. In the old fluff (that I do know) in Codex: Eldar 6th edition page 12 "The Webway" stated that the craftworlds were sub-light vessels moved by solar sails as they were so huge no webway gates were large enough to accommodate them. Instead they had webway gates on them so they can send Eldars and even their ships to other parts of the galaxy. I don't know if they've changed, though I quite liked it. It makes even more sense why the Eldars focus so much on divination to avoid disaster as just like most species, they've got homes that they can't just magically puff up into smoke, like most other species in the galaxy.

And as far as I know the Exodites who still settle on exodite worlds across the galaxy are still canon, so if you count them as the non-dark Eldar as well then there can be hundreds to perhaps millions more worlds under Eldar control.

Meanwhile I'm not really sure about the size of Commorragh, I had made notes of fluffs that I could get my hands on back before 8th edition, so I know in 7th it stated "Its dimensions would be considered impossible if they could be read by conventional means, its population greater than that of whole star systems. If anything, Commorragh is more like a vast collection of satellite realms and cities linked by myriad portals and hidden pathways. Viewed from one perspective, Commorragh is a loose collection of far-flung nodes spread throughout the arteries of the webway like a malevolent virus." (The Dark City)

I mean maybe its size is comparable to an especially large star system, but that's up to a dozen or so worlds at most. And how are we to figure out if the void between planets, which constitutes the biggest chunk of the space, should be included or not? It was stated outright it was pointless to try figuring out its size. All that matters is that it is huge and it can contain... however many Dark Eldars as the plot demands. Oh and just like the craftworlds they can get anywhere using its webway gates.

By the number of worlds actively under a faction's control the Imperium is most likely the largest in the galaxy. Most other factions control varying sized packets of spaces between imperial controlled spaces... whatever that means since planets and systems, you know, move.

 lcmiracle wrote:
Regarding Q1: Eldars, at least the playable not dark kind, as mentioned before no longer inhabit any worlds. Their massive sub-light spacefaring craftworlds can contain... however many Eldars you need for the plot. In the old fluff (that I do know) in Codex: Eldar 6th edition page 12 "The Webway" stated that the craftworlds were sub-light vessels moved by solar sails as they were so huge no webway gates were large enough to accommodate them. Instead they had webway gates on them so they can send Eldars and even their ships to other parts of the galaxy. I don't know if they've changed, though I quite liked it. It makes even more sense why the Eldars focus so much on divination to avoid disaster as just like most species, they've got homes that they can't just magically puff up into smoke, like most other species in the galaxy.

And as far as I know the Exodites who still settle on exodite worlds across the galaxy are still canon, so if you count them as the non-dark Eldar as well then there can be hundreds to perhaps millions more worlds under Eldar control.

Meanwhile I'm not really sure about the size of Commorragh, I had made notes of fluffs that I could get my hands on back before 8th edition, so I know in 7th it stated "Its dimensions would be considered impossible if they could be read by conventional means, its population greater than that of whole star systems. If anything, Commorragh is more like a vast collection of satellite realms and cities linked by myriad portals and hidden pathways. Viewed from one perspective, Commorragh is a loose collection of far-flung nodes spread throughout the arteries of the webway like a malevolent virus." (The Dark City)

I mean maybe its size is comparable to an especially large star system, but that's up to a dozen or so worlds at most. And how are we to figure out if the void between planets, which constitutes the biggest chunk of the space, should be included or not? It was stated outright it was pointless to try figuring out its size. All that matters is that it is huge and it can contain... however many Dark Eldars as the plot demands. Oh and just like the craftworlds they can get anywhere using its webway gates.

By the number of worlds actively under a faction's control the Imperium is most likely the largest in the galaxy. Most other factions control varying sized packets of spaces between imperial controlled spaces... whatever that means since planets and systems, you know, move.

I wouldn't be suprised if the various eldar factions had small outpost and colonies on many unmentioned planets or living as small minority communities on more peaceful planets that go unmention because they're, you know, peaceful and GW hasn't made fancy plastic to sell about them.

