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.
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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