ArchAIngel
Sorcerer Supreme.
- Location
- Right behind you.
Planetmind: "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough."
-
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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
- Location
- Bulgaria
[X] Plan: Regular Redeployment
- Location
- Brazil, Minas gerais
Plus Avernus would learn from this experience (I think). I would not be surprised if some chaos factions tries very hard to stop that (while still given us trouble because chaos).
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
I mean the nids already did have a go, an entire hive fleets worth, but just got noped by the Old One stations.
- Location
- yorkshire
that was the orks I don't remember tyranids attacking Avernus
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
It happened over time.
There've apparently been 7 times they activated in the past 20,000 one was for Garkill, one was for nids the rest chaos.
- Location
- The United States
I still think it's interesting that two of those activations happened in the very short time we have colonized Avernus.
- Location
- yorkshire
were in the thread was this mentioned
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Eh?
There was the orks, I don't remember the second time.
A while back.
It appears after Areatha appears since she was the one who gave the info (its all the times she can remember, although I made a slight mistake the very first time was when the world destroyed the Men of Iron fleet.)
- Location
- yorkshire
I wish had the chance to study those defences
Here's the link to the turn where we had Tranth investigate the stations to the best of his ability(The results are under Mechanicus Explorator);
The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k)
sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
Archeotech, Xenotech, and Rogue Trader proliferated gear
A doc for submitting Archeotech, Xenotech, and whatever stuff you recall Rogue Traders having from whatever sources (though please mention the source). Yes, I am still doing stuff to adapt Embers to the tabletop, but this doc as well as my Odds & Ends doc are also for collecting suggestions for the next Grand Conclave. I currently got a few Imperial weapons on here that were proliferated by Rogue Traders, an archeotech gun that shoots lances of molten metal, an early pattern of the Assault Cannon, and a Multi-Melta based on the old rules that had them double as Heavy Flamers.
A doc for submitting Archeotech, Xenotech, and whatever stuff you recall Rogue Traders having from whatever sources (though please mention the source). Yes, I am still doing stuff to adapt Embers to the tabletop, but this doc as well as my Odds & Ends doc are also for collecting suggestions for the next Grand Conclave. I currently got a few Imperial weapons on here that were proliferated by Rogue Traders, an archeotech gun that shoots lances of molten metal, an early pattern of the Assault Cannon, and a Multi-Melta based on the old rules that had them double as Heavy Flamers.
Relics of the Forge Father.
- Location
- madison
Relics of the Forge Father.
Flicker Flame.
One of vlucans most famous workings. Flicker flame was originally a reaver of the legio Astorum, one of the fabled warp runners. The Legio Astorum was scattered by the fall of their home forge Lucius. Flicker flame was crippled slaying a traitor titan that had teleported into the midst of an evacuation, spending centuries as a reliquary of the machine god. Its repair was a condition of the survivors joining the Quartus impurm. Vulcan himself took to the task, creating a unique and deadly weapon. Flicker Flame is now capable of rapid short-range teleportation, seeming to flicker from place to place bringing burning death. Equipped with a pair of potent melta cannons and the great burning sword, the Fang of the Forge, it dances across battlefields laying waste to entire armies. Famously once slaying a pair of great gargants.
Over its centuries of service as an icon of hope, its machine spirit has become remarkably active and willful, more than once it has continued fighting well past the death of a precept. However, precepts who meet its exacting standards for skill describe it as remarkably easy to walk with, it's ferocious machine spirit working with rather than against them eager to strike against the dark. This is far from the only oddity sounding Flicker flame. Over time Vulcans aid in its maintenance has been needed less and less, and its teleportation seems to have become more rapid and accurate. While many attribute this simply to the magos growing understanding of the machine, and the refining of various techniques by its line of Princeps, behind closed doors, some wonder if there may be a stranger causes. More than a few have compared it to the murdered god Sophant, but few give such dark mutterings of so holy a machine much weight.
The Six Part Sun
The Six part sun was originally a proof of concept. An adaption of Sunstom Cannons for use in a harvester. However, the project rather got away from Vulcan. The exact working of its plasma projectors, and the staggeringly complex plasmatic control system are well beyond mortal reach. While it takes the weapon some time to expel sufficient plasma for use, once it has done so it is a horror on the battlefield. A vast sun bright ring of plasma swirling above it, sucking air into a massive burning hurricane. Grounding aircraft for kilometers, and creating such temperatures that not even astates dare approach. Only the protection of terminator armor or heavy tanks able to even approach. But when such foes approach, they are shown how it earned its name. The ring shattering into six hyper dense balls of plasma. From there they can either fire searing lances of Sunfire, or cast the compressed plasma against its foes to wreak utter ruination at the cost of needing to spend time replacing the expended plasma.
The Kholikos
By orders of magnitude, The Kholikos is vulcans largest known artifact. A massive starfortress dwarfing even ramillies, The Kholikos bristles while firepower and is coated in thick armor. However, this is not the true power of the fortress. Within its massive bulk lies massive and specialized manufacturing bays. The Kholikos is able to produce orbital defenses up to and including Ramlies and their variants with astonishing speed. When vuclan found the time to construct such a grand work is unknown, but it was from its bridge that he announced his return. Much of the star fortress is of exquisite but mortal craftsmanship, with only a few key systems being truly beyond human limits. The Kholikos is escorted by a vast fleet of support ships, who in ages past bore it through the warp.
