A Lancer vs 40k scenario that's not about warfare: DoJ/HR vs. a recently liberated Necromunda

Regardless of whether you think it would happen, suppose, for the sake of argument, that Necromunda came to be under Union control, and that it looks like it won't be re-conquered for the forseeable future.

Do you think a contingent of Liberators and DoJ caseworkers could sort out the infamous mess of gang warfare, urban decay, and just plain fucked up society that is the Imperium's most famous Hive World and turn it into a reasonably safe and decent place to live?
 
Given infinite time and infinite personel: probably yes. However, it would require basically rebuilding Necromunda, I think.
 
The easy part is the environmental nightmare and resource scarcity. I Imagine they'll be able to phase out corpse starch and start scrubbing radiation in a few years.

The societal issues, especially at Necromunda's scale, are going to be significantly more difficult.
 
Necromunda isn't just a planet; it's a humanitarian catastrophe in motion of at least hundreds of billions and probably more. How many people need aid? A lot, and it's hard to be more specific because the information was too hard for the Imperium to gather, so it gave up.

I'm not sure of the scale of the Union, but I would assume it's not as packed as a hive worlds get, if nothing else because it would make things horrendously cramped for that number of people. Apparently Earth in the Lancer setting has a population of 2 billion? Though it says much of it is given over to wilderness... a brief look didn't find any population figures for planets otherwise.

A single hive has a population of billions and there are thousands of hives, all full of people who mostly have little access to food security (or at least not what I imagine the Union would consider proper food security), medical care or effective social systems, full of heavily armed clans who violently resist attempts to intrude on their territory. The population itself is hostile to outsiders, indoctrinated into a violently xenophobic and hateful religion. Alien infilitrator cults because of genestealers and Chaos cults because the Imperium is shit exist in each hive and occasionally outbreak into open war that topples hives entirely.

The planet itself is a toxic wasteland, full of industrial ruins, which again are haunted by mutants, violent clans and monsters.

It could be done, no doubt, it's not literally impossible - but I suspect it would be nigh-impossible to do in a decent timeframe, because of the sheer scale of the problem.
 
Necromunda isn't just a planet; it's a humanitarian catastrophe in motion of at least hundreds of billions and probably more. How many people need aid? A lot, and it's hard to be more specific because the information was too hard for the Imperium to gather, so it gave up.

I'm not sure of the scale of the Union, but I would assume it's not as packed as a hive worlds get, if nothing else because it would make things horrendously cramped for that number of people. Apparently Earth in the Lancer setting has a population of 2 billion? Though it says much of it is given over to wilderness... a brief look didn't find any population figures for planets otherwise.

A single hive has a population of billions and there are thousands of hives, all full of people who mostly have little access to food security (or at least not what I imagine the Union would consider proper food security), medical care or effective social systems, full of heavily armed clans who violently resist attempts to intrude on their territory. The population itself is hostile to outsiders, indoctrinated into a violently xenophobic and hateful religion. Alien infilitrator cults because of genestealers and Chaos cults because the Imperium is shit exist in each hive and occasionally outbreak into open war that topples hives entirely.

The planet itself is a toxic wasteland, full of industrial ruins, which again are haunted by mutants, violent clans and monsters.

It could be done, no doubt, it's not literally impossible - but I suspect it would be nigh-impossible to do in a decent timeframe, because of the sheer scale of the problem.

Cradle/Earth is an exception: since it was destroyed in an enviroenmental apocalypse before Union's founding, it is a point of pride to keep it lush and unmarred by pollution; other Core Worlds, like Mars, have populations more in line with current-day earth. Plus, every developed planet usually has almost as many people living in orbital habitats around as it has on the surface.

Union occupies a bubble with a raius of 3000-ish light-year in the Orion Arm, and the amount of populated planets is usually given in the order of magnitude of about a thousand. In canon, the amount of space and resources it can access quickly is bottlenecked by the lack of FTL, but in this scenario I think it's obvious it must have access to FTL travel, likely reverse-engineering warp travel, otherwise there's no way it would have even arrived at Necromunda, let alone conquer and hold it. Speaking of, something it has access to in Canon are Blinkgates. Think of them as Webway gates but they teleport you almost instantly to your chosen exits. If they build one of those in Necromunda's system, the rest of their most developed planets would be literally minutes away; but that's a BIG project that would take at least years to complete.

