PDA

View Full Version : How venerated are Space Marine vehicles?



eagleboy7259
10-22-2009, 07:26 PM
I know that there is tons of space marines background fluff on how sacred Dreadnoughts and Land Raiders are, how every suit of Terminator Armor is an irreplaceable relic, and even the bolters, flamers, and ammunition is blessed. I'm curious if GW has ever published anything on the other vehicles: Rhinos, Razorbacks, Predators, Vindicators, Whirlwinds, Land Speeders and Drop Pods.

-I know that the forgeworlds are still producing them, but they can still produce the other stuff too right? I know that Dreadnoughts are venerated for their pilots, but why are Land Raiders more so than the lesser vehicles?

-What about Land Speeders? I thought anti-grav technology was rare in the Imperium and treasured...

-Drop Pods? Do space marines collect them after they make planet fall? They do in fluff have a machine spirit right?

Any insight would be helpful. Thanks.

wittdooley
10-22-2009, 10:48 PM
It's all about the greater presence of the Machine Spirit in LRs.

Nabterayl
10-22-2009, 11:16 PM
Imperial Armour Volume 2 goes into a fair amount of detail about space marine vehicles. According to IA2 every space marine chapter's forge is equipped to produce Land Raiders, albeit not necessarily fast. It seems that every chapter has the capability to produce Land Raiders, but that's not to say that they can just crank them out. (In fact, apparently a very, very few tech-priests know how to create new dreadnoughts, which means that it's conceivable that one or two space marine chapters have that capability as well.) By the same token, most or all chapter forges can produce Rhino-based vehicles at some level.

According to the Adeptus Mechanicus, if it's a machine, it has a machine spirit. According to IA2, Predators, Whirlwinds, Razorbacks, Vindicators, and Rhinos are not actually produced according to any kind of schedule. Instead, the chapter forge produces a Rhino chassis, and towards the end of production the techmarines consult the omens to determine what sort of machine spirit the unfinished vehicle has. If the omens say it's a Vindicator machine spirit, then it gets finished as a Vindicator, whether the chapter needs another Vindicator or not. If the omens say it's a Rhino, it's finished as a Rhino, etc. There's a whole ceremony prescribed for naming and activating a vehicle for the first time.

Land Speeders are indeed rare. As IA2 points out, though, "rare" vehicles aren't necessarily rare because they're hard to produce. Remember, Land Raiders and Land Speeders are STC designs - they're designed so they can be produced anywhere, from anything. They're rare because the designs are jealously guarded by the Astartes and the few forge worlds that have access to the blueprints.

Drop pods are indeed collected after planetfall, again according to IA2. Everything is collected after a battle, even destroyed vehicles. A dead vehicle doesn't necessarily have a dead machine spirit, according to AdMech doctrine - the vehicle can often be repaired and sent back into service, to take revenge. So leaving behind even a destroyed Rhino would be like leaving behind a badly wounded battle-brother - something you do only under the direst circumstances, to great shame.

Crevab
10-22-2009, 11:36 PM
In the latest SM codex, the Rhino entry has a paragraph about the oldest Rhino. It sits in a reliquary and doom is said to befall the Salamanders if the centennial engine starting fails to catch the first time.

eagleboy7259
10-23-2009, 08:24 AM
Nabterayl- Thank you! that was very helpful and very interesting. I always thought of a Rhino being a Rhino and a Predator a Predator, that naming thing is pretty cool. Makes me want to go buy some IA books just for the fluff now.

person person
10-23-2009, 11:28 AM
Didnt know they collected Drop Pods.

Love that rhino bit.

Tech:"what would you like to be?"

Rhino:"The one with most guns"

Tech: "Ok, Predator it is."

After transformation

Rhino: "I can kill any hereti..."*CSM Land raider "passes" by*

Rhino: "He lied!"

Duke
10-23-2009, 01:11 PM
Probably one of the funniest parts of 40k fluff is the Ad. Mech. and pretty much vehicles in general.

Duke

Lord Anubis
10-23-2009, 06:36 PM
Remember, Land Raiders and Land Speeders are STC designs - they're designed so they can be produced anywhere, from anything.