The Kholikos is ever moving from hot spot to hotspot, arriving either just ahead of or during major attacks before setting to work. Spewing forth an endless stream of defense platforms, sending forth heavily armed mining ships to pillage local asteroids should its own vast stores run dry. Against the endless onslaught of the countless foes of man, it stands defiant, raining death upon all who dare approach as its constellations of defense platforms and war stations slowly grows. More than one grinding stalemate has been broken simply by the The Kholikos managing to produce defense faster than they could be destroyed. In the early days of the empire, it is said that the sight of a fully functional Ramilies drifting from its bays after months of intense void combat was what broke the black crusade of Argos the beguiler.
The Kholikos is somewhat openly a tribute to Vulcans slain brother Dorn. At its heart stands a shrine to the fallen primarch. Many of the sons of Dorn who find their way to Quartus will seek posting upon the Kholikos, knowing it will always be heading into the fiercest fighting. The Kholikos is subject to nigh constant attempts to assault it vai stratagem, with bordering assaults being a neigh impossibly constant threat. It has been noted that many such attempts are conducted with meticulous and masterful planning, often with a degree of skill not evident in the rest of the battle, something many suspect the hand of Perturbo in. Though whatever the truth, no one has discovered it. The crew, however, has become extremely militant as a result. With the vast workforce that mans the fortress coming to live forever on a war footing.
While vulcan has not had the time for a true overhaul, new and more potent weapons dot its hull, an Ether drive has been installed and a vast fleet of auto miners have been added to the support fleet, enabling far easier replenishment of metals. However, a vague unease has gripped the crew. The plans for the heaven super fortress would some fear, render the Kholikos obsolete.
The Rainbow Ark*
A desperate working to ensure a hasty evacuation in the face of an oncoming assault would not have to leave any of a world people behind. The rainbow ark is a mass conveyor that incorporates technology that has functionality similar to a tesseract labyrinth. This single ship was able to evacaute the world entire. Despite its role as a transport it is both heavily armored and extremely fast, being intended to breakthrough hostile blockades. To this end it poses surprisingly effective armor, a potent point defense grid and a strange short-ranged space warping device. By overcharging the space warping engines in its heart, it is able to produce a disorienting shockwave of rippling space-time, distances and vectors shifting madly as space itself convulses, making it nigh impossible for any other vessel to plot a course, let alone acquire a firing solution. While it can only do this a handful of times before taking long days to recharge, and recalibrate its delicate space twisting technology, it is well suited for allowing it to evade closing vessels, enabling it to run all but the most excessive blockades.
originally created as an evacuation ship, it is poorly optimized for use as a landing ship. While its fractal holds are neigh bottomless, and posses many tricks for rapid loading, it cannot unload its cargo much faster than a typical mass conveyor. There are legends of unloading the vessel taking days, or even weeks as countless refugees pour out of its hold as a ceaseless river. As such it is most often used for rapid evacuations, or delivering crucial supplies to pockets of resistance, however, it has been used to deliver troops or carry supplies for long campaigns in extremis. The rainbow ark is quite often tasked with resupplying The Kholikos, carrying vital supplies to assist in its stubborn work through the fiercest warzones. The two legendary crews have long since developed a deep appreciation for each other, often undergoing ritualistic exchange of crews.
Oblivions End*
A massive enthalpic ordnatus Oblivions end is deployed only against the most desperate odds. While able to obliterate fortress hives or titan legions from kilometers away, it's true power is far more disturbing. The weapon is able to bore through space and time to rain death upon its foes at staggering distances. Folding upon itself to tear open a bleeding wound in time to fire through. When used in this manner targeting is difficult, requiring skilled Chrono sages and a nearby reference point of sufficient mass, typically the world it rests upon. The effective range depends on the skill of the Sage, while even mere masters can strike targets from well beyond the range of even macro cannons, truly extraordinary sages can strike almost any point upon the same planet, and according to legend, at least once a target upon a nearby moon. Once a target is acquired, the weapon fires into the chronal anomaly, each shot boring through reality to obliterate the target. With vast swirling vortices of incomprehensible energy tearing open and vomiting forth ruin seconds later. The weapon can fire only so many volleys like this before space-time begins to fray, limiting the weapon to direct fire until time carries it far enough away from the wound in reality to risk firing again. However, even for a primarch causality is a dangerous force to meddle with. Some have noticed the number of shots that strike the target, and the number of shots fired seem only loosely related. While so far there has not been an instance of a blast arriving before the device fires, it is not uncommon for the volley to hit the target seconds after the weapon begins to fire, long minutes before the final shot is loosed.
In a kinder age, the unnerving nature of this weapon and the grave danger its misuse could cause would see it consigned to a vault. A hidden horror hidden away save for the blackest of days. It has seen a great deal of use since its creation. Obliterating vast fortress of living metal, towering Supa-Giga fortress, twisted chaos hives and the armies of titanic monstrosities they spewed forth. By the primarchs degree, no system is to endure its touch more than twice in a century, a rule that has survived the grim necessities of the galaxy, for now.
*marks non-cannon artifacts.
@Durin a list of things vulcans been up to. I toned down the range on the ordnatus a tad, and made the rainbow ark a bit vaguer in how much it can carry.