See that's exactly what I was thinking. Necromunda would probably be a generations long project. Still, even not being very knowlegeable on the lore of that planet beyond the basics, I do see a couple of availeable inroads:

There is a sort of metalworking guild made of abhumans who are dependent on chemical compounds from another gang to keep themselves alive and able to reproduce. They seem like a low-hanging fruit: offer them a permanent solution to their problems, and you'd have a foot in the door of inter-house politics, as well as significantly weakening a huge drug cartel; which iirc also derive a lot of their wealth from selling basic military equipment like Lasguns to the Guard, so being cut off from the Imperium would already have done a number on them.

The Adeptus Mechanicus could (and should as soon as possible) be completely replaced, taking their place of influence, which would enable the new planetary administration to project power in the usual "we provide to all but people who play nice with us get more and sooner" way.
Speaking of the Mechanicus, I don't know if it's possible to restore a servitor to full autonomy and sapience, or even full autonomy with some brain damage, but if that's possible would imagine every one saved would be very well disposed towards the people who took them out of that waking nightmare.

Also, although this is as much of a question as it is a suggestion: did the T'au Empire evr manage to conquer a Hive World? If they did, and managed to effectively at least improve the situation there, the DoJ personnel assigned to Necromunda could get some notes from that.
 
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The big thing is that Necromunda is kind of like a million FF7 Midgards stacked on top of one another, one where every level you go down is more poverty stricken and violent then the last.

Union's biggest issue is that the Hive aristocracy will fight them for every inch, and use their control over the gangs to turn Necromunda into the biggest shit show since Hercynia. We're talking full Liberator teams recruited just for dealing with Hive Primus, let alone the other Hives. Nasty city fighting all the way.

Nothing in Necromunda is going to be fixed until Lord Gerontius Helmawr and all of the Great Houses are gone.
 
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There's no way a hive like this is anywhere close to self sufficient in its ability to provide life-critical resources like food and water. Union will have enormous leverage in that regard; even the most recalcitrant gangs and mercenary companies will be reevaluating their loyalties when the planetary aristocracy can't feed them.

This sounds ghoulish and that's because it is, and it's also unavoidable. Necromunda is a humanitarian disaster on a level we can't comprehend - even if Union throws as much capacity as it can into providing unconditional aid, I seriously doubt it would be enough to prevent a massive wave of deaths. This is the price of intervention when hundreds of billions of lives are on the line.
 
There's no way a hive like this is anywhere close to self sufficient in its ability to provide life-critical resources like food and water. Union will have enormous leverage in that regard; even the most recalcitrant gangs and mercenary companies will be reevaluating their loyalties when the planetary aristocracy can't feed them.

This sounds ghoulish and that's because it is, and it's also unavoidable. Necromunda is a humanitarian disaster on a level we can't comprehend - even if Union throws as much capacity as it can into providing unconditional aid, I seriously doubt it would be enough to prevent a massive wave of deaths. This is the price of intervention when hundreds of billions of lives are on the line.
I'll give the counter-arguement that, given the appalling state of infrastructure we know exists, the difficulty of travel, and the sheer number of people involved, it must be. I don't think there's a way for canon Necromunda to have any effective means of importing food and water on the scales involved, because the ability to actually move it from it's sources to said hundreds of billions just doesn't appear to be in evidence. As such, I think that the only way to reconcile said populations with the hive being so large and so awful is that these people, somehow, scrape by a mostly self-sufficient life.
 
I'll give the counter-arguement that, given the appalling state of infrastructure we know exists, the difficulty of travel, and the sheer number of people involved, it must be. I don't think there's a way for canon Necromunda to have any effective means of importing food and water on the scales involved, because the ability to actually move it from it's sources to said hundreds of billions just doesn't appear to be in evidence. As such, I think that the only way to reconcile said populations with the hive being so large and so awful is that these people, somehow, scrape by a mostly self-sufficient life.
Warhammer infrastructure is often whatever the current writer needs it to be, but considering that corpse starch is the mainstay of the diet of the average worker in a hive city I think we can safely assume that self-sufficiency isn't in the cards, or at least not a self-sufficiency that isn't reliant on billions of people dying.

