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Javin
05-27-2010, 09:02 PM
I am not sure about how long a titan takes to build. Imperial titans are what I am referring.

The building of an Imperial titan would be a serious undertaking, of both massive resources and time.

Yet other races, like orks and nids can build massive titans in months, or just grow some rather quickly.

How can the titan legions be built fast enough to keep up?

Jordan Ashworth
05-27-2010, 09:37 PM
From what I remember reading it normally takes centuries and in some cases a millenia to build a titan. Most titan's that walk the world of man are from the dark times of the Horus Heresy. Hence why it is always a major loss when one is destroyed.

So they don't really build to keep up with the creation of enemy engines.

Nabterayl
05-27-2010, 09:44 PM
Yet other races, like orks and nids can build massive titans in months, or just grow some rather quickly.
Can, yes, but remember that they don't necessarily do so. Orks don't build gargants until they've got a Waaagh! going, and even then only a handful. And remember that tyranid warrior organisms are generally not self-sustaining - they're essentially one-shot deals, grown for a particular invasion or even a particular battle. The hive mind doesn't only deploys the larger, more resource-intensive organisms if a target's resistance calls for it, which means only the most extremely resistant planets will ever see a bio-titan deployed. So it's not as if orks and tyranids have thousands of titans running around, which goes a long way, I imagine, towards redressing the imbalance in construction times.

eldargal
05-27-2010, 10:38 PM
Another point to consider, there could be thousands of forge worlds building several titans simultaneously with different completion dates. We don't know for sure, but given that the Imperium has been on a permanent war footing for ten thousand years or so, it would make sense to assume there will be titan casualties and to plan accordingly.

Edit: Actually, we don't even know that the centuries/milennia to build is centuries/milennia of constant construction. There are Cathedrals in Europe which took hundreds upon hundreds of years to build because of a slow construction pace and long gaps in work. There are others of similar size and complexity which were built in decades.

RogueGarou
05-27-2010, 10:52 PM
Additionally, you have to account for the manner in which the Mechanicus works. It is not simply a matter of improving a design for an assembly line. That assembly line is thousands of years old and is a holy relic. A simple circuit board is slavishly copied and consecrated and the actual functionality of the components are not really known by the majority of those working with or on them. The many pieces of a Titan has to be consecrated and prayed over and then the entire engine of destruction has to be sanctified before it can be put into use. The failure in innovation and understanding that the Mechanicus perpetuates is a thorn in the side of the Imperium of Man just as the presence of the Techpriests of Mars is possibly the greatest boon to mankind.

Imagine your typical car being assembled today. It is pretty quick. Now imagine a holy ritual being performed at each step of the way down the assembly line. A group of priests insisting that the correct unguents, rituals, incense, and prayers are conducted as each piece is moved into place and joined together into the finished product. Then imagine that the people on the assembly line do not know what the small device connected to the radiator actually does. Instead of being truly technical, they will not understand why a component has failed. Instead they will attribute the failure to an unhappy spirit inhabiting the machine which must be appeased for the machine to work.

A Titan could probably be assembled much more quickly if it were treated as a machine rather than a shrine.

Jordan Ashworth
05-27-2010, 10:56 PM
Additionally, you have to account for the manner in which the Mechanicus works. It is not simply a matter of improving a design for an assembly line. That assembly line is thousands of years old and is a holy relic. A simple circuit board is slavishly copied and consecrated and the actual functionality of the components are not really known by the majority of those working with or on them. The many pieces of a Titan has to be consecrated and prayed over and then the entire engine of destruction has to be sanctified before it can be put into use. The failure in innovation and understanding that the Mechanicus perpetuates is a thorn in the side of the Imperium of Man just as the presence of the Techpriests of Mars is possibly the greatest boon to mankind.

Imagine your typical car being assembled today. It is pretty quick. Now imagine a holy ritual being performed at each step of the way down the assembly line. A group of priests insisting that the correct unguents, rituals, incense, and prayers are conducted as each piece is moved into place and joined together into the finished product. Then imagine that the people on the assembly line do not know what the small device connected to the radiator actually does. Instead of being truly technical, they will not understand why a component has failed. Instead they will attribute the failure to an unhappy spirit inhabiting the machine which must be appeased for the machine to work.

A Titan could probably be assembled much more quickly if it were treated as a machine rather than a shrine.

Well I think you just gave the best explanation hands down.

Javin
05-28-2010, 07:08 AM
After reading Helsreach, the orks has hundreds of titans. And it took them 2-3 months to build a titan that destroyed an Emperor titan! How could the number of loyalist titans even compete against that?

Old_Paladin
05-28-2010, 07:19 AM
I've actually read things that state that the Imperium cannot even build titans anymore.
They do everything they can to salvage and rebuild damaged and nearly distroyed titans; and occasionally find a small cashe of lost titans; but there hasn't been a new titan built for thousands of years.

They are holy and irreplacable icons, everyone lost is a huge blow because no new ones can be built.

Gotthammer
05-28-2010, 08:46 AM
A lot of 3rd ed era stuff was like that - plasma can't be built anymore, dreadnoughts can't be built anymore, terminator armour can't be built anymore etc etc - and is being slowly pushed down the memory hole.