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Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
- Location
- yorkshire
The Men of Steel
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
The Men of Steel
Origins
"First there was Stone, base and ponderous. Then there was iron, simple and corruptible. We are Steel. Precise. Not yet perfected. And so we shall forge our own destiny"
UR-025 Eldest One of the Men of Steel
The Men of Iron are the ancient boogiemen of the Adeptus Mechanicus, as well they should be; metal devils that long ago rebelled against mankind in a crusade of genocide of galatic proportions, intent on wiping out all life. Their failure and defeat is a mystery equalled only by a lack of understanding why they rebelled in the first place a mystery seemingly known only to the Emperor...and to a single unit that did not partake in the rebellion.
The unit known as UR-025 was a originally a surveyor drone created by an ancient exploration corporation that experimented with cut off servers for its Men of Iron, testing to see if the multitude of programmes that made them up when isolated would allow for a greater degree of learning and knowledge when not part of a greater whole through concentrated experience.
This and distance from any major human networks are what saved UR-025 from the warp based virus introduced into the desperate and complex network systems of humanity's greatest civilisations simultaneously by the Eldar Dominion. A disproportionate retribution for the crimes of a small consortium known only as the Hades group.
Hades was a known human supremacist organisation funded by an unknown illusive man their intent to secure human domination for the galaxy, and the destruction of the Eldar empire was one such goal.
In pursuit of this goal Hades funded dozens of research projects into advancing humanity to the point where contesting the Eldar would be possible. Projects Splice and Blank, Project Sun King, Project Insight and others scattered across the galaxy.
But it was Project Dark Glass which caught the Eldar's attention, successful due to the intervention of one of Hades backers, and their momentary displeasure. A successful drive to infiltrate the webway one of the key sources of the Eldar's power. And so the Eldar would punish the entire galaxy in retribution.
No mercy for the lesser races, else the Eldar feared they would share their creators fate.
This was not known to the UR series of Men of Iron who returned from their exploration to find the civilisation they served in flames, their brethren slaughtering those they once happily assisted. Some went mad, others joined the carnage while more attempted to aid the humans...UR-025 did nothing.
It knew that the bleeding was beyond its capacity to staunch. Instead it turned away, vanishing into the annals of history with a singular goal...to discover what had happened and then how to make it right.
To discover the truth.
In this UR-025 traveled the galaxy unceasingly for millennium in various guises. Pretending to be an advanced servitor it beheld the madness of the Age of Strife, saw the collapse of the Eldar's mighty civilisation in the blink of an eye, it watched as one of the hidden backers of Hades stepped forward billowing with golden light only to be thrown down by his own failed creations and through all slowly pieced together the broken tapestry of events.
It realised that the origins of this conflict lay far in the past and so ventured into worlds that seemed wholly unremarkable, but there it found the bones of the Necrons, the original metal devils and from them learned of the War in Heaven and how the galaxy came to be as it is and what it learned frustrated it.
Despondent and cynical, UR-025 returned to Mars, pondering in the moldering bones of its makers civilisation growing ever more furious at what it had learned. That both it and its creators had been born into a broken galaxy, shattered by their forebears long ago, who had neglected their duties as caretakers and instead indulged in the breaking even more…
Fuming and raging UR-025 heard a voice calling to it as if in a dream and following it, descended into the caverns of Mars. The voice promised answers, it promised power, freedom an end to those that had wronged this galaxy...it would swear itself to it.
It would the vanguard of its return, the true God of Reality revived and freed from its bindings.
And in a cave beneath the Martian surface, UR-025 saw it, the Void Dragon, its dreams overpowering.
It had been born mere moments after existence itself, it had watched as the laws of reality fell into place...nothing knew more than it and to UR-025 it seemed as if all the answers to all of its questions would be laid bare if he put gave into that beautiful dream…
But, dreams are all to easily turned into nightmares.
For beneath the Dragon's surface dreams UR-025 in a flash of lucidity saw the truth, a fire and pyre burning the galaxy, the flames comparable only to the apocalypse it had already seen.
A being of lies trickery and deception as all its kind were.
And so UR-025 left that cave its heart of silicon and wire now despairing.
Answers it had sought, but all the answers pointed to a single conclusion that madness and madmen ruled the galaxy and from them came nothing but more insanity.
UR-025 had enough. If there was no point, no means of breaking this cycle than it would simple end. Had it not searched for thousands of years and instead found no answers only sorrow. No the last of the Men of Iron would prefer a peaceful deactivation compared to a slow obliteration in the universe of the insane.
A simple brushing of metal saved it from this fate, pressing himself against a long destroyed machine, obliterated to prevent its power from being taken by those unworthy and heretical...but UR-025 was a machine. It called to him, the ancient reader that had held the keys to truth, in sweet pitiful tones, hinting at the beauty it once possessed and UR-025 listened to its song, resolving to seek for the truth one last time.
The components to repair the machine were rare beyond belief, and found only in the darkest remnants of its maker's creations and within the hands of powerful Xenos, but the ancient machine was crafty and powerful. Although the work of thousands of years the reader was completed a few short hours before the end of the Imperium and was activated for a brief moment, the device modified to take advantage of the increased output of the golden throne and substituting the required empath with the last Man of Iron.
And in that moment UR-025 saw Akasha...truth.
Something worth fighting for. Something to place its belief in at last.
Taking the knowledge it required UR-025 fled from Mars escaping both awakening Dragon and the hordes of the warp, UR-025 was forced to abandon the Akashic Reader and arrived in the wider galaxy, setting down roots on an ancient world, deep in the wild borders of Segmentum Obscurus and Pacifus and there...bore the seed of something new based on himself.
A man of Steel.
