Question about chaos gods

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I'm pretty sure most everything C'Tan related is no longer canon, other than that they once existed.

[Todeswind]

Actually, it was the C'Tan Deceiver who tricked the Nightbringer into eating his fellow C'Tan.

They retconned that.

[madd0ct0r]

Actually, it was the C'Tan Deceiver who tricked the Nightbringer into eating his fellow C'Tan.

My mistake, was their not a story in the Necron 4th edition in which the laughing god messes with Nightbringer causing him to eat several other C'tan;is that no long canon?

both stories existed - leading to much argument about whether the laughing god and deceiver were the same being (previously impossible) or who was pretending to be who (or both?)

[Connor MacLeod]

I'm pretty sure most everything C'Tan related is no longer canon, other than that they once existed.

It depends entirely on how you interpret evidence. If you take a strictly literal approach, then yeah, there's a shit-ton of contradictions. If you are more flexible about it it doesn't become all that problematic. I think NL even mentioned how the Shard stuff fits in with some of the stories and fluff we've had over the years (like Deus Ex Mechanicus.) We know there are shards still free and who knows how poweful they are (it doesnt neccesarily mean all shards are equal), and the Necrons are still hunting for them. So you could have entire factions of Necrons (the severed worlds ... the ones who are basically the lifeless emotionless kililng machines.. hell there's an entire Tobm world that was taken over by the Master Program and is carving out an empire..) being controlled by C'tan shards which are basically acting the way the Necrons were in earlier fluff.

Just about the only thing that was retconned out was the Pariah, and that's only form teh game itself. Nothing says it still doesn't exist in the fluff.

[Simon_Jester]

Not 100% on the new codex back story, but the old reason for the C'tan eating each other was because the Eldar laughing god manipulated them.

Well, a god of logic will not be immune to manipulation by a god of trickery- just because you're logical doesn't mean you're omniscient, or immune to being convinced of things that are not true.

Given the C'tan objectives, their actions make perfect sense. And standing as they do in 40k as the total, diametric opposite of the Warp and all it stands for, the C'tan are the best candidates for "gods of logic" to be found in their setting. They neither have, nor use, nor tolerate any form of magic. They make and use the most advanced and powerful technology in the setting. Their ultimate ambition is to abolish the Warp (and its emotion-driven, antinomian defiance of the physical world of which the C'tan are masters).

Excuse me? Last time I checked necron technology only works the way it does becouse of the C'tan power to bend the laws of physics to make it work. Inertialess drives anyone? The C'tan are anatema to the warp but not to other forms of magical trickery.

That raises an interesting question. The C'tan can "bend the laws of physics," but they explicitly do not use sorcery or the Warp to do it. That bit about the Warp being anathema to them definitely stands- even the new codex hasn't erased it, because there was still a war with the Old Ones.

To me, the implication is that all their powers are in some sense "technological-" i.e. if you knew enough science in the 40k galaxy, and had enough resources, you'd be able to duplicate everything the C'tan do, without needing any magic powers beyond your science, technology, and physical resources. It's just that the C'tan have 'maxed out the tech tree,' so to speak, and thus have technological capabilities as far beyond everyone else's as wireless Internet is beyond smoke signals.

The fact that they can seemingly violate what we think of as universal laws doesn't mean they really are- it may just mean we don't know enough physics. Nuclear power would seem like a violation of physical laws to a mid-19th century chemist or physicist, because it would violate the "law" of conservation of mass. The fact that we know something they don't, which lets us pile up a heap of fissile materials to generate heat and drive steam turbines, doesn't mean that we've got magical metal-heaping powers.

[lordofchange13]

Not 100% on the new codex back story, but the old reason for the C'tan eating each other was because the Eldar laughing god manipulated them.

Well, a god of logic will not be immune to manipulation by a god of trickery- just because you're logical doesn't mean you're omniscient, or immune to being convinced of things that are not true.

...What are you talking about, i never called the C'tan god's of logic. The C'tan are not logic gods in any case their just stupidly advance aliens.

[Simon_Jester]

Remember the rest of the thread. I called them that- my argument is that the C'Tan are about as close as 40k gets to the "gods of cold logic" someone else was talking about.

Now, I won't say it's a perfect analogy, but I bet that if a "god of cold logic" emerged in 40k, they'd look and act a lot like the C'Tan: powerful, cruel, ruthless, and having an utter hatred for the messy, organic, antinomian nature of sentience and the Warp in the 40k Milky Way.

[lordofchange13]

Remember the rest of the thread. I called them that- my argument is that the C'Tan are about as close as 40k gets to the "gods of cold logic" someone else was talking about.