Are they, though? This is one of those items the fluff seems to be deliberately vague on. There's the whole bit about how Arkhan Land went down into the labyrinths of Mars and supposedly came back three years later with a bunch of STC-compatible information for a well-armored, artificial intelligence tank plus the basics on manufacturing anti-grav plates.

Yep, AI and antigrav. Discovered deep beneath the surface of Mars.

Hmmmmmm...

;)

Nabterayl
10-24-2009, 03:14 PM
Well, the whole STC thing is a bit of a theological fiction to begin with. There's no way to tell at this remove which "STC" designs were actually included in the STC systems dispatched with colonists during the Dark Age of Technology, and which are modifications by those colonists of the STC constructs they were given. All "STC" really means at this point is that a) the design has been granted STC status by the Adeptus Mechanicus and b) it allows you to produce the machine out of any materials you have to hand. The Land Raider and the Land Speeder both fit that description, although it is possible that the plans actually originate with the Void Dragon (whose influence on the Adeptus Mechanicus post-dates the actual STC systems).

Just_Me
10-25-2009, 02:04 PM
Actually Land didn’t randomly return from some Martian cave with brand new designs. He went into the Martian archives, contained deep underground, and then painstakingly pieced lost designs together from fragmentary records and incomplete blueprints in different corners of the archive. In a similar way the Mecharius design was developed through extensive cross-referencing of Baneblade designs with those of smaller tanks to “fill in the blanks” for a lost class of tank that belonged in-between the average tanks and the super-heavies. The Ad. Mech. develops very little “new” technology, rather they re-develop old lost designs.

In short, no, the Void Dragon had nothing to do with it, not everything related to the Mechanicus has to do with the Void Dragon…

Nabterayl
10-25-2009, 03:55 PM
That's one of the things that makes the Land Raider unusual. Land returned from the crypts with "a near complete dataslab image of STC information about a heavily armoured battle tank" - in other words, the Land Raider STC data was unusually complete when Land uncovered it.

I don't mean to say that the Void Dragon clearly made up the Land Raider, disguised its blueprints as STC data, and then somehow got it into Land's hands. It's possible, certainly, but the simplest explanation is just that Land Raiders really were in use during the Dark Age of Technology and Land rediscovered an unusually complete set of blueprints. Certainly it shares many design features with vehicles we know were STC designs, such as being designed for multiple roles, non-sloped armor, and nonsensical weapons layout =P

Just_Me
10-25-2009, 07:38 PM
That's one of the things that makes the Land Raider unusual. Land returned from the crypts with "a near complete dataslab image of STC information about a heavily armoured battle tank" - in other words, the Land Raider STC data was unusually complete when Land uncovered it.

I don't mean to say that the Void Dragon clearly made up the Land Raider, disguised its blueprints as STC data, and then somehow got it into Land's hands. It's possible, certainly, but the simplest explanation is just that Land Raiders really were in use during the Dark Age of Technology and Land rediscovered an unusually complete set of blueprints. Certainly it shares many design features with vehicles we know were STC designs, such as being designed for multiple roles, non-sloped armor, and nonsensical weapons layout =P

Quite so :D.

lobster-overlord
10-25-2009, 08:37 PM
OK, I'm going to sound like a noob here. What is STC?

John M>

Nabterayl
10-25-2009, 08:59 PM
STC stands for Standard Template Construct. STC systems were issued to colonists during the Dark Age of Technology in order to help them keep up a high technology base. The STC systems were computer systems that would analyze your local environment and tell you how to build a large array of machines, from the ground up. In theory (although I don't think we have any examples this extreme) it would tell you how to build anything its database from anything. Take a Rhino, for instance, which is a classic STC design. You land on a planet, fire up the STC, and tell it you want to build a Rhino. Okay, says the STC, here's how you build a Rhino. Well, you say, I don't have a machine shop. Okay, says the STC, here's how you build a machine shop. But I don't have any hand tools, you say. Okay, says the STC, here's how you build a hammer ...

And so on, all the way down to the simplest hand tools (though as I say I don't think we have any examples quite that extreme; it's not like colonists routinely forgot to bring simple hand tools, after all). The genius of the STC is that it would tell you how to build all these machines using locally available materials. In theory, if all you had to work with was hydrogen, an STC system could tell you how to build anything in its databanks using nothing but hydrogen as a starting point (again, not that we have any examples quite that extreme).

