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So I was thinking.

A vox skull is maintained with by tech priests with ointments prayers and stuff and require someone to do that service.

If two servoskulls (Auto-scribes with tiny arms) maintained each other, could they ”live” forever?

Ok yes I know the problem with corrupted data, pewercells and so on, but besides that.
With an endless supply of parts and powercells, do you think it’s possible?

Absolutely. Issue is just said supply.

It would probably also run into some objection from the Mechanicus about self-perpetuating machines. But otherwise, "maintain a servo-skull" is a simple task that isn't beyond a servo-skull's capacity.

Yeah I think it’s possible.

Servoskulls appear to be monotask, but are by no means therefore limited to simple tasks.

I mean, a defence servoskull is able to aim, fire and evade, not to mention find beneficial firing angles.

There’s also a Warhammer Horror short story where a Servoskull turns serial killer. Can’t remember the exact book it’s in. It’s been a while since I read it, but I think they’d used the noggin of a loony to make it.

The most remarkable thing about servoskulls is the miniaturised hover-field built into it, tbh.

Considering the Imperium understands hoverfields so badly that jetbikes are all but extinct outside of Necromunda by 40k, with only Primaris reversing the trend, it's telling.

We know it's not a thing about "smaller is easier" too because hovercars are all over the Eisenhorn novels for example (and Land Speeders exist).

I think its important to realise that within the Imperium technology isn't a science its a religion.

This is a very important distinction because when you couple it to their reverence of the past; their fear of certain things (eg AI) and the general stagnation of a LOT of its society and structure you end up with a special kind of madness.

It's a madness which sees munitions taken from a world at war and shipped to a munitions dump that's so overwhelmed with supply, and no demand, that they are destroying most of what arrives. Where the stockpiles for skyscrapers and yet are held not used.

It's the same madness which can see an inefficient machine being used for generations in war because - that's what you have always done. The Leman Russ is a disaster of a tank - its a high profile, WW1/2 hybrid built with advanced weapons and armours; but still a relic of design.
Meanwhile the Imperium can build vastly superior weapons of war and yet it does not; instead it equips their army with battalions of leman Russ Battletanks.



Of course another often quoted argument for why hover tech isn't used as much is the simple fact that armies rely on supplies and support and sometimes a simpler, more crude weapon; just works WAY better if you can quickly and easily resupply, rearm and repair in the field.
Consider Tiger Tanks VS Shermans in WW2 - the Tiger was a monster of a powerhouse that could demolish a Sherman; but it was also a nightmare of support, upkeep, production and all. On paper the Sherman was the "worse" tank; in practical war the ability to make, supply, repair in the field meant that the Shermans were the superior choice.


So this could very well be why the Imperium relies on tracks and wheels instead of hovertech.

At the same time they use mounted cavalry in large scale battles; not just exotic rough terrain recon.

The Imperium is actually surprisingly adept at grav-tech
Suspensors are absolutely tiny and cancel a portion of the mass of an attached object
Underhivers of various types have access to hoverboards and grav-sleds and jetbikes.
Imperial ships have grav-plating that can be turned on or off on command to turn on gravity in a local area
Tanglefoot grenades are, IIRC, fluctuating gravity fields used for the incredibly mundane task of tripping people up

Servoskulls aren't really that remarkable in that context. I mean, if a human skull weighs about a kilo, and you add two kilos of bionics to it, but suspensors cancel 1.5kg each, you only need two suspensors and some thrust to make the skull fly.

It's fast, military-grade grav tech that appears to be difficult to maintain. Grav tech is normally depicted as fragile and temperamental, building something that can hold up to a warzone and take a beating while staying afloat is going to be quite different from the basic principle of "make this little thing fly"

Depends on your definitions there.

Strictly speaking, The Mechanicus doesn’t really understand any of its wares. It understands their STC Template sufficiently to follow it, yes. But there’s no introspection on how a given element might be successfully applied elsewhere.

Servo Skulls are of course demonstrably common. So the process to make one is widespread across The Imperium. And that will include the Grav Unit,

But to try to upscale that Grav Unit? That’s a no-no. That’s metaphorically and literally unthinkable. As would be getting enough Servo Skulls attached to your person sufficient to let you fly.