Now, I won't say it's a perfect analogy, but I bet that if a "god of cold logic" emerged in 40k, they'd look and act a lot like the C'Tan: powerful, cruel, ruthless, and having an utter hatred for the messy, organic, antinomian nature of sentience and the Warp in the 40k Milky Way.

Sorry slipped my mind, seemed like you were replying to one of my past comments.

The C'tan do not hate organic's quite the contrary, they love us...with whipped topping.

[Connor MacLeod]

The C'tan are basically the normal space version of Chaos Gods. There's not an exact 1:1 parallel, but they function broadly along those lines. I mean fuck, you can even break C'tan into shards the way you can break up Warp creatures into shards.

The mechanism by which the C'tan can manipulate reality is still magic too, its just a different flavor of magic (powered by EM energy, I'm guessing.)

My personal theory from the old codex was that the C'tan "necrodermis" constructs were basically puppets that harbored a fraction of the C'tan's essence.. and the bulk of the c'tan's body remained outside, but connected. ow it was connected we never knew, but if they can fold time and space they probably can find some way to have some magic FTL umbilical between the host body and the puppet.

[Simon_Jester]

The C'tan are basically the normal space version of Chaos Gods. There's not an exact 1:1 parallel, but they function broadly along those lines. I mean fuck, you can even break C'tan into shards the way you can break up Warp creatures into shards.

The mechanism by which the C'tan can manipulate reality is still magic too, its just a different flavor of magic (powered by EM energy, I'm guessing.)

My personal theory from the old codex was that the C'tan "necrodermis" constructs were basically puppets that harbored a fraction of the C'tan's essence.. and the bulk of the c'tan's body remained outside, but connected. ow it was connected we never knew, but if they can fold time and space they probably can find some way to have some magic FTL umbilical between the host body and the puppet.

Well, I would argue that where the Warp is explicitly "magic" in that you make things happen by wanting them to, the C'tan abilities are the result of "sufficiently advanced technology." It's "magic" to us because it runs on bullshittium, but it's no more "magical" in the context of its own setting than a Star Wars hyperdrive is a magic box in the context of Star Wars.

In short, they're what you get when you really, really far out 'post-Singularity' in the 40k galaxy: easy ability to wrap the functional equivalent of a Dyson shell around a star, ability to warp the very laws of reality that mere mortals abide by (insert technobabble stolen from Orion's Arm) and so on. But this isn't the kind of emotion and ritual-powered phenomena that are associated with the Warp.

So I distinguish between that and magic, even though from the point of view of good old Atomic Age Simon they're both totally indistinguishable from magic. It's not what they're capable of in my context that matters; it's what they do in the context of their own setting.

[Purple]

The C'tan are basically the normal space version of Chaos Gods. There's not an exact 1:1 parallel, but they function broadly along those lines. I mean fuck, you can even break C'tan into shards the way you can break up Warp creatures into shards.

The mechanism by which the C'tan can manipulate reality is still magic too, its just a different flavor of magic (powered by EM energy, I'm guessing.)

My personal theory from the old codex was that the C'tan "necrodermis" constructs were basically puppets that harbored a fraction of the C'tan's essence.. and the bulk of the c'tan's body remained outside, but connected. ow it was connected we never knew, but if they can fold time and space they probably can find some way to have some magic FTL umbilical between the host body and the puppet.

Well, I would argue that where the Warp is explicitly "magic" in that you make things happen by wanting them to, the C'tan abilities are the result of "sufficiently advanced technology." It's "magic" to us because it runs on bullshittium, but it's no more "magical" in the context of its own setting than a Star Wars hyperdrive is a magic box in the context of Star Wars.

In short, they're what you get when you really, really far out 'post-Singularity' in the 40k galaxy: easy ability to wrap the functional equivalent of a Dyson shell around a star, ability to warp the very laws of reality that mere mortals abide by (insert technobabble stolen from Orion's Arm) and so on. But this isn't the kind of emotion and ritual-powered phenomena that are associated with the Warp.

So I distinguish between that and magic, even though from the point of view of good old Atomic Age Simon they're both totally indistinguishable from magic. It's not what they're capable of in my context that matters; it's what they do in the context of their own setting.

No, I am rather sure you are wrong.
I can't recall the exact quote, maybe Connor would help me with that. But I think there was a place in one of the books there a techpriest looks at I think gaus weapons and just flat out says it should not work.