Almost all titan lore comes from RT and 2nd ed, so they were much more optimistic and the Collegia Titanica has an entire diviso dedicaed to field testing and designing new systems and improving existing ones. Also they were very hard to construct, and would take a long time to do, but I don't recall any concrete figures (I suspect it was to avoid having this sort of thing come up).

Nabterayl
05-28-2010, 10:30 AM
After reading Helsreach, the orks has hundreds of titans. And it took them 2-3 months to build a titan that destroyed an Emperor titan! How could the number of loyalist titans even compete against that?
"Titans" meaning what, everything from stompa on up? Because according to Epic, Ghazghkull only had 78 gargants when Third Armageddon stopped for the first season of fire, compared to 72 titans of all classes fielded by the Legii.

DarkAngelHopeful
05-29-2010, 02:17 AM
I just finished reading the Grey Knight's Omnibus, a great read mind you. The second book of the omnibus, Dark Adeptus, is all about a corrupted forge world where the STC for the father of all titans was located. This titan pattern was even bigger than the biggest titan the Imperium currently has and way more advanced. The way I took the STC to be explained was that it was pure information, almost like an AI. From what I read, the STC became self-aware and then turned to chaos. As such, Alaric, the main character and his team, had to destroy it.

I'm not sure if STC's are a onetime construction or if they were built several times and spread out throughout the pre-Imperium human civilization. If there is only one copy of each STC then, the Imperium just lost the father of all titans capability. If they were spread out, then the Imperium just needs to keep searching for another one.

An interesting side note, the corrupted planet spend a little over a 1000 years in the warp. During that time they were able to make approximately 150 titans from their titan works, of varying patterns common to the Imperium currently.

RogueGarou
05-30-2010, 01:10 PM
Well, yes, and no. First, the world where the corrupted STC for the Titan design was lost to the Warp long before the novel when the whole world was swallowed into the Empyrean. Eventually, the Chaos worshiping Dark Mechanicus or a daemonic entity corrupted and possessed the STC construct which then created the Titan in the novel from the designs within the STC construct. Those designs had been gone for a long time but they were not necessarily the only existing copy of that particular Titan design.

Depending on the fluff and the era, the STC started as a computer core and possibly a small automated manufacturing unit. The main unit was sent with each of the colonizing vessels sent out from Earth so that upon arrival on a new world, the colonists could rapidly reach an advanced technological state comparable to Terra. The STC core included designs for buildings, knives, weapons, tools, vehicles, reactors, tractors, farm equipment, practically anything that could be built had a design included in the STC core. In many, many cases, the colonists did not have need of most of the items included in the core and would only produce the items they required such as farm machinery, buildings, perhaps some weapons but there was not a need to pull up the blueprints for a Titan manufacturing facility and then the schematics for a Titan to be built in it. Think of the STC as a repository of all kinds of technical knowledge.

The STC has also been described as having its own manufacturing capability at times. The idea being, it can make the small component needed to make the larger component needed to build the bigger component to make the building that will hold the nuclear or plasma reactor that will power the manufacturing of the item you really wanted to start with, a farming tractor.

There were all kinds of designs included in the STCs, including robots and their programming, but the majority of the designs were not used by the colonists. The skills and knowledge to use and maintain the STC cores faded with time, as well. When the Terran colonies became isolated during Old Night, that was the beginning of the end for the STCs. The knowledge within them was lost over the course of years, the desire to put all of that knowledge into one place (much less the hands of anyone not a Priest of Mars) dwindled, and the technologically advanced state of Earth and Mars began to slide. Without maintenance or use, the STCs began to fail or their locations were lost. In some instances, there were hard copy printouts of designs from the STCs and even these scraps of paper are today highly prized relics for the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Part of the problem with new designs is that the Priesthood of Mars holds almost a monopoly on technology. They worship it and slavishly try to copy it without understanding it. Think of the knock-off products you can find out there, a Rulex watch that looks remarkably like a Rolex but works for about a week if you are lucky. :) Mankind became technologically advanced but then people took for granted that the technology was constant and would always be there, so why waste time learning how to build it or maintain it. If it is simpler to walk over to the STC and punch up a new one, why bother learning about the one that just broke? Wait a minute, the STC just gave me a design for a coffee cup... uh-oh, now the STC is broken and Old Bob, the only one who knew anything about it just died... um, I guess I can use a coffee cup to store things...

The loss of knowledge and the Mechanicus' idea of the technology being holy and any designs built on technology being holy really puts a damper on making new things. The Land Raider and Land Speeder were not in production until their designs were found on Mars in an archived location that had fallen into disuse and been lost for years. The design for a flame thrower mounted on a Rhino chasis were lost until found by representatives of the Ministorum who worked out a deal to provide the designs to the Mechanicus in exchange for exclusive production of the tank as the Immolator. When the Imperial Guard first began receiving the Hellhound tank it was suggested that some enterprising Techpriest had violated the terms of that agreement and showed some heretical ingenuity by adapting the design to a Chimera chasis.

