Hopebright

So, there was some conversation on the Discord which led to this shameless riff/parody/etc. of the Warhammer 40K intro quote to produce one for this setting:

It is the dawn of the Ninth Millennium. For nearly a hundred centuries the unbroken line of the Imperial Couple have sat upon the Dragon Throne. They are the executives of the Empire by the free contract of its three trillion citizen-shareholders, and sovereign over twelve score worlds by Their own will and merit. They are the chosen of their people’s self-created machine deities, haloed in the power of transcendent computation. They are the line of Alphas and Seledíë, those who first brought the galaxy order, progress, and liberty.

Yet even beyond the Empire, Their benevolence is felt. The matchless fleets of the Imperial Navy roam the ten-thousand stars of the Associated Worlds, their paths forged by stargates, the only swift route between distant stars. Vast populations live lives of peace and contentment on uncounted worlds beneath the Empire’s protective cloak. Even beyond these, their comrades – the bold scouts of the Imperial Exploratory Service – roam, forever seeking the knowledge of new worlds and the friendship of new peoples. But for all their striving, the galaxy is vast, and there is so much yet to know…

To be a sophont in such times is to be one among unimaginable diversity. It is to live in a world shaped by freedom, harmony, and vaulting ambition. These are the tales of those times. Revere the power of technology and science, for so much is known, and so much can be done. See the promise of progress and understanding fulfilled, for in this bright future there is only awesomeness. There is no more darkness lurking among the stars, only the promise of eternity, and the laughter of delighted gods.

One further note…

…on the technologically advanced civilization vs. WH40K Imperium of Man scenario occasionally played with.

What we might have here is a really dramatic example of why you don’t want single points of failure, regardless of how well defended you think your single points of failure are.

Combine Jon’s Law (any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction) with the Imperium’s centralized governance (not exactly great centralized governance, but something has to provide centripetal force to the whole tangled mess – even if that’s mostly a corpsified and gross symbol these days) and even more centralized navigation system (Astronomican), throw in the way that canonical WH40K assumes that space defenses are porous and blind at medium-to-long range, and what you have a situation that just screams “relativistic kill vehicle“.

Basically, you whack Holy Terra with an RKV, then smirk as the thousands of successor splinter states, reft of their unifying symbol, are only prevented from slashing each other to suicide by their inability to reach each other in any sort of organized fashion. You may not have cured your human problem, but you’ve definitely reduced it to manageability.

 

…There Is Only Awesomeness

So, today I was randomly reminded of In The Grim Darkness Of The Contact Form, and the hypothetical fictional possibilities of a face-off between the Empire and Warhammer 40K’s Imperium of Man, which details I cover there with a note that I can’t really deal with metaphysical mismatches like the wackiness of the Warp.

Well, here’s what occurred to me this morning:

The Tyranid hive mind is known for creating a “shadow in the Warp” that plays merry hell with all psychic communications, Warp travel, Warp-related abilities, and anyone with any sort of psychic sensitivity that happens to be beneath it, which appears to be everyone who isn’t a blank or a Necron.

So, folks: what do you think the Transcend, a hive mind collective consciousness with some additional relevant features, like a core brain the size of a star system and moon-sized local ganglia, looks like in the Warp?

(My take:

Best case, you have a Big Freakin’ Glow in the Warp, which is a lot nicer than the Tyranids’ shadow but which will still interfere with your day and is not to be fucked with.

Worst case (for the existing galactic powers): A weakly godlike superintelligence just got promoted to strongly godlike, and as the Warp’s first Order God/Constructive Power it has issues to raise with absolutely everyone.

We also might have to start calling its part of the galaxy the Eye of Harmony, but I think that name’s been used before…)

 

In The Grim Darkness of the Contact Form…

…there are only questions:

Huge fan of your nanofic and your worldbuilding is superb.

Thank you kindly!

That being said, however, I’ve also long been a fan of the less insane parts of the Warhammer 40K universe (in particular the Imperial Guard and Space Marines) for much the same reasons; in my estimation it offers a fairly well thought-out look into the military makeup of a combined-arms force built around the need to combat massed infantry durable enough to reliably close to knife-fighting range.

In a face-to-face matchup between the Imperial Legions and the Imperium, then, how do you think the dice would fall?

Well, now. I’m going to insert a couple of disclaimers up front, here. The first being the more-or-less obligatory one that it’s always hard to compare across universes where the physics and metaphysics are so different. (I’ll be basically ignoring the wackiness of the Warp, for example.) And the second is that I’m not all that familiar with 40K canon – grimdark not being really my thing – so most of what I know about the setting I learned from Ciaphas Cain.

Anyway.

At the top level, civilization vs. civilization as portrayed at the current place in both their timelines, I’d probably have to give it to the Imperium, simply because of size. It’s a galaxy-spanning regime versus a few hundred worlds, and quantity has a quality of its own. I think, for the below reasons, they’d win over a planet-sized mountain of their own dead, but it’s not like the Imperium has any shortage of commanders who subscribe to the We Have Reserves school of tactics.

(Of course, there’s always ADHÁÏC PARASOL and friends to worry about even then, so the Imperium may have some trouble afterwards with the galaxy’s new infestation of self-improving, self-replicating berserker fleets. This is the sort of ‘take everyone with you’ strategy that the Imperials would generally disapprove of, of course, but given the 40K galaxy’s parameters, I suspect they’d see it as civic improvement.)

If, though, we adjust things so the conflict in terms of civilization-scale is equal, or even less disproportionate, then the pendulum swings the other way. One can argue some advantages for either side (the Imperium certainly has an initial advantage due to being, well, highly optimized to hatemurderize basically anyone it comes across given the opportunity; the Empire arguably has a technological edge in various areas, such as preferring to expend readily replaceable machines rather than population; etc.), but ultimately, I think it comes down to these two things:

  • The Imperium has an impressive fighting machine, but it’s a stuck fighting machine. Their technology is stagnant and at best poorly understood even by the Adeptus Mechanicus, their tactics are also terribly by the book except when they get really lucky in choice of commanders, they have a religious proscription against adopting ideas from outside, and anyone who tries to change any of this runs hard into PURGE THE HERETIC. They get away with this because, well, it’s not like anyone else (with the possible exception of the Tau) in their galaxy innovates worth a damn either: the Eldar are stagnant, the Orks rely on genetic knowledge, etc., etc. Meanwhile, the Empire understands exactly how all its stuff works, and innovates, borrows, and steals good ideas from the enemy about as easily as breathing.
  • And the other one is that the Imperium’s fascist theocracy is a seething mass of factions, many of which appear to hate each other almost as much as they do the xenos, and all of whom are paranoid about hidden mutants and traitors. This is the sort of scenario that the Stratarchy of Warrior Philosophy adores, because they specialize in getting into all those little cracks and inflaming the hell out of them until they catch fire and explode. (The Empire’s a lot less susceptible to this sort of thing, and in any case, the Imperium doesn’t go in for it. Even if it tried, it’d probably have to regularly have all its memeticists shot for understanding the xeno outlook.)

To sum up – unless the Imperium is smart enough to realize that it had better use all its biggest hammers right away, and not telegraph its blows, it’s in deep trouble, because it’s fighting people who are scarily adaptive given even half a chance.

Or that’s how I’d read it, anyway.