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How do!

So this is something I’ve been pondering for a while, and it stems from the Primaris vehicles going grav, rather than tracked. Without wanting to get bogged down with who does or doesn’t like Primaris (I really don’t care either way), that attracted controversy because grav plating is said to be a rare technology within The Imperium.

Not just the material needed being rare or scarce, but a technology very few even have access to.

And yet….the humble Servo Skull is ubiquitous. Just one of those things The Imperium has in seeming abundance. And most, if not all? Use grav technology to scoot about the place on whatever business they have assigned to them. Now of course, making Mecha-Boni all floaty is a different task to making a tank all floaty. They’re individually lighter for a start, and some can be truly ancient. Yet….there’s still plenty of them, and they’re even used as disposable assets.

Which is suggestive that grav tech is more uncommon for military applications, with it being far harder to maintain than good old wheels or track drives. Certainly it simply can’t be all that rare, or why squander it on something as utterly mundane as a Servo-skull?

And that got me thinking in Big Numbers, and about general comparative scarcity of other “rare” weapons.

Consider Plasma weapons. Again we know not all Forgeworlds or other Manufactora worlds can produce these weapons. And of those that can, there’s a definite hierarchy when it comes to bigger and more shootier versions. And even within the ranks of the relatively more simplistic Pistol and Gun applications, some makes and models are said to just be better. Yet…..plasma guns are still found in the hands of the Imperial Guard, an armed force so staggeringly large it beggars belief, with literally billions, possibly trillions, of men and women underarms at any given moment. So even if Plasma Guns are a conservative 1 to 1,000 ratio compared to the Lasgun? That’s still…..a huge number being made, maintained, repaired, and fuelled at any given moment. And they’re not so rare and esoteric that examples struggle to be found in the hands of militias and criminals of the Underhive, who again exist in their untold billions.

I put it to you that rare in 40K kind of loses all meaning, and even if that’s over-egging the pudding, there’s a definite sliding scale. Nigh Mythical Rarity should apply to Marines, background wise (yes, I know the word ‘should’ is doing some heavy lifting, but let’s move swiftly on) because there’s a mere 1,000,000, give or take. But even in those scant forces, a Chapter might have a single example of a relic tank or Dreadnought chassis from the Heresy era, such as a Kratos Heavy Tanks. And by no means would all roughly 1,000 Chapters have even in that. So in an armed force the size of The Imperium, certain venerated tanks might number in the low hundreds, or even a couple of dozen, possibly even fewer than that.

But the merely exotic? Could well be far more commonplace than we might first think, numbering into the billions of individual examples.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
How do!

So this is something I’ve been pondering for a while, and it stems from the Primaris vehicles going grav, rather than tracked. Without wanting to get bogged down with who does or doesn’t like Primaris (I really don’t care either way), that attracted controversy because grav plating is said to be a rare technology within The Imperium.

Not just the material needed being rare or scarce, but a technology very few even have access to.

And yet….the humble Servo Skull is ubiquitous. Just one of those things The Imperium has in seeming abundance. And most, if not all? Use grav technology to scoot about the place on whatever business they have assigned to them. Now of course, making Mecha-Boni all floaty is a different task to making a tank all floaty. They’re individually lighter for a start, and some can be truly ancient. Yet….there’s still plenty of them, and they’re even used as disposable assets.

Which is suggestive that grav tech is more uncommon for military applications, with it being far harder to maintain than good old wheels or track drives. Certainly it simply can’t be all that rare, or why squander it on something as utterly mundane as a Servo-skull?

The Imperium's technology is patchy and not consistent due to their reliance on STC fragments.

Small compact low powered anti-grav technology for servo-skulls seems reasonably common. Grav plates for artificial gravity for starships also seems reasonably common. Something that is reasonably powerful yet compact, such as for Land Speeders, seems to have been what was relatively rare.

Similar observations apply to plasma technology. Large high powered applications such as plasma reactors and plasma guns for starships appear common. Compact reliable applications like plasma pistols and plasma guns are supposedly less common, and for the Imperium's case, they seem to have chosen power over safety.

