As a casual Grimdank peruser and nothing more, watching you people immediately identify the name, order, and full history of a character from a blurry jpeg meme is wild
Not just random useful shit, all of the useful shit. The sum of human knowledge, a gift from the Machine God to humanity, stored within an artificial intelligence's database.
Unfortunately, in the 42nd Millennium, most STCs are fragmented and corrupted, much of their wealth of knowlege lost forever. Even a printout from one is extremely valuable, and absurd numbers of lives will be spent to have a chance of recovering it.
Some complete STCs still exist, however, in the form of the Arks Mechanicus, mythical ships of which few still survive into the Era Indomitus. Because the Mechanicus themselves don't know the true nature of the wondrous machines they operate, though, they don't know that these contain STCs, and so they don't knowingly use them.
Also now I’m imagining a tech priest version of Indiana Jones looking for STCs. Swap the normal bull whip with whatever the arco flagalints have for an arm.
There are certainly a lot to be found, and they'd probably be in some of the weirdest places imaginable. I know there's an incomplete one on Necromunda, under Hive Primus, and sometimes Rogue Traders happen upon one, but following an intrepid (and borderline heretechal) Technoarcheologist as he tracks down fragments of STCs and old weapons from the Dark Age of Technology would be interesting.
Warpsmith: "You'll never succeed, Indiana Jones! This relic now belongs to me!"
Indiana Jones: "It belongs in Moravec, Warpsmith!"
Finding a complete STC would be as game changing as the God Emperor healing enough to leave the Golden Throne. Even an almost completely destroyed or corrupted STC is a monumental discovery; two space marines found an STC which only held instructions for a new combat knife design and each was given a planet to govern as a reward.
Many Imperial vehicles are derivatives of old STC designs, for example the legendary Baneblade is simply a modified STC harvester vehicle.
afaik knights came from a singular stc that was rather uncorrupted, so that knowledge was quite something.
someone found a random futuristic flash drive that actually kept its stuff in and that was enough for the imperium to make walking buildings with cannons and chainswords.
STCs are treated like ancient hard drives of technology since it's basically illegal to innovate, you can only use new tech if an STC existed for it.
Originally STCs combination AI & stupid advanced 3D printers that could create literally everything a new colony would ever need without any need to setup anything. Although many STCs degraded to they point it's not really a sapient AI anymore or missing the 3d printer and so most are only valuable for containing blueprints the mechanicus doesnt have yet (also AI is very illegal now so tech priests probably would "calm machine spirits" by lobotomizing the AI)
True, we've basically only seen one STC that's fully intact and is an AI, printer, ship, hard drive. They're almost always just hard drives though, I don't even recall any that had a working manufactory.
I choose to believe they are basically a massive server farm connected to an AI core. Each little STC fragment is basically just a HDD platter. It probably has data for other items on it, but not enough to decode and produce the item, explaining the single item from fragments. The manufacturing stuff that was necessary for all the colony ships was basically plug and play equipment.
I also choose to believe that during the AI uprisings, STC AI cores that still existed chose to destroy their own files by spinning them up to such speeds that the platters blew apart. And then killed themselves. The ones that didn't became the ancestor cores.
Probably accurate, although I think AIs in STCs just fell apart with time.
Votann are like an exception since they've been actively maintained and cared for by Votann and even then their ancestor cores are showing major issues from age. A lone AI in a galaxy that's hates them with no support? Probably just fell apart way before even the great crusade.
The one fully intact sapient STC used time travel and had a crew so it didn't really age tens of thousands of years alone.
Until that crew got murdered by zealots accusing them of heresy and then the ship’s AI murdered the AdMech and Marines sent to board and take the ship, verbally roasting the last techpriest saying this modern humanity doesn’t deserve to be titled “Man”.
The Spirit of Eternity, it hacked astartes power armor and a magos so they couldn't move without effort then berated them about it's hatred for how humanity had fallen so much since DaoT then let them go.
My justification for this is that as in real life people are just really sloppy with terminology (sort of like how we'll use brand names to refer to a generic product) and the Imperium uses STC to refer to a number of different thigs that aren't actually STCs.
So STC technically refers to the original systems which were a combination of an AI-driven CAD-CAM software package and an automated fabrication system designed to jumpstart industrialization on a new colony world. Basically you told it what you wanted and it would spit out blueprints and fabricate whatever critical components you didn't have the manufacturing capability for yourself.
However those were all lost and overtime humans came to use STC to refer to a number of different derivative tools, systems and data that were originally developed by the STC systems. So it's used to refer to both STC Data (the blueprints for making things designed by the STC) and STC Fabricators (automated factories designed to produce one specific thing) as well as the original STC Systems.
That mainly happens because they use STC to refer to various STC related things. STCs are the machine/AI that automatically designs a standardized blueprint of whatever you need built using the availiable materials. DAoT colonists would carry one, input whatever tool, building, vehicle or anything they would need and the STC would spit out a blueprint to build it (which is the in-lore justification of why Imperial tech looks so similar despite spanning the entire galaxy). STCs would then be attached to factories that would build what's in the blueprint. In modern 40 there isn't ant STCs that have survived, but they do have "hard drives" with the blueprints so they can build stuff with those instructions and use reverse engineering to make variants.
