Troike wrote:A popular fan theory is that they help with the Black Ships, though.
This would be contradicted by
GW's own material about Black Ships and who guards or has access to them.
A "problem" is that the core studio itself does not really acknowledge the Sisters of Silence ever existed - they were an invention of a few Black Library authors and have yet to be mentioned in a single core
GW product, and as we know from Gav's blog,
GW sometimes does adopt ideas from various novels, but they also simply ignore what doesn't fit into their own vision. Perhaps their stance on the
SoS will change in time, but given that the Sisters of Silence are somewhat close to the Sisters of Battle, it could also be that they do not want to challenge the latter's uniqueness with a second army of women in power armour who
also go by the name of "Sisterhood". That would be kind of like introducing a new all-male army of heavily armoured "Star Marines".
Of course anyone could come up with their own ideas for why the Sisters of Silence might still be around in M41 or what they would do for the Imperium - this is the other side of
GW's "no canon" policy, and I have heard of a few fan-projects regarding this faction. If you're interested,
here is a PDF that was written for
FFG's Dark Heresy
RPG, and it features a few bits of fluff in the back. Perhaps it may serve as inspiration?
It would likely necessitate to discard certain elements of
GW's own material, though. Aside from the Black Ships background, there is also the bit about Nulls being
extremely rare (see the background on
Dorian Black for example), and the ones that actually are found and recovered alive being funnelled into the care of the Inquisition and the Assassinorum, the latter using them to train Culexus Assassins.
Myself, I'm still somewhat unsure whether I should acknowledge them at all, but assuming they did exist, I would not be surprised if their order was disbanded either following the Siege of Terra and the affiliated casualties, or later when the Imperium's ability to detect Nulls dropped below a level where their order could be reliably supplied with a sufficient number of new recruits, ultimately leading to the decision that those Nulls would be of more use in more specialised positions. This would at least tie in with the current studio material.
the shrouded lord wrote:another question: if the sisters were disbanded, what would happen to their armour? would they keep it? would it be melted down? stored in a vault? abandoned?
I don't think anyone can truly answer this, but my
theory would be storage in a vault and then forgotten, simply because it'd fit to how the Imperium deals with things from the past. Melting it down would simultaneously seem like a waste (the armour plating is just one of several components that make up the suit, and it is the most crude) as well as unusually efficient (the Imperium, recycling stuff?). Surviving members would probably keep their armour even in service of another organisation such as the Inquisition, into which they could have been absorbed.