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If anything it's one of Taylor's advantages that she doesn't have a shard in her head pushing her to weaponize her technology. It's the non-weapon applications that are going to really change things.

Heck, look how she's learned to talk to Queen Administrator; that's a lot more important than a new type of bomb or gun.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Explain then how the tech priests can fully repair a tank or other vehicle that has been badly damaged by energy and impact weapons, including guns that fire super heated plasma (is there any other kind?), weapons that literally melt the armor off, and being physically torn to shreds. And they can do so within minutes while out in the field. The only requirement is the vehicle can't be completely destroyed. And the tech priest can do this without any assistance. Just run up to the vehicle, do something, and it's completely repaired. Yes, yes, I know. "It's just game mechanics". But in-universe the tech priests are fixing badly damaged tech in seconds to minutes via prayer and maybe tightening a bolt or two in a ritualistic way.
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I haven't read enough WH40k literature, so do the novels literally have that happen? Or is that an exaggeration? Because I know that tech-priests like to bolt extra limbs and tools onto their body, so I can see them being able to pull off a one-man pit crew act quite easily if they had the parts they needed.
Dragonlord said:
It's actually in the background lore that humans no longer know how much of their tech works due to the dark ages. They have templates from before that age that are basically mini factories where you put resources in one end and tech comes out the other. Wars have been fought over the discovery of an intact one. From what I understand during the dark age most of the intermediate knowledge was lost so they have these super advanced things and their own knowledge of science is only around 5k years ahead of us. Also iirc the source of the dark age was when chaos infected the ai they were using, and those are the machine spirits they're talking about.
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I agree with most of that, but I should point out that they use VI, not AI. AI stands for abominable intelligence. So the modern machine spirits have nothing to do with AI, even if they did in the past. Virtual intelligence, along with brains that have been 'Ship of Theseused' until there aren't any meaty bits left are all that they use.

I just meant that it's all technology dressed up as religion and magic. Aside from the very literal daemonic infestations, everything is either superstition that doesn't do anything directly or a process that is firmly grounded in science, even if it isn't understood anymore.

Edit: I just finished posting this when I realized what thread we are in. Sorry. Agree to disagree? WH40k is kind of ridiculous, so it's not like your explanations are more implausible than mine. Quite the opposite, really. I just dislike the idea of tech-priests 'Wololo-ing' a partially exploding super-tank into working condition.
 
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verycoolname said:
I just finished posting this when I realized what thread we are in. Sorry. Agree to disagree? WH40k is kind of ridiculous, so it's not like your explanations are more implausible than mine. Quite the opposite, really. I just dislike the idea of tech-priests 'Wololo-ing' a partially exploding super-tank into working condition
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Imagine that the tech priests are the successors of the original apprentices in the dark age where there were experts that understood what they were doing. So over a few thousand years and the advance of warp knowledge what was "if we do this it will start working again, fuck knows why" turns into "if we perform this ritual and say these prayers it starts working again because the machine spirits have been appeased."

And yes, they no longer use ai for anything because of what happened then.
 
@Faeryknight: Your comment made my mind wander to a weird place, after detouring through shaggy dog stories.
Danny walked down into his daughter's personal laboratory at home; she had gotten distracted again, and after too many repeats, they had implemented a "no more than one solo meal a day" to keep her healthily socialized.

"Hey, Little Owl. Are you hungry?" He didn't expect a reply - if things were bad enough he needed to fetch her to a meal, he'd likely have to break her concentration first. As he wandered over to her workstation, his attention was attracted to what could only be described as a shiny art-deco ray gun, complete with multiple settings dials and a trigger button. Buck Rodgers couldn't have done any better. Curious, he wandered over to the ray gun. There were four dials. Two were labeled "Locus Distance", "Locus Radius", and seemed to each have multiple scales, accessed by pulling the dials out, or pushing them in. One dial just had a logarithmic scale starting at 1. The remaining dial only had a few positional settings - "Position", "Speed", "Direction", "Spin", and "Temperature". Idly, he picked it up, and carefully keeping his fingers away from the trigger and safety, began examining the gun more closely.

He was surprised when Taylor leaped out of her chair in alarm, and snatched the gun out of his hands. "No, Dad! Don't! It's too dangerous!"

That set Danny aback, considering what many of Taylor's inventions were capable of. She always made them absurdly safe for the operator, of course, but that often didn't help the subject or target. "Huh? Taylor? What's the problem?"

"That's my Natural Entropy Attentuation Transformer. It's not safe."

Danny was really worried. "So what's it do?"

Taylor look a little embarrassed. "Well, you know how sometimes you get an idea in your head and you can't do anything else you've planned until you get it out?"