Iracundus wrote:
Small compact low powered anti-grav technology for servo-skulls seems reasonably common. Grav plates for artificial gravity for starships also seems reasonably common. Something that is reasonably powerful yet compact, such as for Land Speeders, seems to have been what was relatively rare.

Similar observations apply to plasma technology. Large high powered applications such as plasma reactors and plasma guns for starships appear common. Compact reliable applications like plasma pistols and plasma guns are supposedly less common, and for the Imperium's case, they seem to have chosen power over safety.

Im with Iracundus. I think the tech is there if size doesnt matter, it's the "compact reliable" and power to weight efficient that's rare.

Im not sure, however, that Id view it as choosing power over safety rather than most makers not having access to a vital piece of tech (like a safety vent/governor/etc) in the necessary size.

 Emperors Grace wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
Small compact low powered anti-grav technology for servo-skulls seems reasonably common. Grav plates for artificial gravity for starships also seems reasonably common. Something that is reasonably powerful yet compact, such as for Land Speeders, seems to have been what was relatively rare.

Similar observations apply to plasma technology. Large high powered applications such as plasma reactors and plasma guns for starships appear common. Compact reliable applications like plasma pistols and plasma guns are supposedly less common, and for the Imperium's case, they seem to have chosen power over safety.

Im with Iracundus. I think the tech is there if size doesnt matter, it's the "compact reliable" and power to weight efficient that's rare.

Im not sure, however, that Id view it as choosing power over safety rather than most makers not having access to a vital piece of tech (like a safety vent/governor/etc) in the necessary size.

All Imperial plasma weapons of about vehicular size and smaller have the "Gets Hot" rule, whereas other factions such as the Leagues of Votann, Tau, Craftworlds all have similar sized weapons without such a rule at the cost of generally -1 Strength compared to Imperial plasma tech.

Imperial plasma has the option to fire on a safer low power setting though- the dangerous setting is generally a choice (not every edition of the rules has reflected this but it has been in the lore since at least 2nd edition).

so, theirs a few effects in play here

1) the tabletop is not the lore, and reverse engineering the rarity of something based on its table top availability is problematic.

2) our viewpoint likely over-represents certain rare items, because our viewpoint focuses on Intresting Times, where people break out the cool toys. Combat viable grav tech might be a rarity, but space marines are vanishingly rare in the lore at the best of times. it makes sense that its cost effective to make grav tanks for that million odd marines, but not for the trillions of the imperial guard.

3) guard techology is likely standardised at the lowest common denominator to ease logistics. It might be large swathes of the imperial has reasonable access to working grav tech, but its not enough to be able to guarantee you have a supply base to work form, and its easier to standardise on a non grav platform that literally everyone can build and keep working.

i have more ponts but not enough time to say them. i will elaborate and expander when i can

Concepts of rarity within a setting the size of a galaxy are best left ignored IMO. Sometimes it works like how most Imperial citizens will never see a Space Marine but not always.
With regard to anti-grav, the Imperium is able to produce millions of servo skulls, floaty platforms, Lands Peeders (that's what they're called and I will die on this hill), and various other local anti-grav vehicles/equipment on thousands of Forge Worlds across the Imperium. That over ten thousand years (give or take) Cawl was able to horde tech and basically just slap loads of panels on a tank chassis isn't a big leap IMO.

My understanding, at least as far as the Primaris tanks go, was that their anti-grav tech was in most ways that matter completely inferior to the likes of stuff on Land Speeders.

Speeders fly across the landscape at speed and height. Impulsors and Repulsors grind over the ground at much slower speeds.

The type of grav systems seem to have been chosen because it’s better than tracks over certain terrain and allows greater adaptability. It’s not meant to be considered on par with Speeders, or indeed Eldar stuff.

Another thing to consider is the difference between military and civilian use. There are a lot of technologies that we use today that don't see use on the military battlefield but are commonplace at home.

This can be because they are too complex to upkeep; too niche to be worth using in generalist deployments; too expensive; too high maintenance; not durable/rugged enough; too bulky/large of profile etc...