Agri-worlds exist for a reason in the Imperium, and it's to feed hive cities. These are planets that have so thoroughly blighted and used up the water and soil that they literally cannot sustain themselves without resupply from off-planet, full stop. I suspect that control over this extraplanetary system of resupply is precisely what gives local aristocrats so much control in hive cities, and it's also what will cause their power base to erode out from underneath them in a scenario where they no longer control it. I suspect what they'll end up trying to do is use what force they can command planetside to seize control of local logistical systems to create a facsimile of their previous power, and how successful they end up being will rely in large part on Union's ability to push back against that. Ideally they'll be reconstructing these logistical systems entirely because they're usually designed to be shitty on purpose, but when the local equivalent of the Black Hundreds are terrorbombing construction sites that may prove difficult without a painful and expensive occupation.
 
Also, although this is as much of a question as it is a suggestion: did the T'au Empire evr manage to conquer a Hive World? If they did, and managed to effectively at least improve the situation there, the DoJ personnel assigned to Necromunda could get some notes from that.

They did, they took Agrellan during Second Damocles. They IIRC were forced to start terraforming the damn thing just to make it liveable again, and considered many of the hive spires to basically be write-offs, but were confident that in time it could become a Sept World to rival T'au itself.

Then the Imperium came back and razed the place.
 
Union administrators explicitly dread being assigned to the Harrison bruise, and necromunda is much worse then that.

It's not impossible but you're going to need to measure in generations.
 
Union administrators explicitly dread being assigned to the Harrison bruise, and necromunda is much worse then that.

It's not impossible but you're going to need to measure in generations.
It'd also be a project that consumes most of Union's administrative capacity. Necromunda is about as populous as all of Karrakin space, and it desperately needs development and reconstruction or it'll collapse and hundreds of billions will die. You would need to just assume that the Imperium would be fine with this whole situation as well, because while Union's fleet is large it would at certainly struggle with projecting the force necessary to conduct this reconstruction while also fending off vengeful Imperium fleets.

The only way I see this being feasible is if Necromunda's star system just ISOTs into the Lancer setting at, like, the edge of the Dawnline Shore or something.
 
As others have said, the Union is going to be in this for the long haul. Necromunda is probably one of the most messed up worlds in the Imperium of Man that still has a significant human population on it. But the Union does have a couple technologies that would help them accomplish the process of bringing a level of sanity back to Necromunda. I'm going to assume that Necromunda was basically dropped in a system with one of the blink gates, otherwise the Union wouldn't be able to reach it before everyone there starved to death.

First are the printers. Printers in Lancer are a lot like today's 3D printers on a big pile of steroids. If it has raw matter and the schematics of what you want, it'll pop out copies of it pretty much instantly. It doesn't do as well with biochemistry though, but it is capable of printing emergency food called 'printloaf'. One can live off of printloaf, but it's pretty bland and unappetizing. Which means to the people of Necromunda (outside of the nobility), it's as good as a 5 star meal.

Second are the NHPs. While Union does have sub-sapient AIs called COMP/CONs, NHPs are different. They're essentially eldritch bodiless entities encased within a system called a Casket, which enables them to exist in our reality and think much like a human does. They're capable of very impressive feats of calculation and analysis, and their processing speed is virtually infinite, limited only by how fast they can get data. For example, there's a group of five of these somewhere in the Union that form an extremely accurate predictive model of the known galaxy. Warships of the Union all have one for a central computer, and some warships are crewed almost entirely by the NHP and supplementary Comp/Cons and hardly have any human presence at all.

Third is hacking. Even base lancer mechs can hack other mechs and cause trouble in their systems. Mechs with NHPs can do some really alien stuff like bending time or dragging enemies into blink space. Capital ship NHPs that are in combat can attack with paracausal viruses sent through blinkspace in a war that is just as vicious as the bombardments in reality. The information security of Necromunda and the machine spirits won't stand a chance. The moment the Union lands, they will own the local networks. Any camera or microphone becomes eyes and ears for them. More importantly, the Union can use this to learn of the dangers waiting for them on the planet, once they get into Inquisitorial systems. They'll be forewarned about the gangs, the adeptus mechanicus, which nobles will likely be difficult, and the possibility of gene stealer cults and chaos cults.