For their day, STC designs were crude, but they were reliable and adaptable - this was pioneer gear, not top of the line stuff. The key thing was that it would work for the colonists wherever they ended up, in whatever environment they ended up.

Fast forward through the Age of Strife to the start of the Great Crusade. The Adeptus Mechanicus has legends of a machine that would tell you how to build anything, from anything. Such a machine could logically be none other than the sum total of the knowledge of the Machine God itself - and as everyone knows, the Machine God knows all. The Holy Grail of the Adeptus Mechanicus' Quest for Knowledge is to find a working STC system. If such a device could be found, Mankind would at last have at its fingertips all there is to know.

Not true, of course. The STC systems never contained the sum total of mankind's knowledge - as I said before, they told you how to build tough, practical designs that wouldn't let you down and would help you rebuild a technological society. But according to Mechanicus doctrine, the STC systems contained all there is to know about technology (AM doctrine also states that knowledge is not created, only discovered). The Mechanicus has never discovered a working STC system, though they have discovered STC blueprints for various machines. Oftentimes these are discovered in fragments of data cores, perhaps over a period of centuries or millennia, and the Mechanicus must piece together (or, Machine God forbid, infer) the final blueprint from the bits and pieces they've gathered.

It follows from this doctrine that if a machine design was not once contained within an STC system's databanks, it must be heretical. The Mechanicus won't produce a machine, and won't condone the production of a machine, unless it's convinced that the machine is an STC design. Usually this means that non-STC machines don't get produced, although space marine chapters have enough production capabilities that they've been known to bend the rules.

The trick is that, at such a far remove from history, nobody actually knows what's an STC design anymore, and what is a modification of an STC design. Take a hypothetical example - you land on a planet, and your STC tells you how to build a Rhino, which has wheels. You look at the blueprints and say hell, wouldn't it be better if my Rhino had tracks instead of wheels? Of course it would! So, being a handy guy, you modify your blueprints to make a tracked Rhino. Your modification is so successful it becomes quite routine among colonists. Ten thousand years later some Mechanicus explorator digs up a blueprint for a tracked Rhino. Praise the Machine God, he says - an STC design! The wheeled Rhino designs, which are the actual STC designs, are never found, and the Mechanicus goes on thinking that the STC design for the Rhino had tracks all along.

This is a hypothetical example, but it should give you the idea. To add to the confusion, because the Mechanicus can't handle the idea of non-STC machines, sometimes they end up convincing themselves that a new design was STC all along, and they just didn't see it until now. The Predator Annihilator is a famous example of this process - it was created ad hoc by the Space Wolves, much to the consternation of the Mechanicus, who issued a series of sternly worded condemnations to those space marine chapters which began producing the heretical design. These wordings were, for the most part, ignored, until finally the Mechanicus, after much prayer and debate (well over a century after the first Annihilator was produced), decided that the Predator's STC blueprints had contained provisions for swapping the autocannon for twin-linked lascannons all along. You can kind of see the logic:
All non-heretical machines are STC
The space marines have been producing a machine that works
Therefore, the new machine must be non-heretical, or its machine spirit must be enslaved or tortured by foul xenos or Chaotic tech-heresy
The machine has served the Emperor well on many battlefields, therefore its machine spirit must not be enslaved
Therefore, the machine is non-heretical
Therefore, it must be STC
Gotta love the AdMech! :cool:

eldargal
10-25-2009, 09:49 PM
That is probably the bes stummary of STCs I've ever read.:)

Just_Me
10-25-2009, 10:39 PM
That is probably the bes stummary of STCs I've ever read.:)

Agreed! great summary! Had I done it it would have been around 3 pages long and way harder to understand :p.

eagleboy7259
10-25-2009, 11:12 PM
I am blown away! That was amazing! So is that machine sprit like a fragement of an STC script in vehicles or does that whole world of machine spirits predate the STC's? I know that Tech lore starts with the Void Dragon, but mankind obviously had some measure of control when it came to the creation of machines. And what about the Defilers? I thought CSM have "evil techmarines" or whatnot, how'd those come into being?

Sorry I don't mean to derail you or be annoying, its just if there seems to be anyone to ask about this kind of stuff, you seem to be the one.