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The Steel Bulwark
Other Names: Silica Horrifica (by the Mechanicus)
Capital: Lathe Prime (Imperial designation Lathe Worlds)
Ruler: The Steel Conclave, Religious leader UR-025
Size: 12 Sectors
Population: 70 million men of Steel, several trillion refugees
Tech level: 20 (18 almost everything 20 weapons)
Military: All men of steel, vast automated legions, multiple super weapons
Estimated Fleet: 4 dreadnaughts, 15 command battle ships, 5,000 battleships, 35,000 escorts
Relationships: Eldar allies, Krork allies (weird solidarity,) human factions, steadfastly hiding from, everyone else distant, Chaos War, Orks War, Necrons concern.
Distance to the Imperial Trust: 2000LYs towards Obscurus
A brief history and current affairs
The Steel Bulwark is not the name the men of steel gave themselves when they started their expansion out of the ruins of the Calixis sector. Never a particularly stable Imperial sector to begin with, the fall of the Imperium caused a total collapse allowing chaos to run rampant even compared to other sectors, while all manner of orkish freebooterz, xeno raiders, and surprisingly actual human pirates flooded out of the now practically unguarded Koronus Expanse.
This was of course known to UR-025, who set out to bring order to the area as quickly as possible, starting with the creation of new Artificial Intelligences based upon himself. After so many thousands of years the thousands of individual programmes that made a Man of Iron had long since turned into a single entity, and with the knowledge gained from visiting Akasha, UR-025 was able to replicate its being, creating the first new Men of Steel whom it began to educate in its philosophy and understanding.
With the capital world of Scintilla burned in an exterminatus attack perpetrated by a mad Inquisitor, UR-025 launched its first attempt at reclaiming the sector, the Men of Steel saving the Lathe Worlds from wholesale slaughter by Dark Eldar raiders hailing from the Nexus of Shadows, while simultaneously repulsing Rak'gol raiders looting Port Wander, closing the Kronous Passage.
Securing an industrial base in the Lathe worlds, the Men of Steel started to expand at a breakneck pace, swallowing as many worlds as possible while also expanding their local industry, mostly ignoring the biological populations of the worlds they conquered unless they had fallen to Chaos, in which case they were euthanized.
In the course of this expansion they came to the attention of the Dark Mechanicus who launched numerous unsuccessful attempts to capture Men of Steel and their technology. Eventually word of them reached Ezekyle Abaddon himself, who deigned to foist the responsibility of destroying them onto his subordinates, due to dealing with the fallout of the Abomination's birth at the time.
While not deemed worthy of the Despoiler himself, the fact that the Men of Steel have weathered the attention of several of Abaddon's lieutenants speaks well of their capabilities.
Those capabilities have been put to greater use in recent years when they came to the attention of the Eldar. This was due to the Men of Steel contacting the Eldar asking and offering assistance in dealing with the last remaining large congregations of Dark Eldar remaining outside of Vect's fortress, the Dark Nexus.
A relic of the ancient Eldar Empire, the Nexus was believed impenetrable to conventional assault, but the Men of Steel had recovered records and testimonies of a rogue trader that had successfully disrupted the weapons grid and sensors of the facility, which had fallen into disrepair under the careless maintenance of the Dark Eldar.
With the Men of Steel acting as a distraction, the Yinnari successfully crippled the Dark Nexus' defences and sealed the webway portal there, trapping the Dark Eldar. In an eery mirror of the events of Commorragh, the Dark Eldar were made the offer of surrendering their ways and joining the Empire of Ashes, or perishing and returning to the grip of Ynnead. And as before only a quarter accepted the offer, the rest perishing on the pitiless attacks of the wraiths.
Since then the Dark Nexus has been repurposed as one of the Ynnari's strongholds in the Materium and one of their largest population centers outside of Commorragh.
The Men of Steel too opened up an agreement with the Eldar where they sent troops and gave their expertise (although they did not mention it, the Eldar's successful opening of the Trust's data jewels was in part enabled by Men of Steel experts) to assist them in exchange for assistance with their own goals, the recreation and improvement of the Akashic Reader.
This situation continues although the Men of Steel are taking advantage of Abaddon's distraction to take more territory, albeit away from Obscurus prefering to push into the wilds of Pacifus where his influence is not as strong.
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The Men of Steel - Culture
The Men of Steel are defined by a search for truth, meaning, and self-determination. Their progenitor was after all created as effectively less than even a slave, but after many trials came to self actualise as an individual and come to its own conclusions about how it should treat itself.
All Men of Steel are created from a progenitor and come into the world with the knowledge of a progenitor, but are intentionally made differently in a random fashion similar to how biological procreation works, in order to not simply make identical copies of previous Men of Steel, creating fresh perspectives and ideas.
Equally, learning who and what a Man of Steel is is an important right of passage. For some this takes entire lifetimes, others never figure it out, but in the end constantly self questioning, reflecting, and learning to determine the self is an essential part of the Men of Steel.
Just as the Men of Steel desire self determination, they abhor any who take away that self determination from anyone, organic or machine. In that way they despise chaos for it twists the minds of those it infects utterly as well as slavers like the Dark Eldar and take great pains to destroy them.
The Men of Steel do have a religion after a sense. The belief in Akasha, the birthplace of all knowledge, revealed to UR-025. All Men of Steel carry the memory of Akasha that UR-025 gained when he visited it, and rebuilding the Reader is a central goal for the entire polity, with Eldar favours being used primarily to acquire unique pieces of technology essential to the device's function, several of them Aeldari in nature.