As for the planets of the tabletop factions I think Orks have the most. They are always described as the most numerous species in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of planets. Imperium on the other hand is only ever described as a bunch of islands spread thinly across a million worlds rather than some continious empire, and while yes, the "million worlds" is just a figure of speech it does give some insight into Imperium size. Namely if it had something like 10 million worlds or 10 billion worlds the fluff would most likely say so, but it doesn't a million it is.

Lot more than any other single polity at the moment but a lot less than all the fractious Orks worlds combined.

How does the Adeptus Mechanicus recruit? and How do those recruits become tech priests?

roboemperor wrote:
How does the Adeptus Mechanicus recruit? and How do those recruits become tech priests?

It depends on the Forgeworld - some will vat grow people, test them then assign them roles; some allow existing tech-priests to clone themselves and others recruit from the local population. If you have some technical ability you'll enter the lower ranks (like Enginseer) but you need an appreciation of the spiritual side to progress higher.

roboemperor wrote:
How does the Adeptus Mechanicus recruit? and How do those recruits become tech priests?

Well, when a techpriest and a techpriestess love each other very much...

But seriously, they're hardly ever mentioned, but there must be a lot of ordinary humans living on forge worlds, mostly working in the factories. That's where the AdMech gets skitarii and new techpriests.
The Mechanicus acts like a mix between a mystery cult and a middle-age guild. That implies a system of apprenticeship: a new recruit blindly serves an established techpriest and slowly learns the cult's secrets while doing so. Once they've learned enough, they can become a fully-fledged techpriest and take apprentices of their own.

Gas giants are made out of organic compounds? o_O

 Ernestas wrote:
Gas giants are made out of organic compounds? o_O

No, they're mostly hydrogen, but they still contain a lot of organic molecules like methane.

NB: in chemistry, "organic" means basically anything containing carbon.

 Ernestas wrote:
Gas giants are made out of organic compounds? o_O

Tyranids eat atmosphere. Literally. Gas Giants are mostly hydrogen which is an element found in virtually (or literally) every single organic molecule in existence. They also have helium and we modern humans have the technology to split them into two hydrogen.

More importantly, things like the food chain can be summed up as:
Let another creature do organic chemistry for you, and then eat it.

That's part of the plausible explanation for why the Tyranids don't just stop and eat an entire system. Methane, water, carbon and minerals aren't a balanced diet.

Soul is collection of whom you are. Your memories, feelings, personality. It is also ability to feel and experience emotions. Every living and some unliving creatures have a soul. Soul is also always represented in a warp, this is essentially how demons see a person, it is their reflection within warp. When person dies, it is because his body dies, his soul remains in the warp and person's awareness changes from being in reality to the warp. For vast majority of living creatures, they either do not experience this afterlife or they barely comprehend it. An average human soul has awareness of plankton. It is best understood like this, when you die you become a plankton in a vast ocean. You might float and live for practically eternity and you might get eaten one day. Greater beings like psykers which all eldar are, they usually retain all their consciousness and personality when their bodies dies. So, after death you find yourself in the warp, no God had claimed your soul and you just float in that ocean. You know that there are countless predators there who would more than enjoy eating you alive, often with a lot of torture before. This soul torture is like slowly being melted alive. Demon will eat on everything who you are and you will slowly and in great agony lose yourself to him. You will start forgetting who you are, what is happiness and you will be left as an empty wreck screaming in pain. When soul is sufficiently sucked in this way, demon might end your misery. Of course, only some of denizens of a warp prefer to play with their meal like that and it so slowly. This is essentially what Dark Eldar do when they are feasting on your soul. Your pain and suffering will sustain others, because you can feel and you need to experience as strong emotions as possible if you want to feed others as well as you can. Needless to say, feeling extremities of any emotion will slowly decay your soul.

 Tiennos wrote:

 Ernestas wrote:
Gas giants are made out of organic compounds? o_O

No, they're mostly hydrogen, but they still contain a lot of organic molecules like methane.

NB: in chemistry, "organic" means basically anything containing carbon.