We can also look at relative mass. A Servo Skull is tiny. And even loaded with tech? Not all that heavy.

A Jetbike, once you’ve given it an engine, armour plating, guns and ammo, then a fully armoured Space Marine? Is going to have a great mass. So, presumably, requires more efficient grav plating. Which the engine is also going to be providing the power for.

It’s also difficult to maintain. So for the Chapters and their much reduced circumstances? It’s likely the Jetbike knowledge was lost not through damage, misfiling or stupidity? But because it just made more sense to use Space Marine Bikes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ah, the same answer, served three ways.

Just like Dakka used to make!

I don't really think Grav technology was ever really lost. I think it being lost was just a fan-handwaivium justification for the question of why there weren't many hover vehicles in Imperial faction codices between 4th-7th edition, but they did feature heavily in Horus Heresy and Forge World units.

The recent additions of all of the grav vehicles into the miniature ranges is really just GW making new and different models, the hover vehicle technology was always there and always in the Imperium's tech base, it was just absent from the miniature ranges for a bit.

In terms of Primaris stuff? That’s the benefit of having 10,000 years of R&D and Stockpiling, with zero attrition to your wares.

Even if Cawl had made 1,000 Grav Tanks for each Chapter? Thats a relatively modest in the Imperium scale 1,000,000 in total.

Of course we don’t know when each design was perfected to the point your good to go for mass production, so claiming he had the full 10,000 years to make 1,000,000 is unsafe.

But it’s still a fairly modest target to get stockpiled along with presumably spares and repairs. Not to mention copies of the design for each Chapter so they can make their own replacements.

Hmm
Turned out to be a grav discussion instead.

The topic was vox skull surviving for eternity

Welcome to the background secti oooh look, a squirrel!

Your question has been answered in the positive. Yes. Two maintenance Servo Skulls, tasked with maintaining one another, will continue to do so provide the raw materials remain available.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also the power cell thing may not be a huge issue. Servo Skulls have charging roosts. So provided the power keeps flowing? They can recharge when needed.

Will such a power cell eventually need replacing? Certainly. But it could be the two are programmed to prioritise one another, and so might well go salvaging from other Servo Skulls.

Such programming almost certainly exists, because some Servo Skulls are more important than others. For instance, one tasked with constantly monitoring a given thing is going to be of greater priority than one which just flits about playing hymnals.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't really think Grav technology was ever really lost. I think it being lost was just a fan-handwaivium justification for the question of why there weren't many hover vehicles in Imperial faction codices between 4th-7th edition, but they did feature heavily in Horus Heresy and Forge World units.

The recent additions of all of the grav vehicles into the miniature ranges is really just GW making new and different models, the hover vehicle technology was always there and always in the Imperium's tech base, it was just absent from the miniature ranges for a bit.

The Sammael lore did state that Marine jetbikes were essentially extinct outside the carefully-maintained relics of the Unforgiven.

I think this was incorrectly extrapolated to all grav.

Possibly. It’s long been the case that Grav is rare and exotic. Difficult to maintain, requires comparatively rare materials to make, repair and generally maintain.

Yet the background often has things like Gravcars in the hands of civilians, the Escher Jetbikes etc. And then ask how can it be that rare.

Well. A fighting force is different from civilians. A fighting force tends to favour robust toys. Things which can still perform after taking a battering, and are cost effective to repair and maintain both in terms of monetary cost and man hours.

This is why we see a high level of standardisation within the Imperial war machine. Not only are those machines well understood? But spares and repairs can be manufactured with ease on a ridiculous scale. That massively helps with supply chain logistics. Even if your stockpiles experience disaster? You’re almost certain to be able to resupply at your next stopping off point. Same with ammo.

Marines previously stuck with the Rhino chassis for the same reasons. It’s rugged, it’s adaptable, it’s easy to repair, it’s commonplace. And it needs a single stockpile of spares and repairs. In a pinch, you can take bits and bobs out of say, a Razorback, and use them to fully repair a Predator.

Anti-Grav? Well. Clearly it can be made in quite large numbers. Servo Skulls themselves demonstrate that. But just by looking at them, we know their Grav plating and motors are small. Very small. And we’re told they require regular maintenance, and specialist training and knowledge to do so.