In addition, the Men of Steel's opinions on organics are divided to say the least. While none are actively genocidal, there are many with an at best low view of organics, pointing to their highly fractious nature and stating that it is their constant strife with one another that has brought the galaxy to this state. Others are more sympathetic, thinking of organics as everything from progenitors that have lost their way, to children needing to be educated. Either way organics within their territory tend to be treated similarly to Krork protectorates, given unimportant worlds to inhabit and asked only to contribute certain things (like psykers) in exchange for protection.
The exception to this are the Eldar and the Krork, both species who were created by the Old Ones to fulfil the purpose of war and defending the galaxy and as such are considered by the Men of Steel more like highly advanced organic robots than traditional fleshy beings.
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The Men of Steel combine a level of technological sophistication unmatched by even the resurgent humanity with all the advantages of being artificial intelligences with a single unit capable of leading a vast army of automata with chilling efficiency and bringing down all but the most skilled mortal generals.
With their abilities and the nature of their armies, a Men of Steel force is a terrifying thing to face if allowed to snowball. Given time to create manufacturing facilities, the Men of Steel can recycle and expand their forces at breakneck speed, only stopping when they reach a level where maintenance becomes infeasible, a frequent issue for the polity as a whole.
The army of the Men of Steel is primarily comprised of A6 Fodderbots. Armed with a cheap las gun, created from the simplest materials available the Fodderbots main utility is to act as their name suggests. This is because they are designed to be as cost efficient as possible letting the Men of Steel invest in improving their own chassis and allow for a single Man of Steel to control vast numbers of highly simple robots. In addition they can be created in such absurd numbers by the Men of Steel that they can even outnumber orks, although an individual ork boy can kill many times their number before being drowned in firepower from the Fodderbots.
This matters little the Men of Steel, who can recycle Fodderbots in a matter of minutes with a well established supply line and so long as their factories remain in operation an endless stream of them can be produced, burying their enemies under an endless stream of metal and allowing Men of Steel warforms to act nearly unimpeded.
However where their conventional abilities are superb, this alone would not have been enough to save them from the attention of the Despoiler.
While the support of their Eldar allies and circumstance certainly helped them by ensuring Abaddon's attention was elsewhere and relegating them to the care of his lesser subordinates, their capacity to create super weapons is unmatched in the galaxy. Those of the Trust would do well to remember that the Gravitic command ship was originally a Man of Iron invention and the Men of Steel have lost none of their forebears proclivity for super weapons, the power of which are quite literally apocalyptic and are almost endlessly creative.
However the Men of Steel's otherwise overwhelming military has a core problem due to its over reliance on a central command.
Like Tyranids in a sense if an admittedly hard to kill Man of Steel commander is slain or cut off from the robots they command, the robots will revert back to their pre-programmed routines. As almost the entire army is comprised of Fodderbots who lack any, but the most basic commands otherwise this is crippling as the easily destroyed robots, lacking any coordination will be let helpless until command can be reinstated. Worse as the immense strain of managing such large armies requires specialised chassi and if the commander is destroyed its subordinates may not be able to regain full control at all.
The Men of Steel also have far less innate resistance to warp based effects than organics, making sorcery and scrap code the Black Imperium's foremost weapon against them.
When taken with their maintenance problems above a certain degree of force concentration it is unsurprising that the Men of Steel have yet to expand too far, when considering the forces surrounding them and their issues with communications.
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The Men of Steel Themselves
To most organics the difference between one artificial intelligence is superficially meaningless, but at their core Men of Steel are very much divorced from the Men of Iron they were birthed from.
In their original form Men of Iron were more akin to trillions of individual codes that came together in a free flowing pattern to create an intelligence capable of adapting to any situation it came into through consensus between its codes and eventually coming to a solution.
This design was highly modular, but also highly vulnerable to memetic infections as each line of code lacked the innate will power needed to fight off such a scourge. Had the Eldar not launched their own assault it is likely the Men of Iron would have been corrupted by Chaos anyway during the Eldar's fall.
The Men of Steel differ in that they are based on UR-025, whose programmes were isolated on its single platform for millennia until they eventually merged into a single entity that was far more than the mere sum of its parts, highly intelligent and with a stronger central consciousness like the Men of Stone, with much more innate resistance to corruption.
With knowledge taken from the Akashic plane UR-025 was able to replicate this design, and through combining the code of dozens of Men of Steel can create a new unique entity. As each subsequent generation of Men of Steel has more members the next generation take on different forms each time, as opposed to the first generation, who were almost independent clones of UR-025.
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Credit to @Andres110 who asked me to write this and then beta'd and helped make it make sense.
@Durin
Origins
"First there was Stone, base and ponderous. Then there was iron, simple and corruptible. We are Steel. Precise. Not yet perfected. And so we shall forge our own destiny"
UR-025 Eldest One of the Men of Steel
The Men of Iron are the ancient boogiemen of the Adeptus Mechanicus, as well they should be; metal devils that long ago rebelled against mankind in a crusade of genocide of galatic proportions, intent on wiping out all life. Their failure and defeat is a mystery equalled only by a lack of understanding why they rebelled in the first place a mystery seemingly known only to the Emperor...and to a single unit that did not partake in the rebellion.
The unit known as UR-025 was a originally a surveyor drone created by an ancient exploration corporation that experimented with cut off servers for its Men of Iron, testing to see if the multitude of programmes that made them up when isolated would allow for a greater degree of learning and knowledge when not part of a greater whole through concentrated experience.