Danny smiled. "Not personally, but yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon - you know my favorite author can't seem to focus on a single series at a time. The stories are all good, but sometimes it takes years for him to write the next actual novel in a series instead of little background shorts. It can be kind of frustrating, no matter how much I'm enjoying the other series."

"Well, that's the result of one of those ideas. I'm glad I'm no longer dealing with the idea, but that's not one I'll be publishing, sharing, or developing further. I really kind of regret making it."

"So what does it do?"

"I told you. It's the Natural Entropy Attentuation Transformer. The log scale determines the number of states at the center of the locus for the attribute you select on the positional dial."

Danny thought for a moment - he wasn't a scientific and engineering hyper-genius like his daughter, but he did have a firm grounding in them, just so he could keep aware of his daughter's efforts. He swallowed nervously, and very carefully laid the gun back down, after very nervously returning all the dials to their original position.

Taylor continued - "It's a NEAT gun, but it's not very useful or safe."

I'll leave to those closer Taylor's knowledge base to determine exactly how dangerous that gun is, as I didn't feel the need to run the numbers, as setting the number of "Position" states to 1 was bad enough at the layman's knowledge level.
 
verycoolname said:
I haven't read enough WH40k literature, so do the novels literally have that happen? Or is that an exaggeration? Because I know that tech-priests like to bolt extra limbs and tools onto their body, so I can see them being able to pull off a one-man pit crew act quite easily if they had the parts they needed.
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Not exactly, though certain Clarktech found in the setting could certainly make it possible. The "instant repair" thing is an ability found in the tabletop wargame - it's an abstraction of a techpriest making a field repair for the sake of gameplay and to the best of my knowledge at no point during any of the novels does a techpriest slap a tank on the grill shouting, "THOU ART HEALED!" like a diselpunk Benny Hinn.
 
ToothMaker said:
Not exactly, though certain Clarktech found in the setting could certainly make it possible. The "instant repair" thing is an ability found in the tabletop wargame - it's an abstraction of a techpriest making a field repair for the sake of gameplay and to the best of my knowledge at no point during any of the novels does a techpriest slap a tank on the grill shouting, "THOU ART HEALED!" like a diselpunk Benny Hinn.
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So in other words, it was a disingenuous argument made in bad faith.
 
Guardian Lurker said:
Danny smiled. "Not personally, but yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon - you know my favorite author can't seem to focus on a single series at a time. The stories are all good, but sometimes it takes years for him to write the next actual novel in a series instead of little background shorts. It can be kind of frustrating, no matter how much I'm enjoying the other series."
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🤔 For some reason I feel targeted...

No idea why. Probably just my imagination :)
 
Dragonlord said:
It's actually in the background lore that humans no longer know how much of their tech works due to the dark ages. They have templates from before that age that are basically mini factories where you put resources in one end and tech comes out the other. Wars have been fought over the discovery of an intact one. From what I understand during the dark age most of the intermediate knowledge was lost so they have these super advanced things and their own knowledge of science is only around 5k years ahead of us. Also iirc the source of the dark age was when chaos infected the ai they were using, and those are the machine spirits they're talking about.
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I believe it was the birth of slaanesh causing massive warp storms preventing FTL for like ten thousand years
 
Important question: The AGM-314 Graviton-Thermal Fixed-height Ordnance (nickname 'Duckpond') that was used against the S9. That was designed by a relatively-bright employee of Gravtec, right? Brendan didn't just come out and ask Taylor to build him a bomb, did he?
 
rdmcmains said:
Important question: The AGM-314 Graviton-Thermal Fixed-height Ordnance (nickname 'Duckpond') that was used against the S9. That was designed by a relatively-bright employee of Gravtec, right? Brendan didn't just come out and ask Taylor to build him a bomb, did he?
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I suspect that it was probably built by the Government scientists who have been busy trying to understand the research papers that come out of Gravtec, rather than anyone at Gravtec itself.

Plus, taking out the Slaughterhouse Nine with it then becomes a double-whammy against RCB: first, we took out those terrorists you've failed to stop for the past couple of decades. Second, we did it by having a bunch of certified non-tinkers (who you actually are allowed to meet, this time) build a new application of the technology based purely on descriptions of the functional principles of the technology. Thus proving that it isn't Tinkertech.
 
rdmcmains said:
Important question: The AGM-314 Graviton-Thermal Fixed-height Ordnance (nickname 'Duckpond') that was used against the S9. That was designed by a relatively-bright employee of Gravtec, right? Brendan didn't just come out and ask Taylor to build him a bomb, did he?
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I'm not certain, details blur when you binge like I do, but that seems pretty likely.

As noted above, weaponizing new tech is pretty easily done, especially things that are already energetic by nature.
 
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