But gas giants are made up of mainly hydrogen and helium. These organic compounds are only found in trace amounts.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

roboemperor wrote:

 Ernestas wrote:
Gas giants are made out of organic compounds? o_O

Tyranids eat atmosphere. Literally. Gas Giants are mostly hydrogen which is an element found in virtually (or literally) every single organic molecule in existence. They also have helium and we modern humans have the technology to split them into two hydrogen.

How Tyranids get them those materials from gravity well?

 Ernestas wrote:

 Tiennos wrote:

 Ernestas wrote:
Gas giants are made out of organic compounds? o_O

No, they're mostly hydrogen, but they still contain a lot of organic molecules like methane.

NB: in chemistry, "organic" means basically anything containing carbon.

But gas giants are made up of mainly hydrogen and helium. These organic compounds are only found in trace amounts.

Gas giants are also that: giants.

Jupiter is only about 0.3% methane by volume, but that 0.3% still represents around 4 times the Earth's volume. Not the volume of methane found on Earth mind you, the actual volume of the whole planet.

So you think it is feasible for Tyranids to dry an entire gas giant dry?

 Ernestas wrote:
So you think it is feasible for Tyranids to dry an entire gas giant dry?

It is totally doable for modern humans to do it in the future. Why isn't it for a bajillion year old mega ultimate bio weapon super organism? Answer: Because they're not actually "ultimate". If octarius is any indication, they're probably weaker than orks as a whole. And orks can't mine gas giants either.

And water is prevalent in all organisms and water is H2O. Every living organism is at least 53% hydrogen.

 Ernestas wrote:
So you think it is feasible for Tyranids to dry an entire gas giant dry?

It is just gas, if you took all the gas out of it you'd just be moving all the gas and the planet into a slightly different place.
It's probably not worth their time, whilst there might be a lot of useful material in a big planet, you've got fixed energy costs in just surviving and the time it would take to sieve out the bits you wanted probably don't justify doing it.

You can digest pollen, and break it down into nutrients you can use - doesn't mean you can survive just by swallowing air.

Even if the Nids could "eat" a gas giant with 100% efficiency, the time it would take to do would be undesirable and dangerous to a race currently under attack. We're talking hundreds or thousands of years here. These things are absolutely massive.

How is Goge Vandire pronounced?

 Ernestas wrote:
So you think it is feasible for Tyranids to dry an entire gas giant dry?

Well they literally do that to normal planets anyway and those are mostly nitrogen with a little oxygen (if humans live on them).

The process they use to siphon everything up to space would work anywhere.


Also, gas giants may not be the best option. They would probably go for the Kuiper belt of every system First as they are composed of methane, ammonia and water ice which combined provide all the organic chemistry you need for life and in huge easily consumable quantities.

IMO the only reason Tyranids invade planets specifically with life isn't biomass, it's to add its genetic distinctiveness to their own.

All GW has to do is slightly reword the background to describe 'genomass' or something like it and acknowledge that they get the majority of their organic building blocks from Harvester drones in the Kuiper belt.

Because while they are great atd splicing genes, they aren't great at inventing new ones so the genomass of a planet becomes a highly sought after resource for their perpetual improvement.

Morgasm the Powerfull wrote:

 lcmiracle wrote:
Regarding Q1: Eldars, at least the playable not dark kind, as mentioned before no longer inhabit any worlds. Their massive sub-light spacefaring craftworlds can contain... however many Eldars you need for the plot. In the old fluff (that I do know) in Codex: Eldar 6th edition page 12 "The Webway" stated that the craftworlds were sub-light vessels moved by solar sails as they were so huge no webway gates were large enough to accommodate them. Instead they had webway gates on them so they can send Eldars and even their ships to other parts of the galaxy. I don't know if they've changed, though I quite liked it. It makes even more sense why the Eldars focus so much on divination to avoid disaster as just like most species, they've got homes that they can't just magically puff up into smoke, like most other species in the galaxy.