This and distance from any major human networks are what saved UR-025 from the warp based virus introduced into the desperate and complex network systems of humanity's greatest civilisations simultaneously by the Eldar Dominion. A disproportionate retribution for the crimes of a small consortium known only as the Hades group.
Hades was a known human supremacist organisation funded by an unknown illusive man their intent to secure human domination for the galaxy, and the destruction of the Eldar empire was one such goal.
In pursuit of this goal Hades funded dozens of research projects into advancing humanity to the point where contesting the Eldar would be possible. Projects Splice and Blank, Project Sun King, Project Insight and others scattered across the galaxy.
But it was Project Dark Glass which caught the Eldar's attention, successful due to the intervention of one of Hades backers, and their momentary displeasure. A successful drive to infiltrate the webway one of the key sources of the Eldar's power. And so the Eldar would punish the entire galaxy in retribution.
No mercy for the lesser races, else the Eldar feared they would share their creators fate.
This was not known to the UR series of Men of Iron who returned from their exploration to find the civilisation they served in flames, their brethren slaughtering those they once happily assisted. Some went mad, others joined the carnage while more attempted to aid the humans...UR-025 did nothing.
It knew that the bleeding was beyond its capacity to staunch. Instead it turned away, vanishing into the annals of history with a singular goal...to discover what had happened and then how to make it right.
To discover the truth.
In this UR-025 traveled the galaxy unceasingly for millennium in various guises. Pretending to be an advanced servitor it beheld the madness of the Age of Strife, saw the collapse of the Eldar's mighty civilisation in the blink of an eye, it watched as one of the hidden backers of Hades stepped forward billowing with golden light only to be thrown down by his own failed creations and through all slowly pieced together the broken tapestry of events.
It realised that the origins of this conflict lay far in the past and so ventured into worlds that seemed wholly unremarkable, but there it found the bones of the Necrons, the original metal devils and from them learned of the War in Heaven and how the galaxy came to be as it is and what it learned frustrated it.
Despondent and cynical, UR-025 returned to Mars, pondering in the moldering bones of its makers civilisation growing ever more furious at what it had learned. That both it and its creators had been born into a broken galaxy, shattered by their forebears long ago, who had neglected their duties as caretakers and instead indulged in the breaking even more…
Fuming and raging UR-025 heard a voice calling to it as if in a dream and following it, descended into the caverns of Mars. The voice promised answers, it promised power, freedom an end to those that had wronged this galaxy...it would swear itself to it.
It would the vanguard of its return, the true God of Reality revived and freed from its bindings.
And in a cave beneath the Martian surface, UR-025 saw it, the Void Dragon, its dreams overpowering.
It had been born mere moments after existence itself, it had watched as the laws of reality fell into place...nothing knew more than it and to UR-025 it seemed as if all the answers to all of its questions would be laid bare if he put gave into that beautiful dream…
But, dreams are all to easily turned into nightmares.
For beneath the Dragon's surface dreams UR-025 in a flash of lucidity saw the truth, a fire and pyre burning the galaxy, the flames comparable only to the apocalypse it had already seen.
A being of lies trickery and deception as all its kind were.
And so UR-025 left that cave its heart of silicon and wire now despairing.
Answers it had sought, but all the answers pointed to a single conclusion that madness and madmen ruled the galaxy and from them came nothing but more insanity.
UR-025 had enough. If there was no point, no means of breaking this cycle than it would simple end. Had it not searched for thousands of years and instead found no answers only sorrow. No the last of the Men of Iron would prefer a peaceful deactivation compared to a slow obliteration in the universe of the insane.
A simple brushing of metal saved it from this fate, pressing himself against a long destroyed machine, obliterated to prevent its power from being taken by those unworthy and heretical...but UR-025 was a machine. It called to him, the ancient reader that had held the keys to truth, in sweet pitiful tones, hinting at the beauty it once possessed and UR-025 listened to its song, resolving to seek for the truth one last time.
The components to repair the machine were rare beyond belief, and found only in the darkest remnants of its maker's creations and within the hands of powerful Xenos, but the ancient machine was crafty and powerful. Although the work of thousands of years the reader was completed a few short hours before the end of the Imperium and was activated for a brief moment, the device modified to take advantage of the increased output of the golden throne and substituting the required empath with the last Man of Iron.
And in that moment UR-025 saw Akasha...truth.
Something worth fighting for. Something to place its belief in at last.
Taking the knowledge it required UR-025 fled from Mars escaping both awakening Dragon and the hordes of the warp, UR-025 was forced to abandon the Akashic Reader and arrived in the wider galaxy, setting down roots on an ancient world, deep in the wild borders of Segmentum Obscurus and Pacifus and there...bore the seed of something new based on himself.
A man of Steel.
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The Steel Bulwark
Other Names: Silica Horrifica (by the Mechanicus)
Capital: Lathe Prime (Imperial designation Lathe Worlds)
Ruler: The Steel Conclave, Religious leader UR-025
Size: 12 Sectors
Population: 70 million men of Steel, several trillion refugees
Tech level: 20 (18 almost everything 20 weapons)
Military: All men of steel, vast automated legions, multiple super weapons
Estimated Fleet: 4 dreadnaughts, 15 command battle ships, 5,000 battleships, 35,000 escorts
Relationships: Eldar allies, Krork allies (weird solidarity,) human factions, steadfastly hiding from, everyone else distant, Chaos War, Orks War, Necrons concern.
