Tyranid Hive Fleet Question

[Enigma]

How long does it take to create a Hive Fleet from another one? I mean, if the Tyranids constantly consume worlds I assume the fleet expands in size? If so, does it reach a point before it splits and creates another fleet? Again, if so, how long does it take? Or how many worlds do they go through before it becomes necessary to split into two Hive fleets?

I'm curious. Thanks.

[the atom]

'splitting into two hivefleets' wouldn't be the most accurate way to put it. They generally form different 'tendrils' although to my knowledge they still remain part of the same hivefleet.

Or do you mean how much biomass do they need to effectively double in size? No idea there.

[madd0ct0r]

you miht be thinking of splinter fleets, where a hive fleet is sufficently damaged that seperate 'tendrils' are cut off from each other and go their merry way.

I think it's an analouge to some ant types - big nest, one queen.

dig up the nest or pour boiling water on it and a lot die, but the remainder rebuild and several new queens take off in different directions to start new nests.

i seem to remember the same being true in the command and conquer games now i think about it.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, there's a catch- it would be insane for hive fleets to attack only one world at a time, given the sheer size of the things. So presumably they're operating over a broad front, and that front will predictably wind up channeled along certain axes of attack. So you get tendrils of a hive fleet.

They're still in communication, part of the same larger entity, but they're not all clumped up into one big blob.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The estimates for the total biomass of a planet like the Earth vary widely and wildly, anywhere from one to one thousand billion tons depending on what precisely you count, funghi, microbes and insects making up a tremendous part of that. Hedging bets by going for a middle of the road estimate, and discounting that which would cost more to get at, in food burnt to do the work of harvesting than would be gained, what does that leave, and how many krakens does it get you?

Assume, which http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(e ... ombridge-0 does, we're starting with five hundred and sixty billion tons.

Knock off fifty percent for the microscopic, which it may be counterproductive for the 'nids to extract, and another thirty percent for the merely very small like ants, you're left with a hundred and twelve billion tons of things to eat- fish, sea plants, birds, trees, sauropods, people- and use.

Now, I'm not a biologist and I may be talking through my arse here- but I find it impossible to believe that that process is absolutely efficient. How many tons of krill does it need to feed a fifty ton whale? Same problem. 'Nids are pretty spectacular creatures, way up the food chain, and a lot really should get lost on the way- consumed and used as energy, shuttled up to the fleet as- is to be consumed for energy to take the next world, etc.

It's actually pointless trying to set a lower bound with realistic (ish) estimates, though, because that would be "GTFO, you can't make space battleships with leaves and feathers, total fail". Or rats and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, for that matter. Nids are partially warp powered, which makes it difficult verging on pointless to get a working estimate.

Still, in the interests of wild ass guessery, and on the principle that they wouldn't actually need to eat anything at all if they could just majick all their energy out of the warp Spoiler

which has to be what they're doing anyway, we're talking about processes for which nuclear energy is not enough, matter- antimatter annihilation is not enough, and suddenly adenosine triphosphate rules the universe? What utter bullshit this is.

-
say in the end, between digestion and redigestion and organomystic psychobiology, about half the mass taken ends up as more 'nids, what's that in Gothic?

From the look of them, I doubt most 'nid ships would float, they're too heavily framed and armoured for that. Splitting the difference though, and remembering the enormous variety of the things, I reckon somewhere from fifty to a hundred billion tons for a hive ship, based on the size of the mini, the size of an Emperor class, and about a billion tons per cubic kilometre. Cruisers- some of which are immature hive ships- may be from five to fifteen billion tons as guesstimated from the illustrations in BFG up to nearly a hive ship; kraken, drone ships, somewhere from one to five billion.

Bascially, at the end of a long chain of quasi- random guesses, each planet eaten gets the 'nids a lot- maybe a score- of kraken, a handful of cruisers or half a hive ship.

Which is really wierd, because it suggests there's enough biomass in an inhabited sector to produce what is a splash of bioacid off the tactical equivalent of an Imperium sector fleet. There is actually a rough parity of (potential) forces, here- the 'nids would seriously outnumber them, a huge horde of escorts, but on the table there's not as much as that sounds in it.

[Simon_Jester]

The 'Nids could be getting their numerical advantage from the overwhelming numbers they're bringing into the galaxy in the first place, and from being able to use the biospheres of planets the Imperium doesn't control and cannot draw resources from. I'm not sure the Imperium's "sectors" tile the galaxy in a uniform wall to wall way, or that the gaps between some of those sectors are even as hard a target as an Imperial sector would be.

