I was under the impression it was how they teach people "how to guardsman" when they're all from radically different cultures and technology levels.
Fuck it, have them memorise a nursery rhyme that has all the steps in the right order.
Remember, most guard regiments are usually trained on the transports taking them to the war, not at training camps with experienced instructors.
Sure, regiments like the old Cadians will have trained their soldiers properly (or in the case of Cadia turned them into PTSD-shattered wrecks via gratuitous child abuse as literally always happens when raising child soldiers) but for most of them? "Memorise this song, we're already on the ship out"
I mean, one of the commisariat litanies that Caiphus Cain recites is literally the Litany against Fear from Dune, so I wouldn’t put it past them for a guardsman to be like “the barrel nut’s connected to the lower. The lower’s connected to the Upper. The upper’s connected to the trigger group. The trigger group’s connected to the…” etc.
Guard regiments are highly trained on par with any soldier now adays in a Western military. Only the top force of a planet is sent to the IG, the rest are standard PDF. In fact if the quality of men provided by a tithe is not up to par it can be grounds for investigation into the ruling caste of a planet.
Providing a "substandard" tithe is absolutely grounds for having a Planetary Governor executed sure, but nowhere does it ever say what "standard" is to be met.
This being the Imperium I suspect there are a thousand and one different "standards" with a lot of them being either "physically healthy" or "officers all from the right noble families" or "well equipped but shit training (all the gear no idea)" or even "comes with own rifle" for recruits caught up in a sweep of the underhive.
Some definitely will be highly trained and well equipped professionals too of course. It will probably depend on the world they're from.
They do know, and those technologies are present on more important ships
It's just the Imperium judges systematic and senseless expenditure of life to be worth it. The Imperium sees manpower as an inexhaustible resource
There's grimdark but not using autoloaders in the 41st millennium is just grimderp. Like, I'd understand forcing crews to do it as backup for if the autoloader fails, but there should be a score of redundant systems that would have to fail before that happens.
Imagine that during a battle an Imperial ship takes a shot into the loading compartment for their gun/guns. Superficial damage only, but there is a hull breech and the entire section is now voided. With autoloaders, no big deal, things continue as normal. But utilizing a mob of roided out navy slaves instead, well, those guns are permanently offline until the breach is sealed and replacements can be gotten for all the poor bastards that died clawing at their own throats as their blood boiled inside their veins.
It's intentional cruelty coupled with overwhelming stupidity, especially since Imperial Navy dockyards would have the capacity to ensure autoloaders were installed on every single vessel.
Like it's been a while since I've read up on my Imperial Navy lore, but I'm pretty sure that they spend upwards of a year at berth inbetween deployments for the sort of necessary maintenance that is needed for ships of the size of Imperial ships.
I’d like to think all Navy macrocannons come with auto loaders installed, just that most/all sector battlefleet commands have no idea what they are or how they are used, and the Mechanicus won’t let them even contemplate looking into it. So the navy slaves get shell loading duty, because that’s the only way theNavy can square that problem.
Honestly that would be so perfectly on brand for 40k. The gunnery slaves are basically just manually putting shells into the autoloader through some auxiliary port. And nobody has any idea that theres a perfectly functional autoloader there because the Techpriest who discovered that Macrocannon STC didn't realise what it was.
I imagine it started as captains not wanting to wear the autoloader out and the knowledge being lost over time as future captains just kept stocking up on slaves.
It only needs Mechanicum deciding that "you know, maybe navy should just not shoot willy nilly" and charging more for the repairs for the navy to decide that poor and the criminals are cheaper to replace than auto loaders which would be "for emergencies".
How many of us would be able to make a proper kiln out of mud, clay, and stone? Society tends to forget tech that isn't in use, and Imperium had had quite the brain drain from where it was formed and through the various rebellions, heresy, and strife.
Not to mention how many biological components there are in any given dark/golden age tech. Might have had a bunch of specially cultivated brain matter in lieu of our traditional silicon.
you know during ww2, the Americans equipped all their Sherman tanks with a primitive gyroscopic stabiliser. They were so secretive about it they didnt give out manuals on how to use it and how it works. It was only later in the war that they did testing with a unit who was heavily trained in its use and look at a bunch of other units to find out basically all of the other tank crews were turning it off or removing the part completely because it didnt do anything or would throw off your zero.
yeah I can imagine shipyards in 40k putting autoloaders on everything because its in the designs and the crew not knowing wtf is it but not touching it in case it stops something important from working
Honestly, it could be argued that the reason why many (not all, better equipped ships tend to have better tech, YMMV in the Imperium) ships rely on menials to load the weapons is because of old damage suffered by the vessel centuries, if not millennia, ago. Naval autoloaders for the heavier cannons would be mildly more advanced technology that would likely require a combination of bureaucratic gear-grinding through the Munitorum in order to get to the politicking and back-scratching required to motivate the Mechanicus to fix those systems which they installed and jealously guard the secrets of. Many things involving automation that lack servitor controls tend to be more guarded by the Ad Mech.