Lord Anubis
10-25-2009, 11:38 PM
As near as I've ever been able to tell "the machine spirit" is, to the AdMech, the driving force of the machine. It's soul, if you will.

Nowadays, if a car doesn't start, it means it's out of gas. To the AdMech, it does not start because we've angered the machine spirit by not feeding it. If my fan belt squeals, it means I need a new fan belt, but to them the machine spirit is screaming its rage at faulty maintainence. When the engine runs smoothly, it's because the machine spirit is pleased. If something has stopped working and cannot be repaired (or "restored to health") it must be dead.

This belief is encouraged by the rare machine that actually does things on its own. Computers can do calculations and answer questions, thus they have clever machine spirits. A land raider has a low level artificial intelligence (or high level, if you believe some stories) so it has a very powerful machine spirit. So much so that it gets its own rule. :)

Nabterayl
10-26-2009, 12:35 AM
I am blown away! That was amazing! So is that machine sprit like a fragement of an STC script in vehicles or does that whole world of machine spirits predate the STC's?
Machine spirits are essentially a theological concept. In plain English, they are the "spirit" of the machine - the thing that makes it work, that makes it an individual, the part of the machine that lives on when the physical machine is broken or destroyed. It's the part of the machine that can be corrupted by Chaos, enslaved by dark magic, possessed by daemons, etc. All machines, from the simplest wrench to the most complex titan, have machine spirits. It's really not any different from a human spirit. If you remember that machines are people too, you won't go far wrong.*

Or so the Adeptus Mechanicus thinks, at any rate. Is any of that "really true?" That's not really a fair question. Do you have a spirit? I doubt you can answer that without implicating theology; it's an inherently theological question. The same is true for the Mechanicus - according to their religion, machines have spirits, and you can't actually prove them wrong any more than you can prove to your neighbor that he doesn't have a spirit. Yes, machines in the 40K universe can be worked by people who don't believe that machines have spirits. But plenty of people in the real world get along just fine not believing that people have spirits, and that hasn't managed to dissuade those of us who think that people do have spirits. Same situation, really.


I know that Tech lore starts with the Void Dragon, but mankind obviously had some measure of control when it came to the creation of machines.
Ah, that's a big misconception. The Adeptus Mechanicus starts with the Void Dragon. All of real-world human history, and a good twenty-seven thousand years of additional fictional history, came before the Mechanicus. With the Mechanicus came their religion, and with their religion the belief in machine spirits. People got along making machines just fine before all of that - in fact the high point of human technological development came a good long while before the Mechanicus, during what is now called the Dark Age of Technology ("Dark Age" because nobody knows much about it now, "of Technology" because all they really do know about it is that technology was better then than it is now).


And what about the Defilers? I thought CSM have "evil techmarines" or whatnot, how'd those come into being?
Defilers are walkers that are possessed by daemons and bound to a Chaos lord's will. Yes, it turns out that daemons can possess machines. Does that prove that machines have spirits? Of course not - the fact that daemons can possess humans doesn't prove that humans have spirits. You could argue that the daemon actually latches on to the machine's physical form, same as you could argue with human beings. Whatever the truth of the theology behind it, though, there is a real warp entity controlling the Defiler body.

During the Horus Heresy a goodly portion of the Adeptus Mechanicus turned to Chaos, which is how the traitor legions have managed to maintain some semblance of tech base.

The main difference is that very complex machines might have multiple machine spirits. For instance, a starship has in some sense a machine spirit. But its engines also have spirits, its guns have spirits, its cogitators have spirits, and so on. I'm not actually sure what the AdMech theology is on this point - whether the starship is a kind of collective machine spirit, or whether it's a whole other order of being (an example from real-world theology being that the Christian Godhead, though made up of persons, is thought of as being more than a mere collection of persons; the Godhead itself is a level of organization above, and comprising, "person"). I'm not sure whether complex machines are thought of as more like the Godhead or more like a collection of persons.

the one
10-26-2009, 09:44 AM
The machine sprit is the AI isn't it? I remember somewhere back in the vaults of 40k there's a quote along the lines of:

Techpriest: Start the machine sprit.
Driver: The what?
Techpriest: You know... The machine sprit.
Driver: You mean the autopilot?
Techpriest: (Disappointed) Yes.