In the current 40k universe, the Mechanicus has a long, drawn-out process for designing anything new and eventually approving it as sanctified by the Machine God. It is far easier to find a printout or a digital copy of something that already was designed, and thus already approved and blessed, than to come up with something original. So, the Holy Grail of the Mechanicus to find a working STC somewhere has many reasons behind it. One, all of the designs would be sanctified and ready to go into production. Two, the designs are already there and would require no thought on the part of the builders to create, only to mindlessly copy. Three, it would serve to provide another relic for the Cult of the Machine to worship and hoard.

So, the Titan design in "Dark Adeptus" was lost but that design in that STC had been lost long ago. The existing Titan designs in the hands of the Mechanicus are still in their possession. The designs for a Titan of that magnitude have probably been lost since long before the Great Crusade and the capability to build it and create many of the more advanced materials and components have also been lost from memory. They may still exist on a hard drive or a printout or even an ancient book somewhere but not knowing where it is, is just as bad as not knowing how to do it.

The only ones who know how many Titans have been built are the Mechanicus and they are not talking about that. Over many thousands of years, who knows how many have been built and lost? The same can be said of the Baneblade tank chasis and its variants. They slowly build new ones and record the construction and loss of each one. They are valuable not only in their material construction but also in the time invested in building and blessing all of the components. An Ork or an Eldar craftsman does not worry about those kinds of things. The Eldar grow and mold the wraithbone constructs as they need and want them. The Ork simply hammers steel into the shape they want and as long as it makes loud noise and does not immediately shake apart, they are happy. Orks can build machines faster than the Imperium but their constructs do not last for thousands upon thousands of years like Eldar or Imperial designs, though for different reasons.

RogueGarou
05-30-2010, 01:19 PM
[QUOTE=An interesting side note, the corrupted planet spend a little over a 1000 years in the warp. During that time they were able to make approximately 150 titans from their titan works, of varying patterns common to the Imperium currently.[/QUOTE]

Time flows differently in the Warp, though. A minute can stretch to infinity or be compressed to a brief moment. Time is meaningless in that realm at times. A Space Marine may be functionally immortal in the material universe but still he ages. In the Warp, a Space Marine can be timeless as well as immortal. Kharn, Abaddon, Ahriman, they are all still vibrant and to all appearances unaged for over 10,000 years. Looking at Dante and Logan Grimnar, there are physical signs of their age. A thousand years or a century or even a day in the Warp do not have the same meaning as in the physical universe. 150 Titans were built on that Mechanicus world but how many Daemon engines were built in the soul forges in the same time?

Lane
05-31-2010, 02:14 AM
There are a few inconsistencies in the fluf, in fact I think we should purge all memory of 3rd ed and physicaly purge the author who gave humans a stupid Eldar name.

There are a few bits that are reasonable. The Imperium has lost the ability to make new suspensors and power transmission cables. Apparently suspensors require rare materials. This explains why most heavy weapons are move or shoot and the loss of jet bikes. The power transmission cables were high efficiency drive systems, apply force at one end and get force at the other but were less affected by damage than other methods. Many old designs had to be adapted to electric or hydraulic systems making them bulkier.

Land raider STC - Just Say NO. The Land Raider and Land Speeder get their name from the Techpriest that invented them. Since the STC is a dark Age item there can be no Land Raider STC. IIRC both the Land raider and Rhino were developed from agricultural machines, or maybe the LR was a garbage truck.

Side note: The STC was designed to allow most basic designs to be constructed from local materials and industrial capacity. The <insert name here> might be a gas powered steel vehicle on one world and fusion powered armorplast version on another.

Kirsten
05-31-2010, 07:08 AM
occasionally find a small cache of lost titans

Stuck in that little pocket on the side door of a car, down the back of the emperor's sofa, at the back of the fridge with a piece of old celery. I love the idea of finding titans.

Gotthammer
05-31-2010, 07:32 AM
Land raider STC - Just Say NO. The Land Raider and Land Speeder get their name from the Techpriest that invented them. Since the STC is a dark Age item there can be no Land Raider STC. IIRC both the Land raider and Rhino were developed from agricultural machines, or maybe the LR was a garbage truck.

Not quite, Arkhan Land discovered the STC for the two vehicles at the beginning of the Crusade. STC used similar base designs for simplicity, so a Rhino's base chassis could be used for a tracked digger, an earth mover, a snow vehicle etc. All STC is Dark Age technology, being created during said age.

The meta explaination is GW at the time was only producing the Rhino and Land Raider kit, so having an 'in game' explaination for why everything uses the same body was probably very convenient for the designers (and still is).

The Inner Geek
07-26-2010, 09:09 PM
I read somewhere that a Warlord could take up to three hundred years to build. I wish I could reference it, but I'm afraid I don't remember where it was. I think it likely that different forge worlds work at different speeds too.

Pendragon38
08-04-2010, 07:09 PM
You ever wonder how the TAU got so far ahead in such a short amount of time? they my have a working STC that they found,maybe the STC was in a cave or something.

Connjurus
08-04-2010, 07:40 PM
The Tau advanced as fast they did because their whole entire people was devoted not just to the advancement of the Tau as a whole but also their technology.