So, the Union arrives, and they see just what a hellhole Necromunda is. And they quickly realize the mass famine that will soon break out without regular Imperium shipments of food to feed the massive population. A whole lot of industrial grade printers are going to be shipped in ASAP, and landed on various places of the world. These will need both protection from the constant acid rains, and from the numerous gangs, cults, and other factions that inhabit the world. The Union certainly has the technology to do the former, the printers can make it themselves in fact. As for the latter, a team of lancers to guard a printer would do it. Few would be crazy enough to pick a fight with the big stompy mechs.

Anyway, I see the Union setting up several bases over the world, outside of the hive cities themselves. Any wide open spot of barren wilderness will do, as the Union will need lots of room to expand each of these bases. The printers get set up, and immediately put to work. The Union likely has schematics for small emergency self sufficient shelters, ones that can be stacked up like apartments, that have power, plumbing, and other necessities built into them. Several printers would be focused on churning these out as fast as they can. Others would run pumps and pipes to the literal oceans of fecal matter that accumulated over millenniums from the hive cities dumping their sewage in the wastelands. These printers would use this virtually infinite supply of biomatter to mass produce printloaf to head off the coming famine.

From each of these bases, the Union starts the looooooong process of cleaning up the hive cities. The NHPs could easily hack into whatever communication or public address systems of Necromunda, and start broadcasting their offer of aid. 'Come to the Union. We've got food, shelter, clean water, medicines, and the like.' The nobility probably won't like this, but the Union can be diplomatic. Nobles can be offered a chance to assist and be on the right side of history, and in return be allowed to retire in luxury and comfort. Otherwise, they're soon bound to be facing a riot of starving people, or the big stompy lancer mechs themselves. Gangs and such would also receive an offer, a chance for clemency and a fresh start, a chance to rejoin civilization with a clean slate and not having to live in the underhive. I could see the Union even winning over the local Adeptus Mechanicus, if they dress up their stuff as STCs, and conceal the NHP's true natures. Or present them as a sort of super machine spirit.

Anyway, the Union bases are going to have a flood of people coming their way. Steady food while starving has a way of overcoming xenophobia and fanaticism. The printers are going to be hard pressed to keep up with demand. Things will be crowded for a while, with the printers running 24/7 to make the needed shelter and food for the coming people. But the Union is very efficient, and with an NHP coordinating logistics for all these bases and growing refugee cities, they can ensure there's no wasted time or resources, and the needed material and food gets to where it needs to go. The Union begins a process of medical screening, treating diseases and correcting mutations, even cloning replacements for missing limbs and organs. These screenings will also identify genestealer infections, and with the Union medical knowhow, they could be cured I imagine. The refugees will also likely need to be educated and taught the basics of using Union technology. It will take a while, but eventually they'll be able to assist the Union personnel with the massive humanitarian effort.

Naturally, not everyone is going to accept the Unions offers. There'll be nobles who cling to their power, gangs who answer to no one but themselves, cultists who are too fanatic to be tempted by food and shelter and safety, crazed mutants, suspicious or xenophobic people who simply think the Union's offer is too good to be true, and the like. There may be some that openly attack the growing refugee cities, but those would be put down by the lancer teams. NHPs owning the local information networks would keep any resisting groups from being able to form a unified front. If a stubborn noble transmits an order for his guardsmen to attack, it'll get intercepted mid transit by a watching NHP and changed into an order to surrender. Any stubborn holdouts can be isolated with control of the hive city's systems thanks to the NHP hacking. Once a few nobles are taken down, the rest likely would accept the Union's offer. For gangs, mutants, and cultists and such, armed drones could be mass produced, or lancer teams sent into the deeper parts of the city. The goal will likely to be to stun, apprehend the holdouts, and bring them back for rehabilitation and/or curing of mutations. The drones will likely also be needed to search the parts of the city where communication simply isn't possible, such as the deeper levels, and letting survivors there know that help has come.