Just_Me
10-26-2009, 10:37 AM
The machine sprit is the AI isn't it? I remember somewhere back in the vaults of 40k there's a quote along the lines of:

Techpriest: Start the machine sprit.
Driver: The what?
Techpriest: You know... The machine sprit.
Driver: You mean the autopilot?
Techpriest: (Disappointed) Yes.

Funny, and partially true, although now the fluff establishes that average Joe is if anything MORE superstitious than the tech priests, at least they have some training in what we regard as physics, engineering, electrical engineering, etc. Average Joe probably does not have any better understanding of how an airplane actually works (from an mechanical engineering standpoint) than you or I (assuming of course you are not an aeronautical engineer, if so then bad example :p), but while we chalk that up to technology that we haven’t needed to learn about, average Joe Imperial sees it as mystical and possibly sorcerous.

However insofar as machine spirits are AIs this is correct as far as machines that have an AI go. The machine spirit of a car for example might be seen as manifest in its cruise control, while the machine spirit of something like a Land Raider or Titan is more in line with a true thinking machine or drone intelligence, it can take limited actions of its own. However, all technological devices are considered to have machine spirits. In much the same way that a Samurai believed that his swords possessed a spirit that must be honored a Space Marine believes in the spirit of his boltgun, while a scribe believes that his “word processor” has a spirit. The only difference is that these spirits are seen as weaker than those of machines with AI (thus their inability to act independently), but if one fails to appease the spirit through proper maintenance then it will become angry and fail you.

Duke
10-26-2009, 11:21 AM
What I find interesting about the Ad. Mech and the whole 'machine spirit,' belief is how self fulfinning it is.

For example:
- A machine comes into the shop because the machine spirit is angry (It makes a 'pang,' sound when shifting gears)
- the Priest thinks he must appease the machine spirit through a specific ritual for this 'pang,' sound.
- the ad. Mech Priest thinks that he must pray twenty times prior to washing the machine in holy oils.
- After praying he applies the holy oils
- After applying the oils the engine starts up and has no 'pangs,' in the sound of the engine, also all the parts work properly.
- Obviously the machine isn't complaining and its machine spirit is happy.

All he did was change the oil and the rest of the ritual is worthless, but since it worked he assumes it is because he prayed and used blessed oils. Little does he know praying and 'blessed,' oils would have been as good as cussing and using unblessed oils.

The Ad. Mech cracks me up.

Duke

Nabterayl
10-26-2009, 01:38 PM
It's also actually not that far off from how some people view technology these days. How many times have you talked to a non-computer person who is only half joking when they say their computer hates them?

As a side note, the machine spirit thing makes certain otherwise bizarre space marine practices make sense. A lot of space marine (and other Imperial) war materiel is viewed as a priceless relic - dreadnoughts, terminator armor, relic blades, etc. It might seem strange to take a priceless relic and routinely throw it into the most dangerous tactical situations you can find, which is exactly what space marines do.

But it becomes a lot less weird if you imagine that each and every one of those relics has a warlike machine spirit - in a very real sense, to a space marine, his armor and weaponry are warriors too. They are made to fight, and they want to fight. So it wouldn't actually be an act of reverence to retire a revered suit of terminator armor, for instance - that would be like telling a space marine, "You're such a hero that we've decided you don't get to go on missions anymore." It's actually more reverent to keep on using the armor so that it can continue to serve the chapter and the Emperor, even if that places a priceless relic of the chapter at risk of being lost in battle. To a space marine, his armor wouldn't want it any other way.

eagleboy7259
10-26-2009, 02:19 PM
So what about Dreadnoughts then? I know that the pilot of the Dreadnought basically "wills" his machine on into battle, and as it has been described to me, the Venerable Dreadnoughts can survive more punishment because the pilot is more "willful" than pilots of just regular Dreads. Does the pilot basically take on the role of the machine spirit? how does that all work out?

I had heard a little bit about Defilers had worked before, I was wondering how Chaos got a machine like that. DId the Imperium have a Defiler before that worked without Demons in it? Or is there some fluff describing how chaos accquired it?

