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I know that at the mere whiff of a SCT that theAdeptus Mechanicus will utterly tear a world to pieces looking for said SCT, but; has the Adeptus Mechanicus ever simply destroyed a world from orbit for committing some unspeakable sin the same way that the Inquisition does? I mean, there are some many worlds out there that it is not infrequent for some previously settled planet be rediscovered after centuries (if not millenniums) of being lost. That's a lot of time with out the guiding hand of the Empire (and thus; the Adeptus Mechanicus) to make sure that things stay the way they are suppose to be. What if the people of that lost world decided to improve on their tech in some way to displeased the Adeptus Mechanicus? Or, what if that planet tried to redevelop AI? Or, if they gave up on human tech and swapped over to some xeno tech instead? Would the Adeptus Mechanicus nuke that world from orbit? What they try to incorporate any improvements from that world into the empire at large? If the world in question were a lost Forge-wold, would that change how the Adeptus Mechanicus looked at it? What is the short hand for"Adeptus Mechanicus" on this site? 'Cause, it's not AM, like I thought it would be. I'm asking for silly "i want to right my army a good background" reasons.

I'm not sure if it's ever been recorded, but the AdMech does own many of its own planets. Being an authority unto itself within the Imperium, I imagine it is within their right to declare Exterminatus on a planet that has developed "Silica Animus" (Artificial Intelligence) or that has come under the sway of a virulent data-daemon, or some similar apocalypse-level tech-heresy event.

I don't know about any exterminasuses (is that the correct plural ?), but as for lost Forge-Worlds, in the novel "Skitarius" by Rob Sanders they're trying to conquer a Forge-World lost to Chaos thousands of years before, to reclaim it for the Omnissiah. They don't want to just destroy everything, seeing as every Forge-World has it's load of secrets and precious data, it'd be heretical to destroy all this. Like that time the Tech-Priest Veriliad destroyed the Phosphex STC and got burned alive with a Phosphex gun for it.

I guess another motive for exterminatus is to prevent someone finding something out about the Adeptus Mechanicus they're not supposed to.
Example of the top of my head. Given the usual tech-priest response to necrons and the like, maybe for once they managed to get Necron artefacts without being slaughtered, and they committed exterminatus to cover their tracks, or maybe to kill some guard units that found out what they were doing.

They have the ability, they have the power to get away with it, all they need is a decent motive.

Mudrat wrote:
They have the ability, they have the power to get away with it, all they need is a decent motive.

Exactly so. The AdMech builds most or all of the devices you'd use for Exterminatus and they have their own fleets.

As for motives... Wiping out a place where you could potentially find STC fragments would probably be a very big no-no but some Xeno world with dangerous, twisted Xenotech would be free game. And they wouldn't even have to cover it up!

Normally they sent the Ordo Reductor and delete any record of the soon-to-be-busted-planet, including its name....
Messing with A.I. of any kind is a kind of heresy that is taken very seriously.

And the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Ordo Reductor especially don´t care about the [REDACTED] Inquisition and their [REDACTED] methods.
PRAISE THE OMNISSIAH!

The Ad Mech are calculating. It isn't in their nature to punish planets, but if they see destruction as the best/only way to solve a problem they will do it.