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I like to think that to have mastered the level of technology they have, the Oldcrons had to understand the immaterium to a precise, scientific degree to be able to predict its effects on normal space and physics.

So when they were biotransfered into their mechanical bodies there was an unintended byproduct of gaining a new sense as their mechanical minds churned through equations to calculate and compensate for the warp. It sort of acts as a constant drip torture plaguing the edges of their minds endlessly. They cant get back into their old bodies and they cant reinvent all their technology. This would be the primary driving force behind why so many of them go insane, and why they seek to exterminate all life, becoming the reason they want to pacify the warp. Killing everything is the only way to calm the warp, only sparing pariah to use against warp entities.

On a sidenote I would like for them to be silent save a necron version of lingua-technis where their screams of "Silence them" or "Eradicate" can only be picked up by specialized equipment.

The Emperor is a super weapon created during the Dark Age of Technology. His popular origin story is a figment of his own design in order to inflate his importance. He did not travel to Molech in a rocket, but was actually created there, or rather he was created at the Institute for Molecular Engineering and Esoteric Weapons research on Nova Anatol in a collaboration with some roguish Aeldari in a project called project Star Child. He is motivated entirely by his envy of the Dark Gods and his desire to ascend to godhood himself. His unwillingness to be labeled as such during his rule was nothing but false modesty and reverse psychology. The entirety of the Unification Wars, the Great Cursade and the Horus Heresy was of his own machination. All of those events unfolded entirely according to his plans until Magnus made his famous blunder which pretty much scuppered all his plans, and eventually led to his undignified interment on the golden throne.

"Miracles" that happen around the Adepta Sororitas are the result of their combined psychic energy. Their collective faith in the Emperor is so strong that they can unconsciously bend the warp to make the impossible happen.

They may not like it, but they basically work like the orks

- The Space Marine video game is Canon and Titus is still around waiting for the moment he gets a new game.

- The Blood Ravens are Thousand Sons successors and that they are affected by the flesh change in some way, though have been hiding it very well.

Ratlings used extensively as tankers. Especially in less prestigous vehicles(probably why you'll never see a ratling tank commander model, even if their race has plenty of aces). Probably some of the most biologically suited tankers in the universe. You can put them in any old box, you don't have to worry about them not fitting and they can strap on as much food/loot as their little hearts can handle.

So hear me out here, okay? This is going to get pretty silly, but it's also (in my opinion) pretty fun.

Star-Trek and 40k are the same universe.

I know, I know, they are super different and all that. One is about as dark and warlike as possible, the other is known for being “Utopian” both in vision and story. I'm actually quite a fan of both. Then I started thinking of some weird similarities.

So star-trek primarily takes place between the mid 22nd through mid 24th centuries. Warhammer 40k takes place, well, that one is kinda obvious. Plenty of time between them, obviously. Both feature a variety of aliens, starships and the like obviously. Both feature earth ect. One can argue that the tech in Star-Trek is quite a bit more advanced in some regards than the tech in 40k, but that can be explained by, you guessed it: the “Dark Age of Technology”.

That's right: Star-Trek might actually BE the supposed mythical era of human development that is talked about in 40k lore. Think about that for a moment. Giant, space faring civilization with lots of tech that spreads across the galaxy. A host of interesting and unique races each growing and developing until they bump into one another and eventually start wars... and then there are the synths.

So the recent Star-Trek shows (Discovery and Picard,) are definitely a lot more action/fighting oriented and also a lot more focused on things like evil robots, secret societies, xenophobia and swearing. Basically: they are darker, far less utopian, and more violent. We see the beginnings of robot/synthetic rebellion, conquest, ect. We see less co-operation between races, and we see ridiculous concepts like “The Vulkan Hello” (IE: Just attacking whoever you come across that doesn't look friendly.)

At the end of “Discovery” we also see a future in which the federation has largely fallen, is fading out, and the galaxy is descending into darkness.

Sound familiar yet?

There are some other weird similarities as well. As Trek has progressed, there has been a greater focus on “Psychic” things. In the original series it was pretty limited to things like Vulkan mind melds and the occasional super-psychic dude. In “The Next Generation” we see entire races of psychics (like the Betazoids,) and a lot of talk of psychic energy and the like. In Voyager it becomes a whole thing that certain species have psychic power, on varying levels, and this is a well known and explored aspect of society. What we can gather from this is that “Psychic power” is increasing over time.