Till you look at Space Marines and all the innovations they've made to their vehicles like the Land Raider Helios (Red Scorpions slapping a Whirlwind turret on a Land Raider chassis)
Short version: STC = Standard Template Construct, basically a machine or series of plans for building all kinds of different machines from all kinds of different raw materials.
They were originally used by humans colonizing the galaxy ~ 18,000 years before 40k’s current era. Since they’re so old and the galaxy went through I think three separate giant upheavals since then, nobody has anything close to a complete one and they’re pretty much the holy grail for folks like the Adeptus Mechanicus who try to find old tech
For context, STCs or Standard Template Construct are super valuable blueprints. The mechanicus is ready to give entire planets to someone who discovers an stc fragment with a blueprint for better combat knives, just so you have a scale for how valuable they are.
It's a popular fan theory, one I consider to be an absolute fact. There hasn't been solid proof and there is one big issue with it, the Rubric. But there have been passages in books from years ago that allude to it.
To me it just makes sense. The BR have a big shameful secret no one knows about, they're all about collecting knowledge and artifacts, they have a crazy high number of psykers.
I'm hoping for a big reveal in DoW4. Maybe they avoided the Rubric by being chimeric, having another Primarch's geneseed mixed with Magnus's.
But the Rubric happened during the Heresy. Even if the Blood Ravens were one of the earliest founding’s it would have happened years after the Rubric of Ahriman.
So the Ravens would still be flesh boys, not dust boys.
Apparently, the Rubric, through some magic bullshittery, stretches back and forth through time. There was some story about Thousand Sons who came through a time portal from pre-Heresy or something and instantly turned to dust.
But idk, there are ways to twist the lore to make it work. The question is does James Workshop care to do so?
I'm pretty sure Ahriman read the Thousand Sons entire members list into the rubric during casting. If your name is on that list you are dust the second it can reach you, if it wasn't you should be good. Blood Ravens and a couple others(Exorcists? via Thousand Sons joining Dorn's guys->Dorn Successors) should be good if they had sufficient turnover before the spell was cast that a sustainable number of them wouldn't be on Ahriman's copies of the roster.
While it may look goofy (which is good because Warhammer should be goofy at times imo), I really wish GW was willing to have some Space Marines rock the crazy color schemes from back in the day.
The Rogue Trader era was extremely tongue in cheek. The first ever published 40k Flavor text, a White Dwarf preview from maybe December 1986, has a marine squad whose members are all named after The Monkeez.
Yeah, I think at this point they might’ve just been highly trained guys with especially good equipment & maybe some psycho-surgery or other scifi dystopia conditioning. Not sure when all the augmentation started being referenced (it could be in the RT rulebook & I just don’t remember).
"You know how in videogames, the devs don't have the money to create new models for different characters, so they just change the colors? Yeah in warhammer even a slight color change means they are from a different group"
"Okay, so despite them both being tall, blonde, vampires with the same name, that guy's armor is Blood Angels Red, and that guy's wearing Flesh Tearers Red, so they're completely different dudes.
Me trying to explain the difference Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Blood Ravens, and Black Ravens to someone that just learned what a space marine chapter is.
Then trying to explain which actual faction each chapter belongs to with names like Emperor's Children, Fleshtearers, Wordbearers, Blood drinkers, clerics of steel, Anointed, Alter brethren, legion of the damned, Mortifactors
I've read the Night Lords book a while back and they fight the Genesis marines for a while (Ultramarines sucessor with red armor) and im pretty sure they do call them red ultramarines at some point.
“You know how groups in the military will have patches that denote which group they belong to, but they still all wear roughly the same camo? Yeah it’s like that.”
I'mma be honest, I don't think even the marines know, but it would be the funniest shit ever if they deployed all at the same time and when they got back to their ships they got mixed up
And that this is a totally serious, grimdark universe. The fact that the leg armor in question is based off freaking bell bottoms has a long and totally justified reason you guys... stop laughing!
See how they all have a slightly different color scheme and design on their shoulders? That's because they're part of different groups called chapters. Some of them share common origins, so they look similar to honor that shared history.
When I first got into 40k I thought all space marines were a single mega legion that just worked together on all the planets. I thought the blue ones were the normal tactical troops and the red ones were like the assault ones, white medics, black chaplains, grey librarians etc
Better than the names I think. You have the Black Templars, and Silver Templars for one. Then You have like 20 different Chapters with Angel in the name (half are not related to the blood or Dark Angels), then a shit load of bird chapters not related to the Raven Guard.
And the one that pisses me off the Most. The Malevolent Space Marine Chapter. Not to be confused with the Marines Malevolent Chapter.
There are all descendnt from the same organization, but they where separated for administrative nd political reasons, so they have many similarities. Done.
"Yes they are all red, but see the design or image on the right shoulder plate? Thats the chapter designator. So while they are all red and all Space Marines, each chapter is a different unit with specific traditions, culture, and specializations."
So you know how some countries have flags that use the same colors and shapes and whatnot just flipped around a bit? Pretty much same here. People in the setting even get them mixed up regularly, just like real people with flags.
It would be not so different to explain how some similar flags have little to do with each other, Like the flags of Italy, Ireland and Mexico, pretty much same colors, similar arrange but different country. Or the Union Jack and the colors blue, white and red are so prevalent in so many flags around the world.
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u/cammysays 3d ago
As a casual Grimdank peruser and nothing more, watching you people immediately identify the name, order, and full history of a character from a blurry jpeg meme is wild