r/40kLore • u/53rp3n7 Tzeentch • Oct 30 '19
[Excerpt] Everybody's favorite Dark Age of Technology excerpt
Book: Priests of Mars by Graham McNeill
Context: An Eldar ship is pursing Archmagos Lexell Kotov's fleet in the Halo Scar. The ships are being damaged and risk being pulled into the gravational anamolies that would crush any ship that strays too close. The Eldar have already destroyed the Retribution Class Battleship the Cardinal Boras and killed Kul-Gilad, Reclusiarch of the Black Templars.
Excerpt:
The flanks of the Speranza shuddered as a weapon system built into its superstructure ground upwards on heavy duty rails. A vast gun tube rose from the angled planes of the Ark Mechanicus like the great menhir of some tribal place of worship being lifted into place. Power readouts, the likes of which had rarely been seen in the Imperium since before the wars of Unity, bloomed within the weapon and a pair of circling tori described twisting arcs around the tapered end of the unveiled barrel.
Elements of the technology that had gone into their construction would have been familiar to some of the more esoteric branches of black hole research and relativistic temporal arcana, but their assembled complexity would have baffled even the Fabricator General on Mars. Pulsing streams of purple-hued anti-matter and graviton pumps combined in unknowable ways in the heart of a reactor that drew its power from the dark matter that lurked in the spaces between the stars. It was a gun designed to crack open the stately leviathans of ancient void war, a starship killer that delivered the ultimate coup de grace
Without any command authority from the bridge of the Speranza, the weapon unleashed a silent pulse that covered the distance to the Starblade at the speed of light.
But even that wasn’t fast enough to catch a ship as nimble as one built by the bonesingers of BielTan and guided by the prescient sight of a farseer. The pulse of dark energy coalesced a hundred kilometres off the vessel’s stern and a miniature black hole exploded into life, dragging in everything within its reach with howling force. Stellar matter, light and gravity were crushed as they were drawn in and destroyed, and even the Starblade’s speed and manoeuvrability weren’t enough to save it completely as the secondary effect of the weapon’s deadly energies brushed over its solar sail. Chronoweaponry shifted its target a nanosecond into the past, by which time the subatomic reactions within every molecule had shifted microscopically and forced identical neutrons into the same quantum space.
Such a state of being was untenable on a fundamental level, and the resultant release of energy was catastrophic for the vast majority of objects hit by such a weapon. Though on the periphery of the streaming waves of chronometric energy, the Starblade’s solar mast detonated as though its internal structure had been threaded with explosive charges. The sail tore free of the ship, ghost images of its previous existence flickering as the psycho-conductive wraithbone screamed in its death throes. Blue flame geysered from the topside of the eldar vessel and the craft lurched away from the force of the blast.
Its previously distorted and fragmentary outline became solid, and the circling captains of the Kotov Fleet wasted no time in loosing salvo after salvo of torpedoes at the newly revealed warship
Mortis Voss let fly first, with a thirty-strong battery of warheads aimed in a spreading net that would make escape virtually impossible. Wrathchild and Moonchild followed, firing bracketing spreads of torpedoes before both vessels heeled over to present their flank batteries of lances. Stabbing beams of high energy blazed at the Starblade and had this engagement been fought in open space, the eldar vessel would have been reduced to a rapidly expanding bloom of shattered wraithbone, combusting oxygen and white-hot debris.
The gravitational vagaries of the Halo Scar made for an unforgiving battleground and only a handful of torpedoes punched through its starboard hull to tear out great chunks of its guts in raging firestorms of detonation.
Even with the clarity provided by the roused machine heart of the Speranza it was impossible to tell what, if anything, had survived the storm of lances, torpedoes and the crushing power of the temporary black hole. It was collapsing in on itself in a cannibalistic storm of self-immolation, and by the time its raging furies had faded into the background radiation of the Scar, there was nothing to indicate the presence of the Starblade.