40K, by contrast, has probably the single biggest use of psychic power in any universe. We can assume that didn't happen all at once, because 40k specifically references our own history ect. The end result is a universe where psychic power has increased over time, resulting in a giant mess of “everything is psychic!” that we see in contemporary 40k stuff.

And then there is the Emperor.

What we know of him is that he is Turkish in origin, born on earth a looooooong time ago, super awesome, and the most incredible psychic of all time. He is also borderline immortal and all that jazz. He's also military minded, ruthless, and focused on ruling over humanity.

To me: that sounds at least somewhat like Khan Noonien Singh.

A lot of details about Khan aren't known, like his nationality/race. Memory alpha puts him as being maybe Sikh, but without confirmation. We also don't know when exactly he was born or made, and a lot of his early history. What we do know: he is super-human, actually, supposedly he is the “best” of the super-humans, had a cadre of elite super-humans he worked with, tries repeatedly to take over humanity, is borderline immortal, military minded, and ruthless.

Hmmm...

Well, at least in the versions we see of him: Khan isn't a psychic. However, we actually don't know if the emperor initially was either. It could be that, for awhile, the Emperor was no more than your “average” super-human and started to gain psychic power through means unknown as he advanced in the years. It could be that this power, eventually, led to his being able to conquer the earth, re-unite humanity, and become its true savior and ruler after a great fall into darkness.

Yes, I know, Khan died at the end of Star-Trek II: The Wrath of Khan... but did he though? We know he is one tough dude, and we also know that people thought him dead before. I mean, the Emperor is maybe alive after all those years on the Golden Throne, so why can't Khan survive the explosion of his starship? (also also the genesis device, which could possibly account for a change of his powers.)

Think about that for a moment. We have literally thousands of years in which the slow change from Utopian space co-operation could change to endless war, xenophobia, and all the other aspects of the grim-dark. There is time for both to play out fully.

Smaller side ideas could be how Star-Trek's sentient artificial life could be the beginnings of the Necron, how the Romulans/Vulkans eventually became the Eldar/Dark Eldar, and the Orks started out as Klingons or some other smaller species. With time, the increasing instability of the universe (and the creation of Chaos gods, and all that other stuff) could really change things from a universal perspective.

The end result? Star-Trek, and its slow slide with its modern series into being yet another dystopian mess (I'm not a fan of the new shows,) eventually becomes 40k in all it's glory.

I know, it's pretty far fetched.

But also: it makes absolutely glorious head-canon.

Thanks for reading!

Something I didn't mention in my earlier post is my headcanon on Fenris.

Fenris is a former Exodite world. Originally the Exodites who settled there wanted a harsh ice world and they settled on Asaheim. They bred a lot of the animals like giant stags as helpers/food sources like the dinosaurs on other Exodite worlds and generally got on well enough with human settlers.
As the human empire collapsed the Fenrisian humans got desperate as their technology began to fail and started a war with the Exodites which resulted in most of them being pushed into the seas, some reckless genetic engineering to make more powerful fighters lead to the wolves on Fenris and the Exodites largely retreated to their strongholds in the mountains of Asaheim where the Webway gates are located as they no longer had numbers to continue a conflict and they saw it as a temptation of Khaine/Slaanesh.

This stalemate lasted until Leman Russ arrived. After uniting many of the tribes he went to Asaheim and managed to purge the Exodites who were left and subsequently forbade entry to the caverns where the Eldar ruins are and went back to uniting Fenris. By the time the Heresy ended most of Fenris had forgotten the Exodites or they had morphed into generic monster myths like the Chaos Gods did.

 Tiennos wrote:
"Miracles" that happen around the Adepta Sororitas are the result of their combined psychic energy. Their collective faith in the Emperor is so strong that they can unconsciously bend the warp to make the impossible happen.