As the hive cities gradually empty, and the flood of refugees slow, the printers can be turned to making the refugee cities into proper ones, with the different facilities that a city would need. The NHPs would ensure proper planning is done to prevent any wastage from happening. No multitude of mutant and toxic waste filled underlevels of the old hive cities. The old hive cities would likely be dismantled for raw material to be fed into the printers, though any items of cultural, artistic, or religious significance would be preserved and brought back intact. With basic survival needs met, more attention could be given to improving the quality of life. Hydroponics, vertical farms, and meat cloning vats are set up, to provide better food aside from printloaf. Actual homes are built, letting people upgrade from the basic cubicle with a bed, bathroom, and kitchenette. Actual schools and universities are built to give the coming generations a proper education. More attention is given to cultural and artistic endeavors, even entertainment ones. Religious ones as well, as I imagine the people would insist on building a few cathedrals to the God Emperor. And eventually, terraforming equipment gets printed, to start reversing the horrible damage done to the ruined environment.

It will be the work of decades and take a lot of resources from the Union to pull off. But in time, and thanks to the Union tech and NHPs, Necromunda would eventually be transformed from a toxic brutal hellhole into a vibrant garden world with pristine cities. People born in abject poverty would live to see their children and children's children live in prosperity. And in return, the Union researchers and NHPs get their hands on warp drive tech. They could probably modify it to work with blink space instead, and give the Union a proper FTL engine.

Mind, I don't think the Union could pull this sort of recovery off with more than one hive world at a time. It would tie up a big chunk of their fleet and resources, after all. But the Union is humanitarian enough to embark on a huge restoration project like this.
 
Really, I think the more relevant concern is not whether they can handle the mechanical load, but how well ThirdCom can cope with the work. 3C Union has a tendency toward timidity, and an effective intervention in Necromunda suited to prevent the most catastrophic projections for loss of life would probably necessitate actions they're extremely uncomfortable with the scope of (such as potentially tasking kill-teams of chassis to decapitate the leadership of problem organizations in order to prevent spiteful attacks on their relief efforts or WMD releases, that sort of thing). It's a scale of work that they've never had to deal with, and I strongly suspect the process (including decisions made along the way) would have to result in a sea-change in how Union deals with outside forces.
 
Really, I think the more relevant concern is not whether they can handle the mechanical load, but how well ThirdCom can cope with the work. 3C Union has a tendency toward timidity, and an effective intervention in Necromunda suited to prevent the most catastrophic projections for loss of life would probably necessitate actions they're extremely uncomfortable with the scope of (such as potentially tasking kill-teams of chassis to decapitate the leadership of problem organizations in order to prevent spiteful attacks on their relief efforts or WMD releases, that sort of thing). It's a scale of work that they've never had to deal with, and I strongly suspect the process (including decisions made along the way) would have to result in a sea-change in how Union deals with outside forces.
What concerns me isn't ThirdComm's willingness per se - it was born in a revolution, after all, and while it does hesitate to take a heavy hand it's no stranger to using liberator teams when the situation calls for it. I think what will be the big problem at least initially is for Union's administration to properly assess and confront what a monumental task this is. That Necromunda really does have hundreds of billions of people, that conditions there really are that nightmarishly bad, and that hundreds of billions will die if they do not intervene immediately and with overwhelming logistical and military force. A hive world like Necromunda is completely unprecedented in its sheer scale in the Lancer universe; even the most heavily urbanized planets like Khayradin or Mars don't approach anywhere close to a hundred billion people and the Imperium is a nightmarish polity even by the worst of ThirdComm's standards, and they literally had to kill the genocidal fascists in SecComm!

I think there will be a moment where Union administration will read some of the reports it gets from first contact teams and either go "well that can't be true, there's no way there's hundreds of billions of people are living off of human corpses" or that those first contact teams will literally not be able to quickly grok to the sheer scale of the problem. That moment of hesitation can translate to a logistical lag in proper aid that may well kill unthinkable numbers of people. I think in a world where you could immediately convince ThirdComm's administration of the scale of the problem that they would be very willing to dispatch as much of the Union navy as is necessary to intervene - again, Necromunda has about as many people as all of Karrakin space and nearly all of them will die if they don't - but doing that will be a challenge, to put it lightly.
 