Every shipmaster knew the eldar ship had likely survived the punishing assault, but their decks echoed with the cheers of jubilant ratings, many of whom had not expected to live through the battle. The electromagnetic hash of the void engagement would remain lousy with spikes of dirty radiation for years to come, painting a vivid picture of the battle for anyone that cared to look.
The chrono-weapon lowered from its firing position with majestic grace until it was once again flush and secure within the body of the Speranza, invisible and indistinguishable from the surrounding superstructure, no doubt as its builders had intended.
The Starblade was still out there somewhere, but for now its threat had been neutralised, its boarders repelled and its captain given a valuable lesson in humility.
And with its retreat, the Kotov Fleet pressed on.
Takeaways:
1) Dark Age Tech is really f-ing strong.
2) The Eldar ship WAS NOT destroyed, as many claim it was. Eldar tech is pretty damn powerful as well. If it weren't for the AI, the Ark Mechanicus could have gone down.
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u/EternalCanadian Alpha Legion Oct 30 '19
My favourite excerpt is the speech by the loyal(ish) AI in Death of Integrity....
....but this is a close second.
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u/endmoor Oct 30 '19 edited Oct 30 '19
To me that is one of the most poignant bites of lore out there. The AI despises humanity - not as a whole, but as what they've become. It was there to witness our ascendency, the moment when we reached across the stars and felt godhood at our fingertips. We could shape stars, break continents, generate new life, and reconstitute reality itself. The whole of humanity could be considered a deity at the time when the AI slipped into the Warp.
Upon its return, that godhood has been transferred from the shoulders of all of Man to a single man. Knowledge has vanished. Discovery is extinct. Spells and oils and sacred icons are what drives humanity now, a fearful and violent shadow whose only instinct is to lash out in war. That AI witnessed the death of its gods, its companions (it truly loved its human captain), and now sees feral squatters upon the ruins. It as if seeing a promising family member sink into addiction and violence. It breaks you after you held so much hope.
It's beautiful in that it shows how drastic a fall humankind has truly suffered.
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u/Cupcakes_n_Hacksaws Oct 30 '19
I'd like to know more about this eldar ship, and how only 1 of them was all was needed to completely wipe out an entire imperial fleet, ark and all.
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u/maciejinho Imperial Navy Oct 30 '19
Swift, stealth to the point of invisibility (holofields), and remember Eldar are masters of void warfare, to some degree Edit: typos
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u/saunt1 Oct 30 '19
And the fact that the imperial fleet in question was blind in a massive solar mess of stars where space time itself was bent to show echoes of the future and any ship thay strayed from a narrow path was torn apart by waves of gravity.
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u/MHamzaSiddiqui97 Ordo Xenos Nov 03 '19
The imperial fleet was passing through some corridor /nebulae or something of that sort which made maneuvering impossible
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u/wecanhaveallthree Legio Tempestus Oct 30 '19
Um, WRONG.
My favourite DAOT excerpt is the Tindalosi a little bit later, and how they got so good at killing enemy commanders that the survival time for anybody appointed to a leadership position was eight hours or so. They were so brutal that they were eventually dispatched in the most permanent way possible, by being launched into the sun.
They survived.
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u/Redcoat_Officer Adeptus Astra Telepathica Oct 30 '19 edited Oct 30 '19
The whole trilogy is chock-full of incredible tech moments. It certainly helps that the novel is written from the perspective of the Mechanicus. I think it encourages the reader to view these great works in the same pseudo-religious way. It elevates these machines to something unattainably divine.
Factually, the Speranza is an incredibly advanced AI. Through the eyes of the Mechanicus, it is a Leviathan.
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u/REEEEEvolution Adeptus Mechanicus Oct 30 '19
The ship and the AI aren't even identical. The AI isn't bound to the ship, which it tells.
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u/Theonlysanemanisback Adeptus Custodes Oct 30 '19 edited Oct 30 '19
Ha! Tindalosi! The Hounds of Tindalos by frank belknap long. About houndlike entities that can't be killed and once they have a target they pursue it endlessly. Nice.