[the atom]

@Eleventh Century: Remember that Tyranids don't just strictly consume biomass. They do consume a not-insignificant portion of a planet's crust as well, which I assume would also probably extend to a planet's moons or nearby asteroids.

[Enigma]

So basically the Hive fleet just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until something stops them?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Enigma, you'd think that starvation would set in at some point, but only in the broadest sense as a strategic motive, and occasionally if whatever writer's using them cares and remembers; they seem able to hibernate almost perfectly, requiring little or nothing on long flights, and snap back to fully active metabolism when needed. So yes, they don't stop, they ahve to be stopped.

Atom, I'm not annoyed at you- I'd just forgotten how much I genuinely loathed these creatures. That bit that I put under a spoiler tag? That's where I couldn't stand it any more and suffered a complete suspension of disbelief failure. In theory I know that about the crust and the oceans, it's in the fluff, but I couldn't deal with it because it's even more utter bollocks than the rest.

If they can metabolise rock, ffs, that's basically hello, no limits fallacy. For a start you're looking at something on the order of quintillions of tons, all of which has to be put through the chemical engineering processes of something not massively distinguishable from nature, which to accumulate as much as an upper estimate of a trillion tons has taken earth what, three billion years?
Obviously it doesn't work like that, because it can't work like that at all, so it works like what, magic? Yes, literally, it has to work by warp magic. Which makes it unmeasurable, unknowable and nonsensical.

You're also looking at enough 'nids to eat the galaxy several million times over by M.34, so obviously the entire current 40K setting is a simulation being conducted by a bored hive mind to pass the time on it's way to the next galaxy to devour, although it's impossible to tell why because if they can do that then they have no actual need to. Well done, you ate the Empire.

So let's pretend that they make sense and don't hurt too much to think about, and work backwards and find some manner in which they can be rationalised that's consistent with the setting and less offensively inconsistent with reality, will you indulge me on that one?

I went with the biomass because it is a number, a very large but finite number, with something resembling a basis which is better yet, and thus provides a very large but finite answer (which is still basically an order-of-magnitude estimate) that doesn't require quite so much contortion to avoid destroying the universe with. The fact that it works out not far off the forces the Imperium can raise from the same area- and 'not far off' is actually further away than it looks- was just an interesting coincidence.

And yes, this idea still requires a lot of warp magic to make go and doesn't push the need to hang SoD higher than an orbital elevator very far away at all. It makes almost as much sense relative to the rest of the universe- maybe more- to have them be full blown thaumovores at this point, biology and mass entirely irrelevant and what they 'devour' is the warp signature of the life on the planet to power the magic that makes themselves possible, but that's not how it is in the fluff.

Oh, yes, the OP; I'd guess that they start dividing fleets when they start winning, overcome the local defences to the extent that they're accumulating biomass instead of continually replacing lost cruisers, drones and kraken, and can afford to grow and send off new hive ships and retinues for them.

[Simon_Jester]

@Eleventh Century: Remember that Tyranids don't just strictly consume biomass. They do consume a not-insignificant portion of a planet's crust as well, which I assume would also probably extend to a planet's moons or nearby asteroids.

This is true. To quote the Overmind, "We require more minerals."

I can only assume that Karlacks need plenty of dietary iron, calcium, and possibly fissile materials for healthy bones and balanced digestion...

Atom, I'm not annoyed at you- I'd just forgotten how much I genuinely loathed these creatures. That bit that I put under a spoiler tag? That's where I couldn't stand it any more and suffered a complete suspension of disbelief failure. In theory I know that about the crust and the oceans, it's in the fluff, but I couldn't deal with it because it's even more utter bollocks than the rest.

If they can metabolise rock, ffs, that's basically hello, no limits fallacy. For a start you're looking at something on the order of quintillions of tons, all of which has to be put through the chemical engineering processes of something not massively distinguishable from nature, which to accumulate as much as an upper estimate of a trillion tons has taken earth what, three billion years?

ECR, relax, breathe.

Consider, just as a proposal, that the Karlacks need roughly the right balance of elements to make... whatever the hell they're made of. That while their power sources are "A wizard did it, and then they ate him," they're still basically made out of atoms, which they get from the territory they conquer by strip-mining planets. No transmutation, no creation of matter ex nihilo.