The human element of the Union may be shocked into inaction by the sheer magnitude of the impending disaster. However, Union also has the NHPs, particularly the five NHP supercomputers that make up GALSIM. That group that makes the hyperaccurate predictive model of the galaxy I mentioned above. They'll be getting the relevant information pretty much instantaneously thanks to the Omninet. They might be shocked too at what Necromunda represents, but with a processing speed of infinity, they'll work through their shock a lot faster than humans would. These NHPs could then inform the human elements of Union government (or those that are approved to know that GALSIM exists) that yes the info is real, yes there is a planet of hundreds of billions living in atrocious and appalling conditions, yes their food supply could be measured in mere days at best. GALSIM could galvanize the Union into action, and provide a plan of action for how best to save the people of Necromunda before famine claims them all. It's much easier to get people to snap out of shock and get to work when they're given a concrete plan of action.

EDIT: So, after doing a bit of research, GALSIM aren't NHPs, but actually a different kind of supercomputer. They predicted RA into existence, and NHPs arose after that incident. But there's other NHPs that can fill this role, planetary administration NHPs and the like.
 
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I mean, given the original post's wording, doesn't it imply that Union already has encountered the Imperium before, at least in the sense that they were sufficiently at war with them in order to conquer Necromunda in the first place? So, Union has already seen the absolute travesty that is Imperial life, including Servitors, etc. Necromunda is special, but it's a matter of the scope of the horror, not what kind of horror it is.

As for GALSIM, it's not just a matter of predictive modelling, but outright precognition: it's containing thousands upon thousands of simultaneous fully accurate simulations of the galaxy and it's potential futures, down to the location of small objects, calculating the probability of potential futures by the amount of matching simulations. It gathers the data for it paracausally, so it would know things like what Necromunda is like long before Union ever sets foot on the planet.

Union is absolutely big enough to be able to handle this: If I recall correctly, the Karrakin Trade Baronies alone have already built a NIven-style Ringworld, and are in the process of building a second one, just to flex on people. Even disregarding the Baronies, Union's population on top of that is absolutely in the quintillions, at least. Core worlds alone are in the thousands, with the Diaspora being far greater, with far more space habitats than inhabited planets on top of that.
 
Can Galsim accurately take into account the actions of MONIST entities though? Necromunda would be a considerably better* place if it wasn't for MONIST-7 and MONIST-8.
(Not ignoring MONIST-6 and MONIST-9 but their influences are less visible)

* still horrible
 
Can Galsim accurately take into account the actions of MONIST entities though? Necromunda would be a considerably better* place if it wasn't for MONIST-7 and MONIST-8.
(Not ignoring MONIST-6 and MONIST-9 but their influences are less visible)

* still horrible
GALSIM is currntly busy giving Tzeentch and every Farseer a neverending migraine by constantly accounting for them predicting the future, thus changing the future and altering their predictions as they make them. Also every deck of the Emperor's Tarot now shuffles itself as you're trying to use it.
 
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[Snaps fingers] That's how they hold Necromunda without Imperial interference - GALSIM modelled a version of events where the Emperor finished ascending. Consequently, with GALSIM's track record of dreaming up MONIST entities, Terra got obligingly swallowed into a warpstorm with the coming of the Empyreal Tyrant.
 
Khorne: Sorry Vashtorr, but I don't think you qualify as a Chaos God

Vashtorr: That's bullshit you let that rock in!

Khorne: RA barged in on its own and started giving Tzeentch swirlies. Which is funny to me.

- In the background -

Tzeentch: Gah! My maze is ruined

RA: [Try to find your way through this Metavault you jumped up chicken]
 
Khorne: Sorry Vashtorr, but I don't think you qualify as a Chaos God

Vashtorr: That's bullshit you let that rock in!

Khorne: RA barged in on its own and started giving Tzeentch swirlies. Which is funny to me.

- In the background -

Tzeentch: Gah! My maze is ruined

RA: [Try to find your way through this Metavault you jumped up chicken]
Tzeentch would just ask Kairos how to get through the metavault, as planned!

(Would we be going with the angle that blinkspace and the warp are intrinsically linked here? because there's no particular reason to think that Chaos and paracausality would be able to be compared to one another in any meaningful way if they weren't, imo)
 
Tzeentch would just ask Kairos how to get through the metavault, as planned!

(Would we be going with the angle that blinkspace and the warp are intrinsically linked here? because there's no particular reason to think that Chaos and paracausality would be able to be compared to one another in any meaningful way if they weren't, imo)
Nah I ws just goofing. I actually think they would be incompatible, but that's off-topic.
 
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