They may not like it, but they basically work like the orks

Yes! So much this. (See also Ork & Sister buddy cop movie). Chaos’s way of using the Warp isn’t the only way: Orks, Tyranids, and Sisters of Battle/Living Saints all use the Warp too, but in very different ways.
My headcanon is that the Emperor is in the process of ascending as the Chaos God of Order. Not the natural order of the universe, mind you, but the human tendency to impose order on chaos even when it’s an illusion — like seeing constellations in the random arrangement of stars, or the face of Jesus in a piece of toast (see Pareidolia) — or in some cases to believe so intensely in a falsehood we make it real: I don’t like [group], I think they’re dumb, therefore I won’t let them go to good schools, therefore they really end up knowing less; I think my kid’s unruly, therefore I smack him all the time, so he’s traumatized and acts out; I think I’m going to screw up, so I get nervous and unfocused, so I screw up. After all, what could be more chaotic than believing in a lie so hard you make it real?

The 40K setting isn't actually our future, but a completely parallel universe, with fundamentally different physical laws. The Warp doesn't exist or is inaccessible in our version of reality, hence no psykers, no eldar or orks, no War in Heaven (because no old ones), no Emperor or Chaos. The necrontyr might still have existed, but are long-extinct; the c'tan are still just non-sentient star-parasites, because the necrontyr never had a reason to awaken them (because they never encountered the old ones and so never developed immortality-envy).

The only humans in 40K who are actually like us are pariahs/blanks. Basically, everyone in our reality is a blank, with no presence in the Warp. Even if the Warp did somehow break into our reality (or if we were transported to the 40K setting), we'd still be blanks, without the right genes to access the Warp or use its powers at all (because our evolution wasn't interfered with by the old ones).

40K Terra's history is not the same as our Earth's. The influence of the Warp on the 40K human psyche made everything just that little bit worse. All the wars, disasters, hatreds, atrocities etc. in our own history still happened in 40K's 'past', but a whole lot more besides thanks to the Warp/Chaos amplifying everything, making it harder for people to 'forgive and forget' or to cooperate for the common good without selfishness corrupting everything. The progressively-more-enlightened liberal democratic forms of society and government we've gotten used to over the last few centuries on our world never really got off the ground in the 40K version of human history. Leaders like Hitler and Stalin were the norm there rather than the exception (and some of them even had supernatural powers gifted by the Chaos gods). So the reason the Emperor set up the Imperium as a brutal autocracy right from the start is because he'd spent millennia watching every single attempt at democracy or 'liberal' government go the way of the Weimar Republic.

In 40K, Hobbes was right.

(None of this changes the likelyhood that what the Imperium has decayed into since the HH is probably just making things worse. Nor does it mean the Emperor was necessarily an objective 'good guy', just that his plan could legitimately seem to him like the only possible solution.)

 Duskweaver wrote:
The 40K setting isn't actually our future
The Warp doesn't exist... in our version of reality
Basically, everyone in our reality is a blank, with no presence in the Warp.
40K Terra's history is not the same as our Earth's.
The progressively-more-enlightened liberal democratic forms of society and government we've gotten used to over the last few centuries on our world never really got off the ground in the 40K version of human history.

So what you're saying is... 40K is fictional...?

 Vermis wrote:
So what you're saying is... 40K is fictional...?

Nobody likes a smartarse.

What I'm saying is that there are fundamental differences between our world and what the 40K setting would have been like in its own version of M2-M3. 40K isn't "just like our reality but 38,000 years in the future". The setting's 'starting conditions' are different.

The kit used on the tabletop is some of the most commonly used kit in universe, they're not the worst, they're not the best, they just are the most common.

Guard uses trucks to carry supplies rather than armoured vehicles.

Rough riders are generally used as mounted infantry, and then in situations where motorisation is not possible. Glorious mounted charges are rare and only performed in either the most dire situation, or in circumstances where enemy troops are being pinned down by other units.

 OldMate wrote:
The kit used on the tabletop is some of the most commonly used kit in universe, they're not the worst, they're not the best, they just are the most common.

Guard uses trucks to carry supplies rather than armoured vehicles.

Rough riders are generally used as mounted infantry, and then in situations where motorisation is not possible. Glorious mounted charges are rare and only performed in either the most dire situation, or in circumstances where enemy troops are being pinned down by other units.