[OmegaChief]

No, I am rather sure you are wrong.
I can't recall the exact quote, maybe Connor would help me with that. But I think there was a place in one of the books there a techpriest looks at I think gaus weapons and just flat out says it should not work.

Alright so, uh, side stepping the whole issue of how Tech-Priests (And the Imperium in general) think technology works (Which is in and of itself a rather huge issue that you might really want to look into if you're taking word of Tech Preist as word of God) there's the issue that it looks like it shouldn't work from thier current understanding.

There's a similar seen in Farscape, where looking over an alien propulsion unit they go "Wait, this shouldn't work, it violates everything we know about x, y and z theories!"

To which Chriton replies, "Well, it looks like we were wrong there".

So in short, just because something has no way of working that you can understand, does not mean it's isntantly magic, just think about giving a Viking a laptop with a net connection for a miniute, he's not going to have any clue how it should work is he

[White Haven]

These are the same tech-priests that have no concept of the scientific method, yes? The tech-priests who treat glorified hard drives filled with ancient blueprints as holy relics and assume the knowledge in them is a gift from a Machine God? The same tech-priests who have a habit of just labeling things they don't understand as 'tech-heresy' and either ignoring it, or killing each other for trying to do other than ignore it. They burn incense while they manipulate basic computer controls, because they believe it is a holy rite.

In short, these are not people qualified to say something from a totally unfamiliar tech base 'shouldn't work.' That phrase alone says it. A scientist would say 'We don't understand how this works.' These are people who're qualified to say that it's not a las/plasma/stub/bolt/melta weapon, because that's all they know.

They're gunsmiths writ large, multiplied across everything the Imperium does. Now imagine giving a current-day gunsmith a plasma weapon. He'd recognize it has a trigger, possibly find the removable plasma flask mount, but he'd have no idea where to start at figuring out how and why it works, because he's a technician, not a scientist. The Mechanicus has a nasty habit of executing people who aspire to science as tech-heretics.

[Talk738kno]

A bit exaggeration, the Ad mech has its fractions just like the Inquisition does, see the Explorators as an example.

[Simon_Jester]

In short, these are not people qualified to say something from a totally unfamiliar tech base 'shouldn't work.' That phrase alone says it. A scientist would say 'We don't understand how this works.' These are people who're qualified to say that it's not a las/plasma/stub/bolt/melta weapon, because that's all they know.

They're gunsmiths writ large, multiplied across everything the Imperium does. Now imagine giving a current-day gunsmith a plasma weapon. He'd recognize it has a trigger, possibly find the removable plasma flask mount, but he'd have no idea where to start at figuring out how and why it works, because he's a technician, not a scientist. The Mechanicus has a nasty habit of executing people who aspire to science as tech-heretics.

Though they do have some reasonably capable engineers- their ability to build large infrastructure projects proves it, since that can't possibly be standardized and set up on glorified hard-drives.

What few techpriests they have with analytical skill are concentrated at a handful of forge worlds, the big ones, where they're free of persecution by virtue of having basically co-opted the Adeptus Mechanicus structure outright.

And yet WH has a point- if all we know is that "a techpriest said gauss weapons shouldn't work," it doesn't necessarily mean gauss weapons are powered by sorcery. It may just mean that particular techpriest has no fucking clue how they work, and can't find the parts he expects to see in an energy weapon.

[White Haven]

I think the AdMech had some capable engineers. Long ago. These days, most of them are people who were taught by rote by people who were taught by rote by <add many degrees of Kevin Bacon> some capable engineers. Outside of the rare high-level tech-priests who're actually trying to innovate, the vast majority of the Mechanicus is comprised of individuals and groups vying for the title of 'best Xerox machine' without any real understanding of why what they're trying to copy works well.

[Connor MacLeod]

They actually said that they had an idea how it worked (although the implication carried from their idea of how it works is that the gun is constantly sucking in the mass of the target or something.... like some sort of zombie vaccuum) The part that stumped them as to how it was achieved came in the powering of the gauss weapon.. they said it should require a multi-megawatt power source to operate a Gauss Flayer, and that it was something they didn't grasp was achieved (more specifically tied to the storage and release of energy I gathered from context.. any imperial weapon doing that would fuse after the first shot, or something.)

And it isn't so much that "AdMech are all fools and no technological research or innovation ever happens" but rather "The Admech are an organization filled mostly with over-conservative fools." There is a certain merit to their fears - Imperial tech canonically demonstrates an ability to be subverted, corrupted, possessed or to otherwise run rampant (The STC in First and Only, virtually any chaos-possesed Imperial Vehicle, Titan, Starship, etc. Hell now that scrap code and similar exist, programming and language can be corrupted and fuck things up in all sorts of unpleasant ways. I'm not even going to touch on some of the insidous insane ideas Dark Heresy had for chaos corruption...) but political and religious reasons (mostly political i suspect - their power derives from technology, so they must be the ones to control it at all cost.)