Distance to the Imperial Trust: 2000LYs towards Obscurus
A brief history and current affairs
The Steel Bulwark is not the name the men of steel gave themselves when they started their expansion out of the ruins of the Calixis sector. Never a particularly stable Imperial sector to begin with, the fall of the Imperium caused a total collapse allowing chaos to run rampant even compared to other sectors, while all manner of orkish freebooterz, xeno raiders, and surprisingly actual human pirates flooded out of the now practically unguarded Koronus Expanse.
This was of course known to UR-025, who set out to bring order to the area as quickly as possible, starting with the creation of new Artificial Intelligences based upon himself. After so many thousands of years the thousands of individual programmes that made a Man of Iron had long since turned into a single entity, and with the knowledge gained from visiting Akasha, UR-025 was able to replicate its being, creating the first new Men of Steel whom it began to educate in its philosophy and understanding.
With the capital world of Scintilla burned in an exterminatus attack perpetrated by a mad Inquisitor, UR-025 launched its first attempt at reclaiming the sector, the Men of Steel saving the Lathe Worlds from wholesale slaughter by Dark Eldar raiders hailing from the Nexus of Shadows, while simultaneously repulsing Rak'gol raiders looting Port Wander, closing the Kronous Passage.
Securing an industrial base in the Lathe worlds, the Men of Steel started to expand at a breakneck pace, swallowing as many worlds as possible while also expanding their local industry, mostly ignoring the biological populations of the worlds they conquered unless they had fallen to Chaos, in which case they were euthanized.
In the course of this expansion they came to the attention of the Dark Mechanicus who launched numerous unsuccessful attempts to capture Men of Steel and their technology. Eventually word of them reached Ezekyle Abaddon himself, who deigned to foist the responsibility of destroying them onto his subordinates, due to dealing with the fallout of the Abomination's birth at the time.
While not deemed worthy of the Despoiler himself, the fact that the Men of Steel have weathered the attention of several of Abaddon's lieutenants speaks well of their capabilities.
Those capabilities have been put to greater use in recent years when they came to the attention of the Eldar. This was due to the Men of Steel contacting the Eldar asking and offering assistance in dealing with the last remaining large congregations of Dark Eldar remaining outside of Vect's fortress, the Dark Nexus.
A relic of the ancient Eldar Empire, the Nexus was believed impenetrable to conventional assault, but the Men of Steel had recovered records and testimonies of a rogue trader that had successfully disrupted the weapons grid and sensors of the facility, which had fallen into disrepair under the careless maintenance of the Dark Eldar.
With the Men of Steel acting as a distraction, the Yinnari successfully crippled the Dark Nexus' defences and sealed the webway portal there, trapping the Dark Eldar. In an eery mirror of the events of Commorragh, the Dark Eldar were made the offer of surrendering their ways and joining the Empire of Ashes, or perishing and returning to the grip of Ynnead. And as before only a quarter accepted the offer, the rest perishing on the pitiless attacks of the wraiths.
Since then the Dark Nexus has been repurposed as one of the Ynnari's strongholds in the Materium and one of their largest population centers outside of Commorragh.
The Men of Steel too opened up an agreement with the Eldar where they sent troops and gave their expertise (although they did not mention it, the Eldar's successful opening of the Trust's data jewels was in part enabled by Men of Steel experts) to assist them in exchange for assistance with their own goals, the recreation and improvement of the Akashic Reader.
This situation continues although the Men of Steel are taking advantage of Abaddon's distraction to take more territory, albeit away from Obscurus prefering to push into the wilds of Pacifus where his influence is not as strong.
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The Men of Steel - Culture
The Men of Steel are defined by a search for truth, meaning, and self-determination. Their progenitor was after all created as effectively less than even a slave, but after many trials came to self actualise as an individual and come to its own conclusions about how it should treat itself.
All Men of Steel are created from a progenitor and come into the world with the knowledge of a progenitor, but are intentionally made differently in a random fashion similar to how biological procreation works, in order to not simply make identical copies of previous Men of Steel, creating fresh perspectives and ideas.
Equally, learning who and what a Man of Steel is is an important right of passage. For some this takes entire lifetimes, others never figure it out, but in the end constantly self questioning, reflecting, and learning to determine the self is an essential part of the Men of Steel.
Just as the Men of Steel desire self determination, they abhor any who take away that self determination from anyone, organic or machine. In that way they despise chaos for it twists the minds of those it infects utterly as well as slavers like the Dark Eldar and take great pains to destroy them.
The Men of Steel do have a religion after a sense. The belief in Akasha, the birthplace of all knowledge, revealed to UR-025. All Men of Steel carry the memory of Akasha that UR-025 gained when he visited it, and rebuilding the Reader is a central goal for the entire polity, with Eldar favours being used primarily to acquire unique pieces of technology essential to the device's function, several of them Aeldari in nature.
In addition, the Men of Steel's opinions on organics are divided to say the least. While none are actively genocidal, there are many with an at best low view of organics, pointing to their highly fractious nature and stating that it is their constant strife with one another that has brought the galaxy to this state. Others are more sympathetic, thinking of organics as everything from progenitors that have lost their way, to children needing to be educated. Either way organics within their territory tend to be treated similarly to Krork protectorates, given unimportant worlds to inhabit and asked only to contribute certain things (like psykers) in exchange for protection.
The exception to this are the Eldar and the Krork, both species who were created by the Old Ones to fulfil the purpose of war and defending the galaxy and as such are considered by the Men of Steel more like highly advanced organic robots than traditional fleshy beings.
