Zakiriel wrote:That is a plethora of pinatas, er no, a plethora of purity seals all over him.

 Lynata wrote:

DeathRex wrote:Is there any lesser dreadnought for human use? If they could trust titans to be piloted by humans it seems odd that a dreadnought proxy (not the chapter dreads themselves) are not in some form of use threw out the imperial guard or inquisition.
If the trouble of madness is such a concern how are the Titan pilots spared?

Well, as far as I know Titan pilots do actually get out of their machines - they are not permanently wired to them.

Still, I do not believe that a Dreadnought in itself is any more special or valuable than a Titan, so I suppose it would be entirely possible to build one for a normal human. There are other problems to consider, however, and perhaps those might make for an explanation regarding how this is handled within the setting:

Let us consider the types of people who might be put into such machines. Professional soldiers, popular heroes, and wealthy/influencial individuals.

The first type can be found in large quantities throughout the Imperial Guard, yet we all know that the IG generally works on a principle of quantity over quality. It has its own type of walker, the Sentinel, which can be equipped with extra armour and heavy weapons for frontline combat duty. Suffice to say, its stride would likely make it a much faster vehicle than a Dreadnought with those stubby legs, which lends itself well to the mobility of the Imperial Guard's armoured and mechanized regiments. Direct insertion by manner of how the Space Marines do it would require drop pods, which throws up an entirely new problem.
Another potential problem/explanation would be that the MIU required to have the driver's brain interface directly with the machinery is extreme high-tech, much beyond the "normal" stuff of just having a machine that can walk and fire guns. The Imperial Guard deliberately keeps its vehicles and armaments standardised and comparatively low-tech so that maintenance as well as procurement of spare parts are (more or less) easily ensured throughout the galaxy. The planets that could actually produce a machine like a Dreadnought are so few and far-between that actually taking a bunch of them along with an army group would result in a logistical nightmare.
All in all, the Sentinel just comes across as being a far more useful design for massed use in the Guard.

Of course, particularly heroic soldiers may always constitute an exception to the point where we would feel that he or she deserves to be "immortalized" by the Dreadnought treatment. This, however, might be regarded as being in conflict with the Imperial faith. The Ecclesiarchy teaches that, after death, the souls of His faithful servants will ascend to the Emperor's side - which in turn means that putting the guy into a stasis sarcophagus would actually prevent his or her rightfully earned ascension, in essence rendering their martyrdom irrelevant. Imperial culture teaches one to embrace honourable death with open arms, so being confined to the insides of a Dreadnought may be anathema to many if not all Imperial people.
As a sidenote, here I would point towards the Ecclesiarchy's so-called Penitent Engines, which have a penitent sinner be permanently wired to a walker in a way which suggests it would be exactly the same for a Dreadnought. In fact, take a PE and add armour plus a stasis generator to it, and there ya go. However, as pointed out above, this is not what the Imperium wants - they want the sinner to perish in battle in the hopes of saving their soul, and if possible will then re-use the machine for the next poor sod who gets a sentence like that from his local church court.

Lastly, we have those few powerful people who, either by nature of their wealth or their rank, can afford many life-prolonging treatments from rejuvenation drugs to cybernetic enhancement. I think that these are unlikely to ever go for a Dreadnought as well, simply because they will spend all the resources at their disposal on improving their lives on two feet, regardless of how much less "efficient" their bodies become as the centuries pass. And when finally they become so frail and withered and weak that no technological augmentation can help them any further, their minds and reflexes will have become too dulled to have them be of any use in a Dread.

Needless to say, there can be exceptions, but given the background I am not surprised to have never heard of one in any of GW's books over the past two decades. I would actually almost expect the Martian Tech-Guard to be different from the IG in regards to the technical finesse of their equipment standards, but since the AdMech only has a supporting role in the setting the most we hear of them is a bunch of Titans strutting over the battlefields here and there. Maybe the Skitarii really do have their own Dreadnoughts, maybe they don't. All I know is that the existence or non-existence of Dreadnoughts other than those in use by the Astartes has nothing to do with the Space Marines. I know that some people like the idea of the Marines hoarding better tech and deliberately keeping it out of the hands of "mere mortals" out of some principle, but in the end, the Space Marines have nothing that the Imperium cannot replicate if it so wishes - after all, it is the Imperium that funds their armament whenever a new Chapter is created.