So….its just not that practical on the galactic scale. Even during the Great Crusade, because it was easier and more cost efficient to focus on tracked vehicles which could be churned out in ridiculous numbers.

Cawl? Again, he’s had 10,000 years, planning and stockpiling. Something not even The Emperor had. He’s also passed on the designs and knowledge necessary to build and maintain to each and every Chapter. And we see a commonality of chassis. Happy to be corrected, but the Impulsors and Lancers, sharing a common hull, presumably have the cross compatibility as Rhino variants. So we again see a supply chain as simplified as possible.

It isn't really helpful to group tech like that for the Imperium IMO when it comes to availability.

The Imperium is a cargo cult when it comes to tech. The Adeptus Mechanicus doesn't really _understand_ what they are building, on the whole, they worship it. Innovation is extremely rare, takes decades, centuries, even millennia to be approved and has to be retroactively justified by showing it was really part of the archeotech to begin with.

So categories of tech don't really matter, it is more like tech in a video game- either you have the blueprint or you don't. The Imperium has the blue print for making servo skull grav units (or more likely the blueprint for the machine that makes servo unit grav units). It has lost/no one currently alive can read the blueprint for military-grade heavy jetbike grav units. Ergo lots of grav-skulls, only a handful of military-grade heavy jetbikes.

How common something is is directly linked to whether the correct blueprints and/or machinery built from those blueprints exists or is readable to churn it out.

The Ad Mech also jealously guards information on tech, and does not share it easily. So you get situations like Ryza retaining high-end plasma blueprints and how to actually use them, whereas Voss Prime has lost a lot of plasma knowledge and has subpar plasma equipment (presumably the wrong archive blew up or the only magus who could interpret the blueprints died without a successor or something). Yet even Voss Prime can still churn out starship plasma drives and basic plasma guns, so the loss is relative not absolute.

Does Ryza share plasma knowledge with Voss Prime as a rational system would? Nope! They jealously guard it and Voss Prime would have to concede something major to gain any access to Ryza's secrets.

Plus lets not forget what we see as models, which then directly influences artwork, videogames and books/lore is only a tip of the iceberg of the most common of things.

The setting itself will have countless variations of things all over the place. The Imperial Guard is a great example of this where there's a standard template, but then each world/system might have its own quirks.


And yes part of that is technology being guarded and sacred. There might be a world which has part of a fragment of an STL that allows the to make hoverbikes so their "rough riders" are on hover-horses instead of flesh and blood horses.

Meanwhile their tanks are "chariots" pulled by the hoverhorses.


One must always remember the Imperium, at its core, is insane. Individuals within it might be sane (or close too) but the whole system itself is not.

Is there not a part of servo skulls that is organic, not just the bone but the workings? Isn’t that an imperial rule, no ai, must have a brain bit? If so that would degrade over time and no servo skull could fix that.

Also even the bone would degrade over time so wouldn’t last for ever unless specifically treated, bone is tough but porous exposed to the elements of thousands of years it would break down too.

I once read a very good explanation about why the technology is so limited despite the STLs. Paraphrasing:

STLs are blueprints for a very specific thing. One plasma generator intended for a capital ship, for example. Why can they not make a plasma generator of slightly different size? Because that requires a massive amount of math, which in the Golden Age of Technology, was done by AI. Which is now a big no-no.

Things like lasguns get a lot of variants because the consecuence of getting them wrong is fairly minor. Some Guardman loses an arm, big woop. But downsizing the aftermentioned plasma generator and getting it wrong? That is a city block destroyed. Let us not do that. Instead, we will power the Governor's palace with a stupidly oversized generator, and excess energy can be used for uhhhh...heating a stadium-sized open-topped sauna.

Andykp wrote:
Is there not a part of servo skulls that is organic, not just the bone but the workings? Isn’t that an imperial rule, no ai, must have a brain bit? If so that would degrade over time and no servo skull could fix that.

Also even the bone would degrade over time so wouldn’t last for ever unless specifically treated, bone is tough but porous exposed to the elements of thousands of years it would break down too.

Not necessarily on wetware. That’s mostly, but not necessarily solely, reserve for complex machines which require some kind of decision making and perhaps creativity.