Nabterayl
10-26-2009, 03:22 PM
So what about Dreadnoughts then? I know that the pilot of the Dreadnought basically "wills" his machine on into battle. Does the pilot basically take on the role of the machine spirit? how does that all work out?
A dreadnought is controlled by a mind impulse unit, which is the 40K version of your standard sci-fi control-a-machine-through-thoughts hookup. Essentially, instead of using joysticks, pedals, buttons, and switches to pilot his machine, a dreadnought pilot just thinks. This is more along the lines of the way you "think" about moving forward - you don't think to yourself, "Self, walk forward!" You just move yourself forward. An MIU works like that.

According to the Adeptus Mechanicus, an MIU uplink allows you to interface directly with a machine's machine spirit. So the dreadnought pilot doesn't take the place of the machine spirit - an empty dreadnought still has a spirit of its own - but he does kind of meld with it, until, eventually, the space marine pilot might not even distinguish between "himself" (the flesh and blood suspended in the dreadnought sarcophagus) and "the dreadnought" (the rest of the walker). This can also happen with titan princeps, who control their machines using the same technology.


, and as it has been described to me, the Venerable Dreadnoughts can survive more punishment because the pilot is more "willful" than pilots of just regular Dreads.
Technologically, a venerable dreadnought is not different from any other dreadnought (well, the machine itself is older, though not necessarily of a different or superior design or construction). What venerable dreads have going for them is that the pilot has lots and lots of combat experience. You can become a veteran space marine with less than a hundred missions under your belt, and as far as I can tell, most space marines are very unlikely to make it to 200 missions (of course there are famous exceptions, but that's why they're famous). A venerable dread may have been a dreadnought for many centuries, and an able-bodied space marine for a couple centuries before that. Some have been space marines, or even dreadnoughts, for thousands of years. Hence, a venerable dread has more combat experience than almost anybody in the galaxy short of the original traitor legionnaires. He knows all the tricks, is completely at ease with his new mechanical body, and has probably fought any given foe dozens if not hundreds of times before.

The "Hard to Kill" rule is a mathematical representation of this enormous experience. It isn't that a venerable dreadnought is literally more resistant to weapons fire than the same dreadnought piloted by a less experienced space marine; it's not. But because of his huge experience, the venerable dread knows how to move in ways that present a harder target, is better able to suppress enemy fire, and things of that nature, all of which contribute to making it less likely that enemy fire will score a solid hit on him (which is the mathematical result of the Hard to Kill rule).


I had heard a little bit about Defilers had worked before, I was wondering how Chaos got a machine like that. DId the Imperium have a Defiler before that worked without Demons in it? Or is there some fluff describing how chaos accquired it?
According to the CSM codex, nobody knows the whole story of how the first Defiler was created. What we do know is that some CSM sorcerors have learned how to forcibly summon and subjugate daemons to their will using their psychic powers (not actually all that different from how certain radical inquisitors forcibly summon and subjugate daemons to their will when they create daemonhosts).

The sorceror uses his psychic powers to force a daemon to possess the Defiler, which then becomes the daemon's physical body. As you might imagine, most daemons object to being forced to do anything, and so would normally try to kill the impudent sorceror using the Defiler. The sorceror prevents this by suppressing the daemon into a kind of stupor through a a combination of runic wards on the Defiler hull itself and his own psychic powers. The end result is a walker controlled by a daemon almost in a sort of stasis. When battle is joined, the sorceror allows the daemon to waken. It would probably love nothing better than to slaughter every Chaos marine it can get its hands on, especially the sorceror, but the psychic spells and wards prevent it from doing so. The Defiler thus takes its rage out on the only targets left to it - the Chaos marines' enemies. If the Defiler hull is destroyed, the daemon doesn't care - that just means it's freed from its enslavement.

Runic wards are an interesting phenomenon in the 40K universe. They're really just designs etched into a vehicle, drawn in metal, or what have you - physical, tangible decoration. And yet different runic wards (different designs) have consistent and predictable effects on psychic powers and psychic entities (such as daemons). Runes aren't psychic, strictly speaking - they work even if no psyker is around to channel power through them - and yet they work. It's almost like magic ("if you do this physical thing, you create this supernatural effect"), which is no doubt the effect GW was going for. As strange as it may seem, you really can affect a daemon by arranging metal in certain patterns.

person person
10-29-2009, 08:30 PM
Orks looting a defiler

"All we need to do is nail this fing here*clang* and.."

*Explodes and bloodthirster pops out*

I agree on Duke with the machine spirit.