You're being way too reasonable here, especially with the cavalry

You know, it's funny how the Imperial Guard takes most of its themes from WWI/WWII era armies and yet there are practically no horses around. It takes a lot of effort and ressources to have a fully mechanized force and keep it fueled at all times, which is why horses were used in huge numbers during those wars. Maybe the mechanicus just won't accept a transport that isn't a machine...

But no matter how ridiculous it is, I'd love to see some proper heavy cavalry, like space marines mounted on power-armored cyborg horses. That'd be way cooler than those silly bikes.

Space marines in-universe function EXACTLY the way they do on the tabletop.

Most of the things that they are said to be capable of, and most of the story of the primarchs, is propaganda, the same as the tales of the military prowess of the spartans or persian immortals or samurai. Historically speaking, if you think of a particular group of warriors as especially fearsome, odds are extremely good that that is more due to how well that group was able to propagandize their exploits than anything else.

The Primaris marines and Guilliman are part of a new technological wave from an influential, heretical faction of techpriests using the pre-existing legends about Guilliman as ideological backing for their power grab.

The emperor was a human, or perhaps several humans. whose actions during the DAoT were naturally translated into legends, as is all history. He was as real as Heracles, Jesus, George Washington or Agamemnon - a real human with actions embellished, misattributed, forgotten and added to create a character most likely entirely unrecognizable were you to actually meet him at the time. Given how fast this happens in our current era - a couple hundred years - the thought that the actual thoughts, actions and persona of the emperor could be in any way preserved through 20,000 years is beyond comically naive. Certainly there is a corpse on the throne, and a warp entity that appears to correspond to peoples' image of what the emperor is and means to them, and people believe that they are one and the same.

Duskweaver wrote:Nobody likes a smartarse.

Okay then.

The 'the warp drove the 20th century mad' idea is interesting in a man In The High Castle way, but I don't know if there's any logical inconsistency that demands it. Partly because of the scales involved. We've gone from putting seeds in the ground to global satellite communications in less than ten thousand years, give or take. Thirty thousand years from now 'til the Unification Wars is a long time, and a big blank slot in 40K's history, for something to happen to mess up Terra or the Emperor's head.

Partly because, well, 40K's fictional. I'm sorry for ruffling feathers, but when I read 'the warp doesn't intrude into our reality', I can't help but think 'it surely doesn't'.

Tiennos wrote:But no matter how ridiculous it is, I'd love to see some proper heavy cavalry, like space marines mounted on power-armored cyborg horses. That'd be way cooler than those silly wolves.

FTFY

And yes.

 Vermis wrote:
The 'the warp drove the 20th century mad' idea is interesting in a man In The High Castle way, but I don't know if there's any logical inconsistency that demands it. Partly because of the scales involved.

Oh, I don't disagree. I never meant to imply that my headcanon was in any way necessary to make sense of the setting. I just prefer it. It does (IMO) make the Emperor seem more 'reasonable', and a reasonable-if-flawed Emperor is more interesting to me than the insane/stupid/wrong-about-everything version most people on this forum seem to prefer.

I'm sorry for ruffling feathers, but when I read 'the warp doesn't intrude into our reality', I can't help but think 'it surely doesn't'.

No ruffled feathers. My 'smartarse' comment was intended lightheartedly. Think of it as a semi-grudging acknowledgement of your well-executed snark.

Heh. I just remembered someone said a while back on here that social media is basically our reality's version of the Warp/Chaos: a repository of all the worst emotions and impulses of humanity, all swirled together and feeding off itself, exerting a malign influence on the 'real world' in order to perpetuate itself and grow ever more powerful.

"what if the warp is phones" is the most boomertastic warhammer 40k take I have possibly ever seen.

I applaud you.

That the Ethereals that originally appeared on T'au were actually members of the 4th Sphere expansion that got thrown back in time when that entire operation (literally) went to hell.

The reasons why the Ethereals seem to make some stupid decisions in canon (keeping around hologram Aun'va, starting the 4th Sphere without proper testing, ect.) is because these original Ethereals left behind instructions for the future high council of what the Empire looked like and what would have to happen for the cycle to perpetuate.