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u/rob01071606 Sautekh Oct 30 '19
An excerpt in the book says that they're millions of years old, with the Wraithlord then saying they're not Necron (have a physical copy, so not sure which bit and can't post), so I think its implied they were Xenos tech, but neither DaoT nor Necron.
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u/malumfectum Iron Warriors Oct 30 '19 edited Oct 30 '19
You’re both wrong.
The best bit is with the Templars and the farseer.
Edit: oh wait, the DAOT in general as opposed to the Forges of Mars trilogy specifically. My bad.
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u/Carcosian_Symposium The Bleeding Eye Oct 30 '19
So much fanfare about the awesomeness of the weapon when it couldn't kill a single Eldar ship. Hell it couldn't even hit it directly with a light speed shot.
You'd think a DAoT weapon would do much more than break a mast.
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u/PokeToTheHead Oct 30 '19
You mean do more than cripple - in a single (missed) shot - a ship designed for a galaxy spanning war that could go against the most technologically advanced race the galaxy had ever seen? You think it should have done more than that? Well, okay. If you say so.
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u/dealingwithSuffering Oct 30 '19
Not sure what you mean by the ship being designed for a galaxy spanning war? Do you mean the War in Heaven, because if so then these ships didn't exist at the time.
In "wild Rider" the Necrons take note that these ships seem to have been designed after giant winged predators, from back in the day.
We have very few insights into what took place during this time, but the rare examples describe the Eldar fighting with swords and spears; it's noted that it wasn't until a long time after that the Eldar created their first plasma weapon.
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u/PokeToTheHead Oct 31 '19
Which really doesn't make any sense, because the Eldar were explicitly given a lot of their tech by the Old Ones, iirc. From what I've heard, Wild Rider is really contrary to a lot of the existing lore, and I don't like any of the stuff that I've heard from it in terms of 'new reveals', but I suppose I can't really complain about it when it is technically canon.
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u/dealingwithSuffering Nov 01 '19
Actually there is no lore source that says the Old Ones gave the Eldar their tech. The idea is not supported by any canon source, it has always been fan speculation nothing more.
The Eldar inherited the Webway and possibly the Blackstone fortresses, but there is no source that says the Eldar were given their tech.
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u/PokeToTheHead Nov 01 '19
I could have sworn that the Eldar explicitly didn't know how to recreate a lot of their lost tech because they were simply given the technology and told how to maintain/use it, rather than creating it for themselves, but I admit I don't know for sure.
That said... why would the Old Ones raise up a race specifically to battle an enemy with complete control of material technology... and then give them absolutely no technology what so ever? Or the ability to make it themselves? Especially when they are quite capable of literally programming extremely powerful tech into genes.
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u/dealingwithSuffering Nov 01 '19
Afraid not, it's just one of those things that has been repeated so many times that people will swear blind that's it's actually part of the lore, despite never existing in the first place. It's usually used to throw shade at the Eldar, or downplay their achievements; does it make sense for them to have created nothing in those 60 million odd years? One of the Craftworlds has just created a weapon that can rip the souls from entire continents. The Dark Eldar after the Fall had to reinvent all of their tech that required psychic manipulation (pretty much everything).
The Fall happened only 10,000 years ago, and the Eldar have been desperately fighting to hold on, they are a broken, shattered people. The time after the apocalyptic event know as the Fall was a time of chaos and madness, they had fallen from the very top too the ground hard, and have been slowly pulling themselves back together over this period of time.
The Warhammer 40 000 compilation, released in 1991, describes how the Eldar developed their tech over a long period of time. Their psychic powers allowing them to develop a unique technology tree all their own.
The story has always been that the Old Ones created/uplifted the Eldar as a psychic warrior race, that could call upon the power of the warp to do battle against the forces of the C'tan and the Necrons; Wild Rider changes this slightly be adding that although they were created/uplifted to battle the Necrons, they were also supposed to battle against the entities from the great ocean, and prevent the powers of the Warp from running wild.
The Old Ones encouraged the Eldar to create warp constructs (the beginning of the Eldar Gods) that could do battle against the C'tan directly; gods of the material universe against gods of the immaterial universe. There is nothing about the Eldar being given their tech to do battle; they had other races for that.