How they get the energy to process it all is yes, probably warp magic and unquantifiable. But the very fact that they bother to eat at all suggests that if nothing else, conservation of mass is a factor, as is dietary balance. Barren rockballs are useless to them; a sirloin steak a thousand kilometers across probably would be too for the same reasons- not enough of whatever it is they need to balance out their need for conveniently concentrated organic chemicals.

And, yes, there's still an unquantifiable mess big enough to drive a Ramilles through in the middle of it all, but we can still proceed sanely on the basis of something like the tonnage argument you were making earlier.

Recall that in-setting, the Imperium calculates that it is at least within an order of magnitude of the strength required to overcome all the Karlacks. Allow for fudge factors each way, unanticipated advances in tactics on the one hand, overconfidence on the other, and that still tells us that Games Workshop doesn't seriously intend the Karlack forces to be "limitless." There are supposed to be a boatload of them, and improbably effective at that, but they're not unlimited.

Which adds appeal to the idea that yes, they are roughly limited in total 'fleet' tonnage by the available biomass of the worlds they overrun.

[Shroom Man 777]

If there are creaturoids whose hides can withstand gigaton-level warship beams, and can shoot back by vomiting relativistic acid puke from their blowholes to melt said warships, why is it so hard to grasp them eating rocks and mountains and canyons and drinking volcanos for lattes? I bet the digestive systems of supportive rear-echelon Karlack bioforms would have particle accelerator intestines. Colons lined with organic cyclotrons that would make CERN look like the mitochondria of an individual microscopic cell inside a much greater digestive meta-mega-organoid. They have glands that can generate warp fields, the epithelial tissues of their skin probably have dimples, like how shark skins have to make them more hydrodynamic, but these dimples on the skin tissue would be dimples on space-time to make them have less reality-friction while traveling faster than light. Transdimensional sphincters!

Imagine some great Karlack organoid bioform eating smaller warships. But it does this by vomiting out its particle-accelerating intestines and stomachs very much like a seaslug, and imagine its internal organs that extend to other dimensions and angles of reality, so it's kind of larger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the gigaton-withstanding shields and neutronium hulls of these devoured warships end up getting dissolved and digested by quantum foam superstring liquid singularity Hawkings radiation stomach acids secreted by antimatter endocrine glands.

Or like how flies vomit out acid to melt their food before sucking it back in. But on a cosmic, planetary scale. So those Karlacks whose organic weapons can melt warships actually puke these same ship-melting slimes on a planetary surface, Base Delta Zeroing it with an exotic physics digestive Enzyme Exterminatus. Then the swarms of world-locusts swoop down and begin drinking the liquefied planet with proboscises that dwarf any technological space elevators.

How do they get power? Nay, it's not from the warp. It's not from magic. It's not from a wizard who got eaten.

It is from cosmic butterflies sipping the nectars of quasars.



[PS: When the Millennium Falcon enters the debris field of the eaten planet, those aren't asteroids. Those are Karlack bioform pooooops. Foolish human shits.]

[Purple]

Shroom once again does make a point. But to add to it. These starships have skin, scales or what ever that can withstand lance fire. And in turn their troops have skin that is in some cases shown to be equivalent to the infantry armor or even vehicles of the other factions. That can't bloody well be made out of carbon hydrates. If I had to take a guess I would say that the nids do the same thing Space Marines do when they eat ceramic enriched food to strengthen their bones. All the non organic material sucked up is probably digested in the organic equivalent of a refinery complex, separated into useful minerals like iron or calcium required for biological functions and the rest that promptly gets deposited into the outer hull.

[Shroom Man 777]

Aside from being made out of meat, they seem no more or less capable than their technologic counterparts. So if World Devastators and Von Neumans are kosher, arachnohydragaunlinglisks and mutagargoyles should be able to do the same things.

[NecronLord]

Transdimensional sphincters!

This is canon.

Well, it was in Space Marine, at any rate.

There's a bit where they probe some orificies in a hive ship and discover that the orifices lead to some kind of digestive tract in the warp.

[Shroom Man 777]

Ha!

Haaaa!

HAAAAAAA!



Now that is awesome. I had no idea if any of what I said was whatever, but that being canon is great. At least someone over at Black Library had a sense of the fantastic!