Necron gauss-flayer weapons don't kill you. They disassemble you (very painfully) and matter-transmit you to a tomb complex. Where you're reassembled (very painfully). Ready for conversion into a shiny new Necron body with all your emotions stripped away to sleepless zombified flatness of affect, in shameless Cyberman ripoff fashion. Basically the futuristic version of becoming undead.

All those vanished Sisters from Sanctuary 101 are still out there. Shiny and chrome.

(The above was my annoyed reaction to the 3rd ed Necron codex, which was all 'woo scary be afraid' when all the robot skellies did was kill you. In a galaxy of eternal daemonic damnation and Tyranid planet-stripping, ya gotta get more grimdark than that if you want to impress anybody.)


On a completely un-similar note: Tyranid hive fleets teleport 99% of the biomass they consume through the warp to their home galaxy. Which is how they can strip whole planets to bedrock with nothing but a swarm of space squidships. It takes centuries or millennia for the biomass to get home, but that's fine, because there's always more coming down the pipeline. Other hive fleets in other galaxies are doing the same.

Tyranids aren't nomadic at all. Not if you zoom out far enough. The hive fleets are merely the arms of an intergalactic octopus, reaching out into surrounding galaxies for food.

(That one was inspired by a throwaway line in one of Sherman Bishop's fluff articles for the 3rd ed Tyranids, in which he noted that the bioships can't possibly have room for all that air/water/soil/etc.)

I figured the gauss flayers stored their victims for the C’Tan to snack upon later. Either way, a clean death is preferable.

——

My head canon for the Tyranids is that they still mostly use the warp for travel, sending biomass to the rest of the hivefleet, and launching out scouting organisms. But I’ve finally found a reason for the stupid Narvhal to exist: the Necrons.

The Tyranids have been around. So have the Necrons. The Tyranids have at some point spent a lot of time consuming a galaxy that the Necrons “warded” from the warp with pylons. Eventually, the Tyranids has to adapt or perish, so they adapted. The Narvhal doesn’t use the warp for ftl travel; it’s a very primitive copy of one of the various Necron ftl technologies. As an added bonus, trashing the target world weakens the pylons enough for a fleet of mostly-autonomous Tyranid creatures (genestealers, Zoats, RT-era nids and Space Fleet ships) to break through and free the planet for the hive mind.


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Therefore the Tyranids only use the Narvhal method to approach planets that give off a Necron-touched vibe.

He wanted to go into the webway because there was a lovely little cafe in one of the corridors that made a smashing cup of tea, and it also sold homemade pork pies that the Big E just loved. He'd often spend his mornings walking his little dog, Binston, and sitting outside the cafe while eating his pork pie and feeding little Binston who sat happily on His knee.

But something was to happen that resulted in a fair bit of bother...

As the Big E was sat stuffing his face one morning a pack of Harlequins came walking out of the cafe after having just purchased a bag of cheesy wotsits each. Unfortunately, one of the Harlequins had a bad reaction to the cheese powder on his wotsits, which sent him on a bit of a funny turn before turning to glare at the Big E, who was just sat there minding his own business, and proceeded to beat the Big E up!

Once the Big E had recovered from this horrifying turn of events He noticed little Binston had somehow wound up hanging from one of his assailants belts. He was quite dead, and the Harlequin was stroking his new fetish trophy appreciatively. The Harlequin then asked the Big E, who was by this point wailing like a baby, if He'd got anything else they could have.

The Big E's tears suddenly stopped, his face filled with rage, and rushed the Harlequins, battering them with a startling number of slaps. He slapped those Harlequins silly, His arms windmilling about like a threshing mill.

Then He went home for His dinner. Minus Binston.

Poor little Binston.

My latest Headcannon, which I just thought of today is that the Sisters of Battle (and for that any of the Imperium with less than practical wargear) don't actually have stained glass Exorcists or any of that tosh.

Sure they have *some* but like Dress Uniforms or the military parade gear that's not their combat gear. When the someone wants to know about the war fighting capabilities of the Ecclesiarsty they trot out the Exorcists. When they go to war they roll out in M270 MLRS looking vehicles.

Same for the Marines. Bright green suits of armour with banner attached to the back? Sure. Of course we fight like that. Meanwhile it's all darkened and low vis.