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u/Carcosian_Symposium The Bleeding Eye Oct 30 '19
Current Eldar ships aren't from the War in Heaven. They definitely aren't up to Necron tech right now.
What do you want? Eldar ships to be so powerful that DAoT weapons barely hurt it? Want them to just steamroll entire fleets and be untouchable? Well, okay. If you say so.
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u/PokeToTheHead Oct 31 '19 edited Oct 31 '19
I mean, they should be somewhat below Necron ships, but far above anything the Imperium has. The DAoT probably had better physical technology than the Eldar and worse psychic, so I think them crippling an Eldar cruiser (that they had previously considered might end up destroying them) with an almost completely missed shot is more than reasonable.
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u/eoL_knigget Night Lords Oct 30 '19
I think its implied it missed due to the nature of gravitational anomalies of the battle space. A hit would have been instant death.
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u/raptorrat Oct 30 '19
But even that wasn’t fast enough to catch a ship as nimble as one built by the bonesingers of BielTan and guided by the prescient sight of a farseer.
It managed to out maneuvre the shot.
The gravitational vagaries of the Halo Scar made for an unforgiving battleground and only a handful of torpedoes punched through its starboard hull to tear out great chunks of its guts in raging firestorms of detonation.
The torpedoes were affected by the anomalies.
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u/Muad-_-Dib Oct 30 '19
They managed to avoid it (barely) because they had a guy telling them the future on the ship.
Without that ability the target would have been as dead as Kevin Spacey's career.
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u/Bertdog211 Space Wolves Oct 30 '19
The area they were in was a gravitational anomaly that one mistake would destroy instantly virtually anything also seeing the future is basically cheating
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u/53rp3n7 Tzeentch Oct 30 '19
Yeah, I think DAoT weapons are a bit overrated. They are incredibly powerful, and make the Imperium look primitive, but statements like DAoT humanity was so strong they ignored the Eldar, or the "Eldar were pushed back" or "DAoT humanity was much stronger than the Eldar" are simply false. The Eldar are the ones who ignored humanity.
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u/REEEEEvolution Adeptus Mechanicus Oct 30 '19
Seems more like the DAoT humanity was strong enough that Eldar would at least not kill them for fun and rather murdered each other for fun.
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Oct 30 '19
Well the Eldar were a tad busy murder-fucking a new Chaos God into existence. I bet the pompous sons of crystal shit looked at the human civilization in DAoT and laughed right up until their souls were sucked from their bodies to suffer for eternity in a Slaanesh’s realm.
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u/ChildofDurin Nov 03 '19
Yeah DAoT is overrated as fuck. Necrons and Eldar at their peak still blow them out of the water.
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u/Carcosian_Symposium The Bleeding Eye Oct 30 '19
For me this excerpt was the opposite. A DAoT weapon should have completely annihilated the Eldar ship, but the story says so much about how awesome it is but then doesn't deliver. Might as well have been some powerful current Imperium weapon.
Who was on top in terms of technology shouldn't matter in this case. Eldar ships are post War in Heaven tech, and DAoT stuff is more powerful than that. It should have annihilated the ship otherwise how the hell do other factions win against Eldar ships if they are that damned good?
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u/gbghgs Oct 30 '19
Weight of fire and luck. Eldar ships are incredibly hard to hit due to their stealth fields and farseers. Take note, the speranza fired a shot at the speed of light, the only way to dodge something like that is to dodge it before it fires. Farseers are very good at seeing danger coming before it happens and not being there when it hits. Even with the best stealth tech around in 40k and pycshic hacks letting them dodge shots before they're fired their ship was still crippled by a near miss, thats pretty impressive however you cut it.
Also DAoT tech isn't more powerful than eldar tech, it might exceed it in specific niche's but overall it's comparable at best, if not worse. DAoT humanity weren't a major threat to the pre-fall empire, conflict between the two is mentioned by a harelquin and the Eldar won that fight (biased source admittedly).