These, and more, can be solid logical reasons why not everything adapts to the military field of war as general equipment. It doesn't mean it would never work, but it might mean that going down that pathway requires full commitment; new supplylines; new approaches to stores and supplies and deployment; new doctrine and training etc.


Some of these reasons might even be purely technical. That something could work, but no one has pushed hard enough for it to be adapted into military use because of politics, budgets, finances and all. The better thing might be better, but it requires the hurdle of getting it there.


And that is all in modern armies where we don't have religious influences like the Imperium has as a further layer of politics and barriers.





Another thing to consider with the Imperium is that our perception of it is altered. We see things like greater demons, demons, Xenos, Space Marines, Plasma weapons and all WAY more than is commonly seen in the lore of the setting. The average player has a greater understanding of demons and the warp than most civilians on most worlds in the Imperium.
At the same time our perception is also more limited. Imperial Guard as models are basically one world's force and take on the Guard. When you read the lore you see that there are other deployments from other worlds that can have superior tech; different tech and more. A world that's got a powerful manufacturing base might well have better armour; better tanks; different tactical options and more. There likely ARE worlds that have extensive hover-tanks - perhaps a world that's very marshy and wet and thus heavy tracked vehicles are simply not practical nor possible to use; so they have to adapt. Even within the constrains of the religious approach to technology.










But yes ultimately rare is a strange thing when you're dealing with rare things in a Galaxy sized setting; esp when stories and lore are going to focus on the rare shiny things a LOT LOT more.

GW give you all these lovely inconsistencies for the benefit of your own imagination.

I assume having a little skull flying around is easier than a tank that needs to make combat manoeuvres over different terrain.

Maybe the ad mech are too dumb to realise how to apply the grav tech to other things as most of their knowledge is contained in religious scripts and ceremonies that are not deviated from.

Maybe the tech is considered so Holy that only worthy warriors like space marines are seems worthy of its use. I think there are lots of dumb decisions like this made In the imperium.

Plasma weapons on spaceships are less likely to overheat as they will vent into the vacuum of space.

However my imagination has never found a good way to justify those guys on necromunda flying around in hoverboards and maintaining their own secret STC. Personally I think the AD Mech would have raised necromunda to the ground to get their hands on that STC.

But that’s the fun of the setting of 40K

On variance between Guard Regiments? I don’t recall reading about a given regiment lacking Plasma. Except perhaps through choice, for those levied from Feudal Worlds.

Which is again suggestive Plasma whilst by no means common or standard issue isn’t in particularly short supply.

Of course, translating to the tabletop 40K is often described as an “extreme close up” of a wider battle, zoomed in to where the crux of the matter is to be resolved. So I believe we can reasonably argue any squads involved, however apparently mundane, may still represent elite levels. So those few Guards Platoons trusted enough to be allowed access to their otherwise small stock of Plasma Guns?

As for tracked/wheeled over grav? I guess that’s just simple logistics for the Guard. Nobody really knows where a given Regiment will be deployed next. So whilst their world might have fairly common anti-grav trucks and industrial vehicles, keeping your Regiments equipped with Leman Russ etc ensures wherever they end up for re supply will most likely have the rights bits and bobs needed to fix up your tank pool. And the more exotic and custom you go with your equipment, the less likely that may become.

Which for particularly wealthy worlds does raise the interesting proposition of the PDF actually having ostensibly superior kit, the theory there being if you can produce it, you can most likely maintain it. Though those I’d suspect such a perfect state of affairs is pretty uncommon, if not outright rare.

We can also consider stuff like the Plasma Executioner for the suitably named Leman Russ variant. This is again a pretty exotic, but far from obscure variant. Even if only a handful for Forgeworlds can produce the weapon system, the levels of production a Forgeworld has are still staggering.

But the problem may be if you’re all the way over here, and the supplying Forgeworld is all the way over there, getting spares and replacements becomes a massive logistical problem unto itself.

And so we again see somewhat more basic and/or reliable variants more commonly deployed, where genuine stockpiles for the fancier guns exist, but are more highly localised?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
...why squander it on something as utterly mundane as a Servo-skull?

The answer is the Adeptus Mechanicus.