Servo-skulls tend toward simplistic. Stuff a standard cogitator core is quite capable of doing.

We can also look to the Kastellan Battle Automata for longevity of wetware. Well beyond the capability of the Mechanicus to make an afresh? The Doctrinal Data Wafers used to change their responses are also ancient, and if memory serves now irreplaceable. But still of an organic base. Neural tissue frozen within the wafer for all time.

So wetware isn’t necessarily just a dollop of grey matter. It can be processed. Essentially using brain cells in place of switches on a circuit. If trapped in plastic? It’s protected against decay,

Andykp wrote:Is there not a part of servo skulls that is organic, not just the bone but the workings? Isn’t that an imperial rule, no ai, must have a brain bit? If so that would degrade over time and no servo skull could fix that.

Also even the bone would degrade over time so wouldn’t last for ever unless specifically treated, bone is tough but porous exposed to the elements of thousands of years it would break down too.

As MDG says, servo-skulls probably don't require brain matter unless they are doing something complex. Otherwise a machine spirit would suffice.

That said, if they did, two things come to mind:
1) The Imperium has rejuvenat treatments and can keep living humans going for centuries or even millennia. It would be very in keeping for the Imperium to dedicate limited rejuvenat resources to maintaining an ancient servo skull that was once a loyal servant and is now a treasured relic over improving lives for its actual, living citizens
2) A servo-skull getting increasingly erratic and temperamental as its internal components age and degrade would probably be put down to its machine spirit growing "venerable" and "irascible", and if it didn't work properly clearly you did the rituals wrong and didn't show proper respect to your elders! Go report to the re-education supervisor for corrective work.

I agree the bone is almost certainly coated in something to protect it. To be fair, that applies to the mechanical components too.

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:I once read a very good explanation about why the technology is so limited despite the STLs. Paraphrasing:

STLs are blueprints for a very specific thing. One plasma generator intended for a capital ship, for example. Why can they not make a plasma generator of slightly different size? Because that requires a massive amount of math, which in the Golden Age of Technology, was done by AI. Which is now a big no-no.

Things like lasguns get a lot of variants because the consecuence of getting them wrong is fairly minor. Some Guardman loses an arm, big woop. But downsizing the aftermentioned plasma generator and getting it wrong? That is a city block destroyed. Let us not do that. Instead, we will power the Governor's palace with a stupidly oversized generator, and excess energy can be used for uhhhh...heating a stadium-sized open-topped sauna.

I doubt this plays much of a role. The single biggest reason why innovation is exceptionally slow is that the knowledge of technology and how to use those blueprints is hoarded by religious zealots who think the blueprints are holy scripture that cannot be questioned.

Changing the blueprints is heresy! So any actual innovations or extrapolations go through decades or centuries of religious debates to be approved, where the developer has to retroactively pretend their design was supported by the blueprints all along, they've just recreated a missing segment etc. If they mess up, they can executed as a heretek.

There are even quips in the codex (I forget which one has this) about things like guardsmen being punished for doing something as simple as changing the scope fitted to their rifles. Even though it improved them, it was an unauthorised change that a passing higher ranked Mechanicus priest would be required to investigate and issue punishments.

Which sounds insane, but at the same time the Imperium goes along with it because if they did not they'd risk angering and losing the alliance with the Mechanicus which means losing access to vast amounts of technology AND manufacturing capacity. We have to remember that whilst Mars and Terra are in the same solar system and whilst they are very closely tied - they are still an alliance.

Each must take steps to appease the other in order to ensure that the alliance is maintained because in truth one cannot exist easily/at all without the other.

Legio Cybernetica robots have a Cortex which has a portion of organic matter in there, allowing them to skirt the AI ban (It's also why they're called the Legio Cybernetica and not the Legio Robotica). Just like how the Sisters of Battle aren't "Men at arms" because they aren't Men, the strict adherence to the letter of the prohibition is more important than sticking to the intent or purpose of it.