EDIT:

Now imagine weaponizing that immaterium-festooned digestive tract into some kind of interdimensional feat of predatory regurgitation! "Can't eat rocks ffs" blah!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The person who came up with transdimensional sphincters was Ian Watson- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watson_(author) who was a real science fiction writer before being paid to scribe for Games Workshop, and still approximately one afterwards. Perpetrated the Inquisition War trilogy, too, in the days before BL. There's an interesting crossover potential in the list of his works there, and I expect something nightmarish (although obviously not the obvious) to emerge from Shroom's subconscious in three, two...

If that gabbling syntactic slime of nonsensically connected buzzwords doesn't already count. In fact,

But it does this by vomiting out its particle-accelerating intestines and stomachs very much like a seaslug, and imagine its internal organs that extend to other dimensions and angles of reality,

is pretty much what Shroom does with his brain. On a moment by moment basis.

40K already includes some highly unbelievable gibberish to suspend disbelief over- but not that bad. Waitaminute...what's the public/private balance in the Phillipines' healthcare system again? I think I have it. Shroom is actually trying to drum up business by sending people mad. Spoiler

Me, anyway.

Bags of contaminated water probably are a better defence against laser and energy weapons through heat capacity, back to biomass again. Carbon composites, all right carbon- silicon maybe, again better than slabs of stone. Rock ground up for rare minerals, makes sense, I'll go with that. Bits layered on the outside? Maybe. The proportions are fantastically wrong, though- the balance of organic to inorganic would be closer to that of a man carrying a suburban street on his back.

If the organic component is that small a proportion of the mass of the 'nid, and it isn't if the artwork lieth not, they still need muscles and things, or at least analogues of them close enough to hang the eldritch bit on, then stripping a very small handful of worlds means they have enough force to topple the Imperium soon after first contact. How do you square those problems? With the loud, resounding 'fuckit' they probably deserve?

[Shroom Man 777]

Thank you for the endorsement. Our public healthcare mental facilities, which I worked at for two weeks during my time at nuersing school, have positively medieval facilities.

What if a lot of the non-combat bioforms of the Nids, particularly their logistic ships or the biological organoid equivalent of space stations, are more akin to giant sentient space corals?

Imagine, all those bioships, resting on a giant living planetoid aircraft carrier in space. The majority of the creature is actually a non-living rocky shell made out of the digested crusts of worlds, flattened or formationed in such a way as to be a planet-sized runway for the multitudes of spacefaring bioships, and the "conning tower" or "island" of this space aircraft carrier is where the minimal living tissues are located at?

Barnacles the size of moons. A great barrier reef surrounding a sun. Yes. A Dyson Sphere? More like a Dyson Reef! Imagine that!

The cosmic butterflies which drink the nectar of quasars and dwarf suns could have wings composed of perfectly polished and aligned glass, like the living equivalent of the Icarus ships in Sunshine. Gold-coated hydragauntlinglisks riding them could do EVAs, like some grotesque acid-blooded version of Cillian Murphy.

Why do they need to eat inorganic materials? The spinal chords of gauntlinglisks, or space behemoth bioforms, could be composed of grown fiber optics, super conductors, copper wiring. Imagine trying to do neural-synaptic coordination for creatures whose nervous systems span for miles. Cerebrates with gold-lined retinas to polarize against nuclear flashouts! That big freaky eyeball in the PC monitor, on the lower-center part of the screen, telling you to mine more minerals, spawn more overlords and shit? Twenty four carats, baby!

[Shroom Man 777]

If the organic component is that small a proportion of the mass of the 'nid, and it isn't if the artwork lieth not, they still need muscles and things, or at least analogues of them close enough to hang the eldritch bit on, then stripping a very small handful of worlds means they have enough force to topple the Imperium soon after first contact. How do you square those problems? With the loud, resounding 'fuckit' they probably deserve?

I'll bite. Rather than nebulous "it is a mystery woo" or lame "the Nids are too busy fighting galactic superclusters full of ORKS to commit a Grimdark Galaxy crushing Hive Armada", I have a better idea.

An Imperial navy officer (maybe an admiral born on the eleventh century of the fortieth millennium? ) thinks samely as you. "They have stripped XYZ gigatons of biomass and inorganomass from ABC planets, they should have enough to eat everyone and kill us all". Then, perhaps through playing the Tarot, or hacking into a living organoid Enigma machine captured by the Ultramarines, or something, he discovers that there really are not nearly enough numbers of bioship hordes the Tyranid-eaten masses would suggest.

Where did this mass go, if not to build more monstrous killforms to eat the galaxy?