It is tech heresy to deviate from anything approved as 'pure' from their collected construct templates. Miniaturisation to an extend is permitted but that is about it.
Reverse engineering servo-skull grav technology to power something larger? Tech heresy.

Also a whole lot of hoarding. Forgeworlds will hold on to their particular template and refuse point blank to distribute it in any way. Similarly the mechanicus simply refuse to repurpose some technology to use more practical power supplies or interfaces on the grounds of it being 'sacred' (aka it works for them and it's better than the broarder Imperial stuff, so it's theirs and theirs alone - such as phased plasma weapons).

And more hoarding - anything particularly advanced is placed in the vaults of Mars and locked away forever even if it is otherwise easy to produce.

And some politics too. The rosarius force field is mass produced, enough to equip every space marine in the Imperium a hundred times over, but is exclusive to the Ministorum because they traded a fragment of a standard template for exclusive access forever.


To be fair the administratum in general is also against gearing up Imperial forces excessively with all of the marine and guard forces that end up falling to chaos and the technology that is turned around back upon them with extra spikes. Much better to equip the troops with the bare minimum needed to win through attrition.

Fair points.

But on the Servo-Skull, I think it’s less “why don’t they just super glue a few dozen under every tank” and more “if they can produce untold numbers of Servo-Skulls, then the underlying tech and resources can’t be as rare as we might think”.

Though I do now want to convert a floaty Inquisitor, wearing Servo-Skulls like roller skates.

Don't forget economies of scale. Some tech scales up very easily, some not so much. So the tech that lets a servoskull zip around is easily produced; but might upscale really badly.

So by the time you're at a tank with tonnes of armour and machinery and crew the grav tech is now much more complex, advanced, demanding and such which makes it less attractive over tracked vehicles which still work great in most battle environments.

Was just pondering that. For all we know, Servo-Skulls use a highly efficient power source which nobody has figured out how to scale up or battery together.

Which in turn may be the secret to their ubiquity, if perhaps the effectiveness of grav motors correlated to how much energy is piped through them.

If so, then theoretically the Super Power Source may mean a Servo-Skull requires a disproportionately small grav plating?

It would also offer an explanation for why larger scale applications remain uncommon, as highly efficient larger scale engines/reactors/batteries are the rarest commodity. Yes you could just strap on ever larger power sources, but with that comes added weight and technological chasing of one’s own tail?

it might be something like that, or just that servo skulls have a useful float time of only a few hours, which is fine for thier purposes but its impossible to scale that up to to a "useful for a vehicle" level (say, several days), or they rely on rechargers that take many hours and would impose unacceptable constraints on military operations.

The marines "get away" with it by virtue of being the door kickers who drop in, win a critical victory in hour or two, then leave the days of mopping up to the Guard afterwards. or maybe they have several vehicles per squad and rely on "hot swapping" vehicles to work around the constraints of grav, in a way thats sensible when the bottleneck is the marines, but not when constcripted soliders are plentiful.

training burden is also a factor. how easy is it to train a plasma gunner, vs a lasrifle gunner? the lasgun is proverbially simple and robust, both fine qualities for a weapon to be mass issued to people with very basic education. If it triples training time to get someone competent on the plasma gun, is that a worthwhile trade-off?

Or maybe its just a case of battlefield role. For example, the modern US government is perfectly capable of, in economic and industrial terms, equipping every single infantry soldier with a 40mm grenade launcher if it REALLY wanted to....it just choses not to because their is no requirement too, and giving them all grenade launchers would be extra weight they dont need.

I would not be suprised if theirs worlds in the Imperium that have the means to field entire regiments of guard equipped with plasma weapons...but dont, because its more effective to issue line trooper lasguns and keep plasma as a section or platoon weapon, to be brought up when its extra power justifies its bulk and risks

One of the big bonuses of the Lasgun is its ability to be recharged from almost any heat-source. So you can set a small fire to keep yourself warm; cook food and recharge your gun all in one go.


The time and recharging aspect is good to consider too. Indeed it could be that grav engines are simply so energy demanding that they don't work outside of surgical strikes with a lot of support. Otherwise you could end up with lines of downed gravtanks that you can't even tow because you ran out of fuel.