As far as servo-skulls go, they have at different points been described as having implanted cogitators, and "residual blobs of grey matter preserved and sealed, then threaded through with biowire and psycho-reactive crystals"

So depending on whether the skull uses a cogitator or wetware, that will heavily impact its potential lifespan. Cogitators are explicitly inorganic, and so will last longer and can be maintained like any other mechanical part, whereas even the best preservative technology in the Imperium isn't perfect (they aren't going to waste valuable stasis tech on a servo-skulls pseudo-brain, and even if they did the Imperium's stasis tech is far from absolute and tends to be a bit...leaky. Ask Guilliman)

So to avoid Bob having a conniption and drag this kicking and screaming back to the topic: Given an infinite supply of mechanical components, two cogitator-based servo-skulls who are programmed for the task of repairing servo-skulls could keep each other functioning pretty much indefinitely. Wetware-based servo-skulls would last a long time but wouldn't have any way to cultivate and replace dying grey matter so would last a long time - potentially several human lifetimes, but would fail before the purely mechanical ones. But given that servo skulls are almost always monotask, the ONLY thing they would be doing is maintaining each other, so unless it's for a performance art piece there wouldn't be much point.

On innovation? It’s a lack of actual understanding.

Las Weapons are widespread, and so sometimes entirely unfairly seen as simple technology. But….they’re not. They’re miracles of science when you consider how many shots a single power pack can provide and how robust the basic Lasgun is.

They are however widespread in terms of their STC. So much so it seems it’s a rare industrialised planet that doesn’t have some capacity to make them, and the family of weapons in general.

I’m going to put that down to their massive appeal as effective and efficient logistic busting weapons. For any nascent society on a frontier world? It’s Las weapons that you want. Your small arms have near as dammit infinite ammo, as even a solar generator can recharged a power pack. Lascannons are deadly against pretty much anything you need them to be deadly against.

And once the how-to of their tech was developed? Simple and resource efficient to make too.

Exactly the sort of ubiquitous, every day weapon you’d want to share the blueprints for as widely as possible. With those in hand, provided you can hold on to at least some manufacturing capacity? You’ve a chance.

The larger members of the family? Not quite as widespread as man portable ones. Because the applications and demand are naturally lower. You only really need to make them if you’re building, repairing or upgrading Really Big Things. So whilst reliable and again efficient to build, even at the largest scale? The blueprints have always been comparatively scarce, because there was less reason to have loads and loads of copies.

But even then? Most industrialised worlds likely had call to make them. Either for orbital defence, ship building, commercial ship repair and rearm etc. So whilst it may be easy to lose the super high end ones (as seen on early Imperial now largely Traitor warships)? You’ve still some lesser designs in hand to at least keep your fleet armed, even if it’s not with the best ever version.

Where the lack of innovation comes in? Is a mix of superstition and lack of understanding.

I’m sure there are Adepts out there who undertake sanctioned tinkering and attempt to tweak existing patterns. But when it goes wrong? They still lack the proper knowledge to be able to say why it went wrong in any meaningful way. It’s more likely to be blamed on your approach being blasphemy offending the Machine God than experience any attempt to do a process of elimination. They’re more likely to try a different canticle next time than check all the wires are properly connected, or that you’ve used the most appropriate materials.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On innovation? It’s a lack of actual understanding.

Las Weapons are widespread, and so sometimes entirely unfairly seen as simple technology. But….they’re not. They’re miracles of science when you consider how many shots a single power pack can provide and how robust the basic Lasgun is.

They are however widespread in terms of their STC. So much so it seems it’s a rare industrialised planet that doesn’t have some capacity to make them, and the family of weapons in general.

I’m going to put that down to their massive appeal as effective and efficient logistic busting weapons. For any nascent society on a frontier world? It’s Las weapons that you want. Your small arms have near as dammit infinite ammo, as even a solar generator can recharged a power pack. Lascannons are deadly against pretty much anything you need them to be deadly against.

And once the how-to of their tech was developed? Simple and resource efficient to make too.

Exactly the sort of ubiquitous, every day weapon you’d want to share the blueprints for as widely as possible. With those in hand, provided you can hold on to at least some manufacturing capacity? You’ve a chance.

The larger members of the family? Not quite as widespread as man portable ones. Because the applications and demand are naturally lower. You only really need to make them if you’re building, repairing or upgrading Really Big Things. So whilst reliable and again efficient to build, even at the largest scale? The blueprints have always been comparatively scarce, because there was less reason to have loads and loads of copies.