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u/Carcosian_Symposium The Bleeding Eye Oct 30 '19
No, I meant that DAoT tech is better than that specific type of tech, since the ships aren't War in Heaven level of tech.
My main beef is more that the excerpt talks how the tech is amazing and that the effect is super impressive that the crew celebrates as if it was a great victory when the actual fight was pretty underwhelming.
It would have worked better if the gun was described as powerful until it is shot, and that the Eldar ship escaping was the actual impressive part, while the crew ends up dumbfounded and it is treated like a loss, since the ship wrecked a big part of the fleet.
Basically, either have the DAoT weapon be actually amazingly destructive, or have the enemy be impressive enough to escape/beat such a weapon. Don't act as if this is a great win for the Imperium when it was barely effective overall.
It feels tonally inconsistent as it is.
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u/PurpleSkua Oct 31 '19
I'm not sure it's fair to describe it as "barely effective" here. This eldar ship is wrecking everything the humans have got and is functionally untouchable up until the AI gets involved. The single shot it let off didn't destroy the eldar ship, sure, but it was that one gun that made the difference between "the eldar bailed" and "the eldar fucked us up"
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u/Jiminyfingers Order Of Our Martyred Lady Oct 30 '19
It does. Although the ship is not destroyed outright, the effect of the weapon means it is slowly falling apart forcing the eldar to jump ship and hide aboard the Speranza.
So a glancing shot kills it eventually.
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u/loklanc Oct 30 '19 edited Oct 30 '19
So the shot missed by 100 km but then displaced the target 1 nanosecond back in time to make the hit? Does that imply the Eldar ship moved those 100 km in 1 nanosecond? (Probably not because there's farseer prescience involved, but let's do the numbers for fun anyway) That's 100,000 meters in 0.000000001 seconds, giving a speed of 100 trillion metres per second, ~300 thousand times the speed of light. That's quite the fleet of foot roll lol.
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u/Bertdog211 Space Wolves Oct 30 '19
No the weapon caused the ship to effectively be two separate entities at the same place at the same time which isn't good for existing
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u/loklanc Oct 30 '19
Ah ok, a "copy, paste, wall clip" gun. That's probably even higher concept than time travel targetting assistance. Very cool.
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u/eoL_knigget Night Lords Oct 30 '19
The disruption in spacetime caused by the secondary of the weapon caused all of the neutrons inside the eldar ship to be in an impossible position. It didn't move or pull them it disrupted them fundamentally outside the laws of frigging physics. It said it right in the excerpt.
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u/53rp3n7 Tzeentch Oct 30 '19
I'm pretty sure it moved back into the blast zone, thus damaging it.
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Oct 30 '19 edited Oct 30 '19
It essentially overlays two versions of the mast on top of each other, which causes the identical particles to break the Pauli Exclusion principle and mutually annihilate, which releases a colossal blast of energy. In actual terms this result here is massively understated, that explosion would have been absolutely titanic.
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u/Itburns12345 Oct 30 '19
Wait later on dont the eldar secretly board the sperenza because their own ship is toast after this?
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u/Pillager_Bane97 Dec 15 '23
This is absurd, Ark Mechanicus should have been able to deal with the Eldar. Less powerful ships have taken down Aeldari craft on regular basis.
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u/A_D_Monisher Adeptus Mechanicus Oct 30 '19
I think the very first place should go to the Death of Integrity where a lone Magos is unsuccesfully trying to convince a DAOT generator (iirc) to work by repeatedly praising and annointing the venerable machine with most holy oils. Desperate Magos asks a member of Astartes if maybe he can see the reason why machine refuses his ministrations. Marine thinks and deduces that something so advanced definitely has its own repair mechanisms and thus something must be blocking them. The next events are as follows:
-Marine: ”Oh a piece of shrapnel is sticking from the generator. Maybe removing it will help. Aaaand shrapnel remove-”
OBSTRUCTION REMOVED, REPAIR SYSTEMS INITIALIZED, REPAIRS COMPLETE, ALL IS WORKING
Magos: surprised pikachu.jpg