Well, if we're going with a Lovecraftian senseless careless inhuman nature angle, why the hell should the Nids - this great vast mega-meta-pseudo-paleo-superorganism - give a shit about toppling the Imperium? If it was some kind of cosmic superpredator, to the point of being so vast that its true numbers would drown the galaxy, then why would it care to hunt down what amounts to a pathetic remora in the eyes of a great white shark? Why does it even have to be a predator? The Tyrannid Zerg Broods Karlack Swarm are more than just a singular organism, they're even greater than any lone ecosystem, they're... they're not even forces of nature made manifest. They are nature. They are the evolutionary process, they are neither predator nor prey, they are the complete cycle of predation, of decomposition, of death, and of persevering never-ending all-continuing life.

If we're going with the evil space bugs thing, then why do ants or termites gather so much material - living or otherwise? If one uses plain simple numbercrunching, one'd go "basing on how much wood a termite-chuck chucked, there out to be a million billion termites out there, but there aren't, why?" as you have with the Nids.

The answer is simple. All that literal and figurative wood the antyrannotermites harvested from all those worlds went into constructing this great giant monolithic part-termite mound part-R'yleh part-living breathing Black Stone Fortress coral reef the size of a solar system, which is actually the "home" of the Nids, their true living environments. The 'Nids aren't waging a military war as we'd envision it against the populace of the Imperium. To them, the Hive Fleets and Splinters are just the equivalent of army termite fire ants going through and harvesting and picking up whatever they can to bring back to the nest to use as construction material and or food.

For all we know, these great living constructs are actually just transdimensional farms and/or greenhouses. Like how termites actually use the wood they harvest to grow a fungus which is their food source, the Tyrannids actually cultivate within these enormous hyperstructures scores of living growing sub-sentient chaotic nucleonic nebula, which is their true source of subsistence.

[madd0ct0r]

Shroom, that's made it into my personal canon. awesome stuff.

[Simon_Jester]

Bags of contaminated water probably are a better defence against laser and energy weapons through heat capacity, back to biomass again. Carbon composites, all right carbon- silicon maybe, again better than slabs of stone. Rock ground up for rare minerals, makes sense, I'll go with that. Bits layered on the outside? Maybe. The proportions are fantastically wrong, though- the balance of organic to inorganic would be closer to that of a man carrying a suburban street on his back.

If the organic component is that small a proportion of the mass of the 'nid, and it isn't if the artwork lieth not, they still need muscles and things, or at least analogues of them close enough to hang the eldritch bit on, then stripping a very small handful of worlds means they have enough force to topple the Imperium soon after first contact. How do you square those problems? With the loud, resounding 'fuckit' they probably deserve?

Well, since I don't feel personally betrayed by it not making much sense to me, I just shrug and accept that the Karlacks are a large fraction organic materials by weight as they are mineral-based beings. And thus, the total mass of Karlacks is broadly limited by the mass of biospheres they consume, though whether the mass of Karlack gained is 10%, 50%, 100%, or 200% of the mass of the biosphere I do not know

It doesn't bother me that much, at least for purposes of figuring out how they're supposed to behave, as opposed to how they're supposed to work.

[Shroom Man 777]

Shroom, that's made it into my personal canon. awesome stuff.

And this is why Jodorowsky was right and why some just couldn't get it.

I do not want that the man conquers space
In the ships of NASA
These concentration camps of the spirit
These gigantic freezers vomiting the imperialism
These slaughters of plundering and plunder
This arrogance of bronze and thirst
This eunuchoid science
Not the dribble of transistorised and riveted hulks
The divine one
The delirious one
The superb one
CHAOS
UNIVERSAL
I want magical entities, vibrating vehicles
To prolong to be to it abyss
Like fish of a timeless ocean. I want
Jewels, mechanics as perfect as the heart
Womb-ships anterooms
Rebirth into other dimensions
I want whore-ships driven
By the sperm of passionate ejaculations
In an engine of flesh
I want rockets complex and secret,
Humming-bird ornithopters,
Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars...

Some things should be made wondrous and kept incomprehensible.

[Simon_Jester]

Although if you try this in 40k, you wind up with your ship getting taken over by Slaaneshi chaos demons... which, come to think of it, probably work that way.

[Connor MacLeod]

The 'Nids could be getting their numerical advantage from the overwhelming numbers they're bringing into the galaxy in the first place, and from being able to use the biospheres of planets the Imperium doesn't control and cannot draw resources from. I'm not sure the Imperium's "sectors" tile the galaxy in a uniform wall to wall way, or that the gaps between some of those sectors are even as hard a target as an Imperial sector would be.