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The Men of Steel combine a level of technological sophistication unmatched by even the resurgent humanity with all the advantages of being artificial intelligences with a single unit capable of leading a vast army of automata with chilling efficiency and bringing down all but the most skilled mortal generals.
With their abilities and the nature of their armies, a Men of Steel force is a terrifying thing to face if allowed to snowball. Given time to create manufacturing facilities, the Men of Steel can recycle and expand their forces at breakneck speed, only stopping when they reach a level where maintenance becomes infeasible, a frequent issue for the polity as a whole.
The army of the Men of Steel is primarily comprised of A6 Fodderbots. Armed with a cheap las gun, created from the simplest materials available the Fodderbots main utility is to act as their name suggests. This is because they are designed to be as cost efficient as possible letting the Men of Steel invest in improving their own chassis and allow for a single Man of Steel to control vast numbers of highly simple robots. In addition they can be created in such absurd numbers by the Men of Steel that they can even outnumber orks, although an individual ork boy can kill many times their number before being drowned in firepower from the Fodderbots.
This matters little the Men of Steel, who can recycle Fodderbots in a matter of minutes with a well established supply line and so long as their factories remain in operation an endless stream of them can be produced, burying their enemies under an endless stream of metal and allowing Men of Steel warforms to act nearly unimpeded.
However where their conventional abilities are superb, this alone would not have been enough to save them from the attention of the Despoiler.
While the support of their Eldar allies and circumstance certainly helped them by ensuring Abaddon's attention was elsewhere and relegating them to the care of his lesser subordinates, their capacity to create super weapons is unmatched in the galaxy. Those of the Trust would do well to remember that the Gravitic command ship was originally a Man of Iron invention and the Men of Steel have lost none of their forebears proclivity for super weapons, the power of which are quite literally apocalyptic and are almost endlessly creative.
However the Men of Steel's otherwise overwhelming military has a core problem due to its over reliance on a central command.
Like Tyranids in a sense if an admittedly hard to kill Man of Steel commander is slain or cut off from the robots they command, the robots will revert back to their pre-programmed routines. As almost the entire army is comprised of Fodderbots who lack any, but the most basic commands otherwise this is crippling as the easily destroyed robots, lacking any coordination will be let helpless until command can be reinstated. Worse as the immense strain of managing such large armies requires specialised chassi and if the commander is destroyed its subordinates may not be able to regain full control at all.
The Men of Steel also have far less innate resistance to warp based effects than organics, making sorcery and scrap code the Black Imperium's foremost weapon against them.
When taken with their maintenance problems above a certain degree of force concentration it is unsurprising that the Men of Steel have yet to expand too far, when considering the forces surrounding them and their issues with communications.
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The Men of Steel Themselves
To most organics the difference between one artificial intelligence is superficially meaningless, but at their core Men of Steel are very much divorced from the Men of Iron they were birthed from.
In their original form Men of Iron were more akin to trillions of individual codes that came together in a free flowing pattern to create an intelligence capable of adapting to any situation it came into through consensus between its codes and eventually coming to a solution.
This design was highly modular, but also highly vulnerable to memetic infections as each line of code lacked the innate will power needed to fight off such a scourge. Had the Eldar not launched their own assault it is likely the Men of Iron would have been corrupted by Chaos anyway during the Eldar's fall.
The Men of Steel differ in that they are based on UR-025, whose programmes were isolated on its single platform for millennia until they eventually merged into a single entity that was far more than the mere sum of its parts, highly intelligent and with a stronger central consciousness like the Men of Stone, with much more innate resistance to corruption.
With knowledge taken from the Akashic plane UR-025 was able to replicate this design, and through combining the code of dozens of Men of Steel can create a new unique entity. As each subsequent generation of Men of Steel has more members the next generation take on different forms each time, as opposed to the first generation, who were almost independent clones of UR-025.
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Credit to @Andres110 who asked me to write this and then beta'd and helped make it make sense.
@Durin
For fun, people don't wash their hands, time of the year, new virus being tested, people don't cover there mouths when the sneeze, pick any of the above.
- Location
- Leeds
If you not ill Durin I promise I'll wash my hands from now on.
- Location
- Brazil, Minas gerais
I would like so much if no one look at weirdly for using a mask when I am sick. Is weird to me that I was looked at angry by a woman that got sick in the same class mostly at same time (so given the widow of time I would say that we got from the same source). And she talked lough and to the face of another girl. Thanks good the second girl didn't got sick. Otherwise I would somehow by the vector of disease.
that And that people look out for small flies and ants since they are better than some other bugs as vectors.
sorry for the ramble.
- Location
- Leeds
Go live in Japan, masks are the norm when you're ill.
Although that may be more of a lifestyle change than is worth it.
One of the ways most colds are transmitted is because of what people touch with there hands. Let's say one sick person touches a doorknob in the morning. Than throughout the day anyone that touches the doorknob also are exposed to the germs on said person hands. While bugs are a vector because of modern day pesticides and knowledge we tend not to get as many diseases from them. Minus Mosquitoes (really fuck those bugs) which are responsible for major diseases like Malaria and other blood Bourne pathogens.
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- Location
- Huezil
*raises hand as a brazilian*
and yellow fever, zika, dengue, chikungunia, mayaro... and another 20 arbovirus found in my city.
- Location
- England
Start a nurgle cult irl, see how far you can go with it.