Research does happen, because the Admech is also full of their own radical/progressive branch as well as all sorts in between, such as the Explorators. They will (inconsistently) want to capture/acquire/explore alien technology (Eldar, Necorn, tau) whilst another faction considers that heresy and will try to destroy it. they may try to innovate, or improve, or design. The AdMech will even approve or implement changeso r improvement to technology - if it's their own ass on the line (Ciaphas Cain novels - where Chimeras were datalinked togther to form some sort of computer-assisted anti aircraft network with their multilasers, or the gothic War where the AdMech constantly experimented with changing around starship designs to improve capabilities or exchange tradeoffs to improve overall performance.)

I mean if you want to be really pedantic about it, the old Necron codex wouldn't even be canon if the AdMech never researched or looked at xenos tech, because the analysis they did of Necron weapons would have been marked as and destroyed as heretical.

[Simon_Jester]

I think the AdMech had some capable engineers. Long ago. These days, most of them are people who were taught by rote by people who were taught by rote by <add many degrees of Kevin Bacon> some capable engineers. Outside of the rare high-level tech-priests who're actually trying to innovate, the vast majority of the Mechanicus is comprised of individuals and groups vying for the title of 'best Xerox machine' without any real understanding of why what they're trying to copy works well.

Well, WH, bear in mind that the "AdMech" includes nearly all technical personnel in 40k society. A lot of them are rote memorizers and glorified mechanics- but then, those are the guys doing the equivalent of electricians and auto mechanics and computer repair and IT. They don't design their own hardware, but they wouldn't be doing that anyway.

Meanwhile, the techpriests' hierarchy is huge, and things like hydroelectric dams, new starship classes, and the like still get built. Someone has to have their head screwed on straight to do that, perhaps literally given the AdMech's penchant for cybernetics. And by and large, they're the ones who are running the system, not the glorified bolt-tighteners and chanters.

[White Haven]

Yes, they build new complex things. But by and large that doesn't mean they understand it, just that they're reproducing an already-existing plan. For example, a tech-priest, faced with the need to construct a bridge across a wider river than the bridge he has a plan for can span, would most likely not design a bigger bridge. Instead, he'd go looking for a standard pattern for a reinforced pier, build one of those on one or both sides of the river from that plan, then build the plan for the bridge across the now-sufficiently-short gap. Outside of the very few at the very top, it's all about finding which holy book plan fits and throwing it at the problem.

[Connor MacLeod]

Except that doesn't fit for every case of the AdMech. Look at the Hellfire shells. The Tyranids are a recent enemy to show up in the 40K galaxy, yet they have evolved counter-tactics to deal with them (EG Hellfire shells and the mutagenic acid). In Battlefleet Gothic they experimented with ship redesign and upgrades to improve their capabilities in the face of Chaos invasion. In the novel Hellforged there's an Explorator group who did study on the Necrons and designed countermeasures to help the Soul Drinkers defeat them (Admittedly he didn't like doing it, but he still did it...) Hellforged also featured a Nova cannon that had, IIRC been designed and built by another Explorator magos. In Dark Heresy's Inquisitor's Handbook you had a Magos who designed a whole new kind of breathing appartus for underwater simply because he didn't like existing rebreathers (he was viewed as eccentric, but not a heretic.) I bet if I dug in I could find other examples for the 'radical' side of the equaiton. Just like I can find lots of examples of the blinkered, conservative 'do things only by the way they have always done' types too. And this leads to conflict between the opposing sides.

The AdMech is a religion but being a religion does not mean that everyone has to think or interpret everything the same way or do everything the exact same way. In fact, the opposite is true, and "religion" does not automatically equate that everyone is a blinkered, fucking moron.

I'm not saying the Admech is full of brilliant, progressive, and revolutionary scientific thinkers either, but there's a a wide gulf between "practical and intelligent scientists" and "blinkered fundamentalist". About the only way you could get away with the idea that the entire AdMech is full of zealous morons who don't understand the slightest bit what they are doing is to either given them Posleen Nanoforges/Star Trek replicators, or ascribe to them Ork Mekboy like psychic/genetic connections to racial knowledge (and you could try, but I doubt you can argue that all the AdMech have an innate, psychic ability to tap the warp for scientific knowledge like in Mechanicum.)