Also with regard to whole regiments armed with plasma guns; that give me a funny mental thought of a whole trench ready to fire and one plasmagun overheating and failing; detonating and causing a chain reaction and suddenly the whole regiment is blown to bits as their guns chain fail off each other.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
... more “if they can produce untold numbers of Servo-Skulls, then the underlying tech and resources can’t be as rare as we might think”.

Imperial tech is weird because the original standard construct machines printed out instructions on how to make things based on the resources available at the location.

So grav engine X might be a printout from a system located in an advanced factory complex, whereas grav engine Y might be a printout for the same effective end-product but requested by some backwater dark age community with few resources.

Similarly some printouts would have been multi-step, i.e. someone asks the AI how to build an ironman suit in a cave with a box of scraps and the first set of instructions it spits out could be how to build the factory from the box of scraps that you would then go one to build the suit with - if the printout for the suit is later discovered it is still only usable with the factory, and if the printout for the factory is lost then you end up with these 'one forgeworld only' type situations where the original non-replicable facility exists to feed the blueprint into.

Also? Total side thought.

When you consider the scale of the Legions, and the wide variety of vehicles they deployed and maintained? It kind of adds to just how oddly feeble The Imperium has become. Once numerous and powerful war machines now number in single digits per Chapter, if not Galaxy wide.

With regard to Land Speeders, they're pretty prevalent in Chapter armouries.
Imperial Armour had most Chapters with around seventy odd with most if not all Companies maintaining their own supply operated by Assault Marines and the 7th Company being trained to deploy them en-masse.
Of course then you have the likes of the Dark Angels and White Scars along with many of their Successors who deploy Speeders in their hundreds.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Also? Total side thought.

When you consider the scale of the Legions, and the wide variety of vehicles they deployed and maintained? It kind of adds to just how oddly feeble The Imperium has become. Once numerous and powerful war machines now number in single digits per Chapter, if not Galaxy wide.

Well, thats just part of the "long twilight of humanity" element of 40K.

The Great, CIimatic Battle To Decide The Fate Of the Universe has already happened, and the Enemies of Chaos lost. All thats left is to "not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

xerxeskingofking wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Also? Total side thought.

When you consider the scale of the Legions, and the wide variety of vehicles they deployed and maintained? It kind of adds to just how oddly feeble The Imperium has become. Once numerous and powerful war machines now number in single digits per Chapter, if not Galaxy wide.

Well, thats just part of the "long twilight of humanity" element of 40K.

The Great, CIimatic Battle To Decide The Fate Of the Universe has already happened, and the Enemies of Chaos lost. All thats left is to "not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

This is actually good inspiration for a new background thread. Where I’ll argue it’s a galactic pyrrhic victory. Kind of.

Let me gather my thoughts and I’ll hopefully get something posted up soon.

Others have already made all my points, but I'm chipping in my two cents anyway.

Rarity when it comes to things like grav and plasma strikes me as being a matter of efficiency. Sure, you might have a steady supply of SPACE MATERIALS to reliably make some servoskulls float and to build some plasma gun components, but the supply lines might simply not be there for giving every single guardsman a grav chute and a plasma gun. Especially given how many of those guardsmen you expect to get killed in messy ways that are likely to destroy said expensive equipment.

Conversely, smaller forces like scions have grav chutes and plasma guns for days.

It's one thing to offer to cover your friend's drink when you stop off at a bar. It's another to offer to pay for the next round for the entire bar.

Its more that there is a lack of "clever thinking" for people within the Imperium to connect the dots. Nobody is going to consider upscaling Servo-skull repulsors to fly tanks around because that would be frowned upon. You need to use the blessed STC for tank sized repulsors silly(Even though the STC tank repulsor is literally just an upscaled servoskull repulsor).

Add in that most of the people who build this stuff don't actually know how it works, only that it does and that if you put A and B together it works.


