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A Stranger in a War-Torn Galaxy: A Supreme Commander/WH40k Quest

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BOTcommander said:
Now, what will our dear General's reaction be to feral worlds.
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WTF IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!?!?!

[X]You are at fault
You have somewhat of a temper, and she was right, you ignored the opportunity for a comprehensive report in favor of her working on something else.

She really does need to accept that the Imperium is baseline completely alien to her and has tens of millennia more products of research and technology but is fallen and laughably ignorant of almost all of it.
 
[X]You are at fault

As they say "The buck stops here". We decide how to utilize our resources and deciding to skip a briefing about the destination is something her academy instructors would have chewed her out for.
 
BOTcommander said:
Now, what will our dear General's reaction be to feral worlds.
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She's probably blow her gasket at some of the 1st founding chapters who keep their recruiting worlds untamed or perpetually damaged (Fenris or Baal) instead of repairing the damage done previously or keep them deliberately feral.

Speaking of that what about the reaction to a death world? No clearing of the environment to livable standards and that people actually chose to live there?
 
HungryHamadryad said:
Yeah, that's one of the more reasonable ways to look at things. He had a plan for something not nearly so inhumane and self destructive, but he was the lynch pin holding it all together until the bureaucracy was more complete. The wheels on the bus fell off too early for the system to be properly resilient and autonomous, as often happens to highly centralized systems.

So now any hypothetical Imperial reformer is stuck in a consequentialist ethical nightmare wherein rocking the boat will probably kill billions of people relatively immediately through the disruption, for the chance at saving more down the line, by improving things.
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Pre-Beast Imperium was functioning pretty well for the most part, it was even demilitarizing its standing armies and navies cause of a lack of need. There were even talks about disbanding the Astartes too, but then the Beast gut punch the Imperium and it's been in a downward spiral ever since.
 
[x]You are at fault
[x]The Imperium is at fault

Honestly I think both are true. Revy is at fault because she chose not to get a detailed briefing, which meant that she got taken by surprise when she discovered the conditions Tet's populace lived under. Cue human supremacist temper flareup. OTOH the conditions that the Tet populace lived under were very much the Imperium's fault.

BOTcommander said:
I prefer "The Emperor left the nascant Imperium in a state at the moment of his entombment upon the golden throne in a state that, while not the only possible path, made the current one the most likely. Unfinished and incomplete, the project of the Imperium is the great tragedy of 40k, the fallacy of the Emperor's belief in the great man theory of history."

The Imperium's cruelty being nessesary for mankind's survivial is a take I find cringe. The Imperium's cruelty is nessesary for the surivial of the Imperial machine (and then maybe by proxy humanity?) and its many constituent parts. Its a very academic distinction but an important one, I think. As in, change for the better right now would have to be done by someone either extremely powerful or very carefully, or the machine breaks and succumbs to the myriad of outside threats knocking at the door, but that does not mean that other forms of government would not theoretically be viable for a galactic human civilisation facing the kind of threats the Imperium does.

Do I make sense?
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Not only is the, "the Imperium's cruelty is a necessary evil" super cringe, my personal take is that it's also propaganda for internal consumption. One of the nifty things about WH40K source material is that it's rarely written from an unbiased neutral viewpoint - splats are written from the view of the faction, and even the main rulebook is written with an Imperial framing (granted this is based upon my own time with the franchise as of 4th edition).

So does the Imperium launch pogroms to cleanse undesirables with fire because it needs to, or because it's space turbofascism and fascism always needs an enemy to rally its populace against? Because if fascism doesn't have an enemy, it has no problems making one. Granted, chaos exists. But there's a bit of a chicken and egg question going on - how much of the materium being awful is because the warp is full of evil shit, and how much of the warp being full of evil shit is because the materium is awful?

Basically, I like a lot of wishywashy philosophy in my 40K :V
 
There are planets with fullblown democracies and public education systems in 40k. The cruelty is, if anything, consequence of the Imperium's neglect of its own body in the face of overwhelming threats from outside. The Administratum loses whole star systems on a regular basis because things got filed in the wrong stack of ledgers. It is absolutely unnecessary, but it is also an inevitable consequence of a system that could only be run by post human minds, and the transition from that to something of more human scale was interrupted when Horus threw his galaxy wide temper tantrum after getting stabbed with a stinky knife.
 
We skipped the opportunity to get a briefing. That's on us. Hell, we're in command and that'd make us responsible alone.

[x] You are at fault
 
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