But even then? Most industrialised worlds likely had call to make them. Either for orbital defence, ship building, commercial ship repair and rearm etc. So whilst it may be easy to lose the super high end ones (as seen on early Imperial now largely Traitor warships)? You’ve still some lesser designs in hand to at least keep your fleet armed, even if it’s not with the best ever version.

Where the lack of innovation comes in? Is a mix of superstition and lack of understanding.

I’m sure there are Adepts out there who undertake sanctioned tinkering and attempt to tweak existing patterns. But when it goes wrong? They still lack the proper knowledge to be able to say why it went wrong in any meaningful way. It’s more likely to be blamed on your approach being blasphemy offending the Machine God than experience any attempt to do a process of elimination. They’re more likely to try a different canticle next time than check all the wires are properly connected, or that you’ve used the most appropriate materials.

I still think the lore is pretty clear that the ban on innovation is the primary reason why innovation doesn't happen.

Understanding can be built- a proper scientific process would eventually be able to recreate Dark Age of Technology tech, because the lore says that tech is possible and that is how humanity did it the first time. It would take time, sure. Millennia maybe. But it is doable.

But it will never happen whilst the Adeptus Mechanicum holds sway, because the Adeptus Mechanicum is not a scientific organisation, it is a religious one. A minority of techpriests may have something approaching the scientific method, but they risk being labelled as hereteks if they develop anything actually new. Most "new" tech is recovered from archaeology of all things. The majority of techpriests, as the name suggests, are priests not scientists.

High-ranking techpriests have been shown to have a lot of understanding of how Imperial tech works, with only the most advanced stuff being beyond their ken. But that understanding is couched in religious dogma, is revealed slowly as techpriests ascend the hierarchy, and it is descriptive, not progressive. This is how things are, not how we could use this to build our understanding elsewhere.

To put this into perspective, how do you think the Pope would feel about you "innovating" on the bible? Creating entirely new lore from scratch? That is how the Mechanicum treats innovation. Catholicism treats Mormonism, for example, as blasphemous.

 Haighus wrote:

To put this into perspective, how do you think the Pope would feel about you "innovating" on the bible? Creating entirely new lore from scratch? That is how the Mechanicum treats innovation. Catholicism treats Mormonism, for example, as blasphemous.

And the Mechanicus have vast armies with which to enforce their interpretation of religious doctrine. Even subfaction groupings have to remain close to the core rules and doctrines.

In some ways its tricky for us to understand this approach to technology, esp as geeks, because the idea of innovation, scientific method and so forth is so well reinforced in modern society and science. The idea that you believe in a technology and would never stray from the original design or combine two designs or understand how the design works - just seems almost insane or even stupid to us. Yet that's how the Imperium works and has worked for thousands of years.

Interestingly it worked like that even before the fall of the Emperor and the Horus Heresy.

 Overread wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

To put this into perspective, how do you think the Pope would feel about you "innovating" on the bible? Creating entirely new lore from scratch? That is how the Mechanicum treats innovation. Catholicism treats Mormonism, for example, as blasphemous.

And the Mechanicus have vast armies with which to enforce their interpretation of religious doctrine. Even subfaction groupings have to remain close to the core rules and doctrines.

In some ways its tricky for us to understand this approach to technology, esp as geeks, because the idea of innovation, scientific method and so forth is so well reinforced in modern society and science. The idea that you believe in a technology and would never stray from the original design or combine two designs or understand how the design works - just seems almost insane or even stupid to us. Yet that's how the Imperium works and has worked for thousands of years.

Interestingly it worked like that even before the fall of the Emperor and the Horus Heresy.

It wasn't quite as bad before the fall of the Emperor, because the Mechanicus did not have a monopoly on advanced tech.

Most notably, the Emperor himself could innovate freely, although he conveniently was recognised as the literal god of the tech religion of the Mechanicus.

Primarchs also had great latitude to create or sponsor new tech, and there were whole factions within the Mechanicus keen on greater innovation. This largely led to the schism during the Heresy and the later formation of the Dark Mechanicus.

There were also some surviving tech groups outside of Mechanicus control, like the Luna genecults, who seem to have independently operated for awhile.