My favourite head-canon is that a Magos Biologus named Anzion wrote a paper that could be distributed around the Imperium explaining Orks in a way that didn't violate the tenants of either the Machine-God or the God-Emperor. Bound by his faith not to understand heretical xenos technology, he foundered for an adequate explanation that would not only explain why Ork technology worked, but why the rough-and-ready contraptions often out-performed the most ancient and revered technologies of Mankind.

While co-ordinating with an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor against hereteks in the heartland of the Segmentum Tempestus, it occurred to him that almost regardless of its actual provenance, the troops under the Inquisitor's command treated any casualties as being the result of witchcraft on the part of the enemy. Quite frankly he noticed that they would blame virtually anything on the dark powers of witchcraft, and preferred the long-form liturgies of blessing he performed on their wargear and indentured machines.

His cogitators cogitating a metric milli-mile a macro-second, Anzion realized that he could likewise blame any untoward behaviour (i.e. inconsiderately not falling over dead when faced with harsh language) on the perfidious witchcraft of the xenos. After all, who would claim to understand witchcraft and xenos in order to gainsay him? With sufficient spare parts to hand on account of the campaign, Anzion was able to cobble together a mammoth cogitator, able to produce manuscripts of grammatically correct but meaningless gothic. With sufficient tweaking, prayers, and rites of percussive maintenance, he was able to produce a manuscript so breathtakingly earnest, and internally inconsistent as to be meaningless, that both an Inquisitor and a Arch-Magos might admit its provenance as non-heretical and perhaps even true.

Thus honour and piety were satisfied, the Imperium distributed the result manuscript for millennia, although the actual reproductions eventually left Magos Anzion's name off of it entirely, as a strong literary trend towards the death of the author mysteriously occurred sometime after the Reign of Blood.

The dark millennium, steeped in the kind of pig-headed ignorance, propensity for violence, and magical thinking for which Orks are renowned, therefore believes these things of Orks as well, ignoring the rich Orkish traditions of experimentation, apprenticeship, and self-directed study.

 DalekCheese wrote:
The “more guardsmen than atoms” thing is true.

The atoms split before the Guard did.

 Tiennos wrote:
"Miracles" that happen around the Adepta Sororitas are the result of their combined psychic energy. Their collective faith in the Emperor is so strong that they can unconsciously bend the warp to make the impossible happen.
They may not like it, but they basically work like the orks

I was actually going to put this as one of my own headcanon ideas, but you beat me to it! Yes, agreed completely. I also believe this is partly why Tau don't really have a psychic presence, because they're far more focussed on scientific analysis and explanation of phenomena, rather than blind faith. Whatever mystical sway the Ethereals hold over the race, it isn't psychic in nature.

Another one that I think quite a few people here might share... that the Emperor is dead. Like, DEAD dead. Pretty much fully rotted - and it's actually the Throne with its Black Ship diet that does the heavy lifting with the Astronomicon.
This also explains Guilliman's reaction to meeting the Emperor again - "welp, He's not gonna help me much now, guess it really IS all up to me, I'd better get cracking" - and why he's so concerned about stopping Cypher from reaching the Throne, because the Imperium can't afford for that secret to become known.


(added) Almost forgot one. That the vast majority of hive worlds look and feel like Mars in the Arnie version of Total Recall.

The reason one of the Lost Primarchs was purged was because he figured out how to make female Astartes and then started to reproduce his legion like rabbits creating Astartes at a rate freaking out the Emperor and Malcador and as a result they and their Primarch were purged along with the secrets to create female Astartes. That's why they're so adamant in keeping the other Primarchs brainwashed to forget at least that one Primarch.

Great. Now I can’t shake the image of a whole legion of Tackleberry and Kirkland, or Tremors’ Burt and Reba.

Kayback wrote:

Same for the Marines. Bright green suits of armour with banner attached to the back? Sure. Of course we fight like that. Meanwhile it's all darkened and low vis.

Y'know, I had a similar thought while repainting some first edition Space Hulk terminators. These guys are boarding a space hulk, which probably has low ceilings and lots of damaged sections that could snag on equipment. So why the hell do they have a huge flag pole attached to the top of their armour? These are supposed to be elite transhuman warriors, and yet none of them considered having a big pole attached might cause problems when crawling around narrow corridors in what is already a bulky suit?