You could give anybody with basic tool knowledge and the ability to follow directions the materials to make a nuclear reactor and basic dumbed down instructions and they could probably succeed quite nicely at making nuclear reactors even if they had no idea how a nuclear reactor actually worked and no concept of radiation. Could they experiment and expand upon the reactor designs? Probably not successfully.

That is kinda how the Imperium/Mankinds tech works. A bunch of cavemen have been taught very exacting instructions how to build the stuff that they use, they're very good at it too so everything works. But experimenting and expanding upon the tech is a hopeless idea because only a couple of them even have basic ideas of what the various parts actually do to make it work. And they also know enough that if you mess up bad things happen, so everybody is paranoid about deviating from the instructions.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But on the Servo-Skull, I think it’s less “why don’t they just super glue a few dozen under every tank” and more “if they can produce untold numbers of Servo-Skulls, then the underlying tech and resources can’t be as rare as we might think”.

Not necessarily. Consider something like chip manufacturing. Defects are randomly distributed across the silicon wafer and if one of them is on a particular chip that chip is scrap. If you have very small chips, like a simple LED, you have a pretty high yield rate. There are hundreds of LEDs on the wafer and only a couple of defects so the chance that any individual LED occupies the same space as a defect is pretty low. If you have something complicated like a high-end CPU where you can only fit ten of them on the same wafer yield rates go down significantly, three defects take out three of your ten CPUs. Take that to the extreme and attempt to manufacture a chip the size of the entire wafer and it becomes impossible. Every single chip will have at least one defect and be scrapped. You'd need to completely rebuild your manufacturing process to be capable of making zero-defect silicon wafers to even attempt to do it.

So maybe anti-grav technology is the same kind of thing. Tiny units for a servo skull are pretty simple to make but because of scaling problems the larger and more powerful components required to lift a tank are borderline impossible to produce successfully.

Tracked tanks can add more weight, meaning they can sustain more armor and heavy weapons. This is why the Imperium still prefers tracks to anti-gravity plates despite having the tools to produce both.

But when you’re cancelling out gravity? Mass isn’t the problem we have now, because you need mass and gravity to have weight.

It could simply be that in most worlds, pre Age of Strife, tracked and wheeled vehicles were good enough, the hallmark of intelligent design being simplicity, not complexity. If you didn’t need anti-grav, why produce it?

And it’s much the same in The Imperium when it comes to arming and equipping the Imperial Guard’s untold billions. Simple, rugged, easily repaired is what you need.

Yeah, the idea of rarity within the Imperium is one of those things that sounds great until you think about it. We're told that both plasma and terminator armor is rare, but plasma is issued to basic IG squads, while the lore is still pretty clear that terminator armor is mostly relic, with a handful of dedicated artisans working on more suits.

I think what's weird is that depending on the planet, a PDF might have more advanced tech than a lot of imperial guard. The reason is simple: you can have crazy sonic weapons or grav tanks or optics... but if they can't be repaired, reloaded, or replaced, they're of little use.

And that's the simple reality. If you bring a dozen IG regiments to an industrial world, that world can make the bullets for those regiments weapons.

Also, whatever happened to Suspensors?

These were fairly widespread in 2nd Ed 40K. Essentially dots or strips of anti-grav tech which helped negate the weight of heavy weapons.

They wouldn’t necessarily allow one to wield say, a Heavy Bolter the way one might wield say, a Colt Python*, but it does offset its weight to the point where it becomes reasonably man portable - but you’d still need to brace to fire it, unless you were a Space Marine, where your power armour sorts of most that automatically.

*assuming I’ve not just invented that by confusing two real world pewpews.

Servo skulls are also not, as far as I can tell, a really common feature of the IG. Inquisition, marines, sisters, ad mech... sure. plenty of flying skulls (or cherubs).

If I were to guess, I'd say that servo skull grav tech doesn't need to be very powerful, have a long battery life/range, or be finely tuned. It can be pretty basic. Something like a repulsor needs more powerful lift, while a landspeeder needs finely tuned controls.

Suspensors have a bit more lift, but don't need any real control at all.

But grav still really only operates not just near logistics hubs(like valkyries, baneblades, or other high end IG gear) but really requires ad mech or ad mech adjacent facilities.