My suspicion is that the fundamentalist parts of the surviving loyalist Mechanicus won the post-Heresy power struggle and made the nascent Adeptus Mechanicus into the hyper-conservative organisation it is by the 40k era, and used their position to expunge rivals and cement their monopoly on advanced tech. This probably took a long time, and likely didn't fully complete until the Primarchs faded into legend.

Even in the 41st-42nd millennium, Space Marines have some autonomy outside of that monopoly and are probably a source of great frustration in Mechanicus circles when they slap a new gun on a Land Raider to deal with a specific problem again!

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:
Things like lasguns get a lot of variants because the consecuence of getting them wrong is fairly minor. Some Guardman loses an arm, big woop. But downsizing the aftermentioned plasma generator and getting it wrong? That is a city block destroyed. Let us not do that. Instead, we will power the Governor's palace with a stupidly oversized generator, and excess energy can be used for uhhhh...heating a stadium-sized open-topped sauna.

There's a concern for safety here that I don't think is ever truly demonstrated in the Imperium.

 BorderCountess wrote:

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:
Things like lasguns get a lot of variants because the consecuence of getting them wrong is fairly minor. Some Guardman loses an arm, big woop. But downsizing the aftermentioned plasma generator and getting it wrong? That is a city block destroyed. Let us not do that. Instead, we will power the Governor's palace with a stupidly oversized generator, and excess energy can be used for uhhhh...heating a stadium-sized open-topped sauna.

There's a concern for safety here that I don't think is ever truly demonstrated in the Imperium.

I'm not so sure- quite a few planetary governors seem to have demonstrated a rather strong concern for the safety of the planetary governor...

The reason that there's a bunch of different variations on Lasguns isn't that lots of people innovated them, it's because they're a staple STC that was sent out with the original colony ships

The original STCs were vast computer systems that had the ability to adapt designs based on the local conditions. Colonies need protection, and the most scalable form of weapon is an energy weapon, especially one with a versatile power pack that can recharge from almost any source

So colony ship lands on a planet, STC system starts to spit out plans for everything the colony needs, habs, tools, weapons, vehicles, all adapted to the local conditions.

Lots of iron ore deposits close to the surface? STC gives you the tools to mine it and adapts the lasgun design to contain elements that can be easily produced with iron
Not much iron, but lots of copper? STC gives you an adjusted blueprint making use of copper. Hell, hook it up to a manufacturing system and the STC will make it for you
Lots of resilient and dangerous fauna? Have a slightly more powerful lasgun, that uses more charges per shot as a result
Over time almost all the original STCs are gone, there's only a handful of semi-functional examples in the Imperium, and most are with the Leagues of Votann (or potentially ARE the Votann)

What the imperium's left with are those individualised patterns of lasgun designed around those different environments. so you end up with [Iron World]-pattern Lasgun and [Copper World-pattern] Lasgun and [Dangerous Fauna World]-pattern Lasgun. The original, automated, adaptive system is long gone but the blueprints it made still stick around. They're all Lasguns, because they're all from the same original STC units, but the individual patterns exists not because someone tinkered with the design. SomeTHING did - the STC

Do some people innovate? sure, but they don't do it publicly, and their tinkerings almost never become standardised. the variation between patterns was baked in from the start, way before the Imperium, when the worlds were first colonised. And because the STC was doing all of the thinking, all of the calculation, all of the adaptation, nobody NEEDED to learn how these things actually worked

Quick question, how much of "you" remains in the Servo-Skull?

The Mechanicus loves stuffing brains in jars... and sometimes it's Highly effective Knight Moriax (Armigers with permanent pilots, Thanks Ryza!), to lobotomized Gun-Servitors.

Other times, you eventually go insane.

How long will the mind last in a Servo Skull, or is there just not enough individuality to notice?

It's left very vague and suggests that it can vary. There was one short story in one of the novella's that had a regular person slaved with enough mental shackles that they behaved just like a servitor; despite being fully conscious the whole time (which was not supposed to happen to them).

Lots of the bio-organics in mechanicus tech like servitors; are supposed to be made from braindead vat-grown clones/bodies. Of course that doesn't mean they can't use regular living people; though my impression is this is less common and more an extreme punishment/torment inflicted upon people.