They don't. The sectors are separate 'islands' of humanity across the volume of the Imperium, separated maybe by hundreds of LY on average, so there's lots of empty and unclaimed space in between. The Sectors themselves will also have 'empty' regions in between subsectors and planets (which may be uninhabited or possess alien life or pirates or whatever.)

[Connor MacLeod]

Ha!

Haaaa!

HAAAAAAA!



Now that is awesome. I had no idea if any of what I said was whatever, but that being canon is great. At least someone over at Black Library had a sense of the fantastic!

Oh you're going to love it even better. In Space Marine, the Imperial Fists invade a dormant hive ship by... ramming straight up its space anus.

“We’re going in through its anus,” Biff whooped boisterously. Indeed. Indeed.
What else could that puckered sphincter be, in the white bony hull of the vast, gastropoidal alien vessel?

The leviathan that loomed ahead seemed a cross between a nautilus and an omnivorous, spacefaring snail. It was the length of a four-K asteroid, and almost as high where its shell spiralled upward in a circuit of increasingly small osseous chambers. The shell was bleached chalky by aeons of radiation.

Even as the armoured Fists, tightly packed into a stretched boarding torpedo, stared at the
forward view-screen in its mount of bronze bones, that sphincter pulsed.
It expelled a quick milky cloud, which the torpedo’s sensors assayed as consisting of bitter
liquid dregs, foul gas, and ashy debris—the fart of a leviathan…

So yeah. Let that fuel your Space Marine/Tyranid sodomy jokes.

*squints at text, then at Shroom* You aren't Ian Watson's lovechild are you? Do you have a thing for Space Marine Biff too?

EDIT:
Now imagine weaponizing that immaterium-festooned digestive tract into some kind of interdimensional feat of predatory regurgitation! "Can't eat rocks ffs" blah!

Actually I think Chaos does something like that in The Ghosts novels. Basically they have these chaos beasts whose bodies exist on two different planets connected by some weird hyperspace-tunnel effect - they transfer materials from one planet to another this way. Sort of like some inter-dimensional Dachshund.

Anyhow, the sphincters (they're actually cysts) came from Advanced Space Crusade, a Space Hulk board game made by GW sometime in the 90s. I think it also predated Space Marine (Watson tend to base alot of his writing off the odd materials of that time.) The Doors are sphincters, everything is covered with mucuous, and its basically like crawling along the inside of some person's body.

What the teleporter was was a sort of worm that attached (and allowed transportation among) the different parts of the Hive Ship via the cyst openings. They're creatures part of the hive mind and can teleport the creatures to different destinations. they also act as a defense system - if something not Tyranid (EG a space Marine) tries to use the cysts they might get dumped into a digestive pit.

We also learn that tyranid starship skins are made from fossilised Tyranid stomachs. (They can even adapt their digestive systems to different substances, apparenlty.)

so, while Ian Watson may not have originated the Teleport cysts, you can still credit him with the space anus boarding assault.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Well, since I don't feel personally betrayed by it not making much sense to me, I

Nah- there are much more real and relevant things to feel betrayed by. Like recruiters and personnel departments, which is why I'm in grump mode. Anyway-

mad though it is, of course, the home of cosmic horror thing isn't the worst solution. it would actually add some motivation to them which they really lack at present. Although the prospect of being eaten is still a serious depressive factor.

In the absence of outside- text, in the reality that all of this is entertainment which in it's purpose is basically the spin we use to modify our lives and make ourselves different people- I'll never agree with you on Jodorowsky. Having read most of the Incal and about half the Metabarons series' and seen fragments of his films, the magic and the madness comes to a worse place in the end than the mundanity he cries against- it's a different devouring god, that's all.

Still unmanned by the infinite, suppressed by the ineffable, made a pygmy in your own head by the things you cannot understand and a scumstain on your own soul by the greed with which you reach out to smear your own humanity across it- he's forgotten that the legends of the people he wants to base his vision on were hymns of unrelieved terror at the world around them, of begging and pleading to capricious, thirsting gods that you be eaten last.

The technocracy he claims to despise and that makes his art possible is not without good reasons to loathe it, but in the end they are human reasons that we can perhaps transcend, with humanity- his vision has only one escape from the infinitely small box of the mystic cosmos, and the mechanofuture is it.