So I wondered if maybe these are new recruits, and the others shove them into impractical, clumsy suits painted some bright chapter colour and let them get minced by the genestealers while the veterans safely skulk through the back corridors wearing slimline stealth armour and plant nukes.

 Super Ready wrote:
Another one that I think quite a few people here might share... that the Emperor is dead. Like, DEAD dead. Pretty much fully rotted - and it's actually the Throne with its Black Ship diet that does the heavy lifting with the Astronomicon.
This also explains Guilliman's reaction to meeting the Emperor again - "welp, He's not gonna help me much now, guess it really IS all up to me, I'd better get cracking" - and why he's so concerned about stopping Cypher from reaching the Throne, because the Imperium can't afford for that secret to become known.

Question - how does your theory account for the Emperor communicating with Guilliman in, I believe, the Dark Imperium novel?

That many more buildings/sections of damaged spaceships collapse under the weight of power armoured marines than they let on.


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 Tiennos wrote:


But no matter how ridiculous it is, I'd love to see some proper heavy cavalry, like space marines mounted on power-armored cyborg horses. That'd be way cooler than those silly bikes.

Well considering they take a lot of cues from mediaeval knights, who were largely highly mobile mounted warriors I'm surprised they don't do something similar and bikes (especially marine ones) would not handle difficult terrain all to well.
Also considering a knight's warhorse, bred for war and properly trained was a formidable threat (kicking and biting, sometimes given a 'unicorn' spike on their head plate, to make charges and headbutts potentially more lethal) by itself it'd make sense for marines to use, if intending to close with the enemy a genemod/cyborg mount that would complement the marine in combat.


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john_chandler wrote:

Kayback wrote:

Same for the Marines. Bright green suits of armour with banner attached to the back? Sure. Of course we fight like that. Meanwhile it's all darkened and low vis.

Y'know, I had a similar thought while repainting some first edition Space Hulk terminators. These guys are boarding a space hulk, which probably has low ceilings and lots of damaged sections that could snag on equipment. So why the hell do they have a huge flag pole attached to the top of their armour? These are supposed to be elite transhuman warriors, and yet none of them considered having a big pole attached might cause problems when crawling around narrow corridors in what is already a bulky suit?

So I wondered if maybe these are new recruits, and the others shove them into impractical, clumsy suits painted some bright chapter colour and let them get minced by the genestealers while the veterans safely skulk through the back corridors wearing slimline stealth armour and plant nukes.

Those back banners have always bugged me. I mean what type of battlefield would they be practical?
They'd effectively block passage through any door frames/etc. They'd get snagged on tree branches.

You'd need a set of eyes in the top of your head (or a servo skull? )as to not keep running it into things. Probably something you can do without worrying about when you are commanding a section of marines in the heart of the battle.

Slimline stealth suits and nukes whilst the more expendable boys in their big bulky suits make a big racket?
That sounds like a whole different universe.

Most marine scouting duty is carried out by full battle brothers rather than initates. Most battle brothers will have access to their own set of carapace armory and power armour. Recon is vital and you want it in the most reliable and steady hands possible. Charging and shooting people takes less individual expertise.

 Dysartes wrote:
Question - how does your theory account for the Emperor communicating with Guilliman in, I believe, the Dark Imperium novel?

I'll happily admit to having never read anything Black Library - and I don't really consider anything within to be guaranteed canon, simply because the sheer number of writers and books means there's got to be some inconsistency between them.
However - my understanding (and I'm happy to be corrected here) is that we're not told the nature of Guilliman and the Emperor's discourse? Only that Guilliman enters the Throne Room, comes back out saying he's had a chat and has a renewed sense of purpose? My headcanon is that Guilliman recognises the immense fallout the news of the Emperor's death would have, and chooses to continue the lie for the sake of the galaxy. So he simply pretends the Emperor communicated with him.

...heck, you could have witnesses in the room who would have to take Guilliman's word for it, it's not like Corpse-Empy can actually move his lips and operate his vocal chords, or anything.