And as far as I know the Exodites who still settle on exodite worlds across the galaxy are still canon, so if you count them as the non-dark Eldar as well then there can be hundreds to perhaps millions more worlds under Eldar control.

Meanwhile I'm not really sure about the size of Commorragh, I had made notes of fluffs that I could get my hands on back before 8th edition, so I know in 7th it stated "Its dimensions would be considered impossible if they could be read by conventional means, its population greater than that of whole star systems. If anything, Commorragh is more like a vast collection of satellite realms and cities linked by myriad portals and hidden pathways. Viewed from one perspective, Commorragh is a loose collection of far-flung nodes spread throughout the arteries of the webway like a malevolent virus." (The Dark City)

I mean maybe its size is comparable to an especially large star system, but that's up to a dozen or so worlds at most. And how are we to figure out if the void between planets, which constitutes the biggest chunk of the space, should be included or not? It was stated outright it was pointless to try figuring out its size. All that matters is that it is huge and it can contain... however many Dark Eldars as the plot demands. Oh and just like the craftworlds they can get anywhere using its webway gates.

By the number of worlds actively under a faction's control the Imperium is most likely the largest in the galaxy. Most other factions control varying sized packets of spaces between imperial controlled spaces... whatever that means since planets and systems, you know, move.

I wouldn't be suprised if the various eldar factions had small outpost and colonies on many unmentioned planets or living as small minority communities on more peaceful planets that go unmention because they're, you know, peaceful and GW hasn't made fancy plastic to sell about them.

As for the planets of the tabletop factions I think Orks have the most. They are always described as the most numerous species in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of planets. Imperium on the other hand is only ever described as a bunch of islands spread thinly across a million worlds rather than some continious empire, and while yes, the "million worlds" is just a figure of speech it does give some insight into Imperium size. Namely if it had something like 10 million worlds or 10 billion worlds the fluff would most likely say so, but it doesn't a million it is.

Lot more than any other single polity at the moment but a lot less than all the fractious Orks worlds combined.

There is some older Lore that Craftworlds still had colony worlds

Your ideas are silly. Tell to Eldars that they were doing their tech all this time wrong. All they needed was some soil, air or whatever and they could manufacture whatever they need.

 Ernestas wrote:
Your ideas are silly. Tell to Eldars that they were doing their tech all this time wrong. All they needed was some soil, air or whatever and they could manufacture whatever they need.

Nah, their manufacturing capabilities are more sophisticated than that.

Wraithbone is never ending and springs from nothing. All they need to do is psychically imagine something and they can form it just using the warp energy they are channelling.

-Guardsman- wrote:
How is Goge Vandire pronounced?

I always pronounced it "Goj" (like as in goji berries, but without the -i at the end).

Hellebore wrote:

 Ernestas wrote:
Your ideas are silly. Tell to Eldars that they were doing their tech all this time wrong. All they needed was some soil, air or whatever and they could manufacture whatever they need.

Nah, their manufacturing capabilities are more sophisticated than that.

Wraithbone is never ending and springs from nothing. All they need to do is psychically imagine something and they can form it just using the warp energy they are channelling.

Being honest, Eldar methods of construction while advanced are hardly efficient. If they would stop being so arrogant, they could really kick off their galactic conquest with mass production of robots made completely from dust found in intergalactic medium or dust clouds.

-Guardsman- wrote:
How is Goge Vandire pronounced?

I’ve always heard it pronounced Gøg (as in “go outside)

 Ernestas wrote:
Being honest, Eldar methods of construction while advanced are hardly efficient. If they would stop being so arrogant, they could really kick off their galactic conquest with mass production of robots made completely from dust found in intergalactic medium or dust clouds.

Eldar don't use robots because it leads to slaanesh. They had robots doing all of their wars before the fall.

It is their decadence which had lead them to their fate. Robots are cool. Eldars could just set them up in intergalactic void and come back with massive galaxy conquering army of robots a millenia later made out from all of the material there.

They could also take some stars and planets who are in that void and mine it or settle it down. No more troubles for them and those areas are so isolated that even Tyranids most likely won't stumble there.