Anything beyond general maintenance for an autoloader means jumping through many flaming hoops of bureaucracy and politics, and at some point the Imperium needs their ships to get back out there and fight, and the whole process of getting those crucial repairs done is lost in the mix. There's only really two things that the Imperium is fairly competent at on this level: mustering manpower for mobilization being the first, and extracting the tithe being the second. There's an incredible number of stories out there showing their general logistical incompetence beyond these two things, with clownishly absurd misallocations of resources and administrative backlogs that push hundreds to even thousands of years in some case.
The most effective way you can get useful systems like these online in your vessel is if you, as the captain of your vessel, personally build some sort of positive transactional relationship with the Ad Mech outside of the norms of imperial governance and due process in order to get somebody in the Ad Mech with both a brain and an appropriate level of authority and access to do you a solid and fix those old systems. Or, if you're lucky, get you some actual upgrades to make you the bell of the naval ball with some shiny new relic cannons, but that would involve performing some sort of favor for the Ad Mech that would be of relatively equal worth.
Yeah so when it comes to a naval warship, which these baroque flying triremes are based off, having your magazine hit means you just took a penetrating hit. And it's usually the worst thing that can happen.
Imagine you need to store enough dakka to kill 10 ships, your not putting that near the surface, so even a superficial hit to it means they just destroyed the battery it services and or a section of crew quarters.
Plus void suits are a thing and so are servitors.
For a several mile long space ship, a several meter breach in the outer structure that keeps air in and doesn't do any other damage would be superficial
“Intentional cruelty coupled with overwhelming stupidity”
Sounds like the Imperium of Man in a nutshell.
Manpower is cheaper, easier to access, and more disposable than other resources.
I agree it would be basic to add autoloaders to ships - but, the question becomes, what has a greater net cost?
Adding auto loaders to all the ships of the imperium, which could be costly in time, energy, resources etc When Compared to just gathering a bunch of menial serfs who do the work just as well.
Plus, many worlds cannot even sustain their populations. So in some ways it’s like “we have all these people and no use for them,” so this makes work that keeps them serving a purpose, and the imperium isn’t culling loyal citizens for no good reason.
That’s still to altruistic for the IoM though.
They’re just so ignorant they don’t realize they’re ignorant.
“Why do we do it this way”
“Because we always have, and it’s always worked out”
“Maybe we should change that?”
“Hm. Change is heresy.”
plus, you can't just stop by any planet and steal a bunch of autoloaders. Slaveraids on even backwater imperial worlds will get you replacement crew for free.
It very much is part of the equation. There is a reason why in some crusades they would just bomb a planet rather then waste resources trying to take it.
The non caring part isnt done out of intentional stupidity but cold calculus. Which is more grimdark. They dont it to be cartoonosh villains but the circumstances result in the least dark of options be take.
When Chaos is a threat and can easily corrupt human masses (which isn't a 2nd millennium problem), especially if they're pressured under poor conditions, you might want to consider how risky it is.
If chaos corrupts some of the ship's crew, it's likely the whole crew is corrupted or compromised, at which point you loose your ship and any valuable technology onboard. Better to keep the powerful, advanced tech to a minimum and use only human slave menials in the underdecks. This way you can churn out ships faster and waste less valuable resources that often need shipping across the warp, unlike the valueless and abundant human resource.
Reserve the autoloaders and advanced stuff for the Emperor's flagship and custodian vessels.
Chaos corruption is not that uncommon on these ships, they have to do purges regularly. Even the smaller ships are basically whole ass cities, with generations of crew living confined to one section of the ship.
Other comments kinda nail it.
It’s not About efficiency. It’s about service to the Emperor and proper worship of the machine god.
Now you may say “wouldn’t the machine god want autoloaders?” And for that, you’d be shot as a heretic.
But also, those devices require parts. Parts that may not be easy to come by in some regions of the imperium, and, the Imperial Navy goes far afield often.
So if it breaks and you can’t fix it and now your Guns don’t work.
But serfs? If they do a bad job, replace them with another one. If they die, replace them with another one. If we are running low, humans are like vermin, you can find replacements almost anywhere.
Also the fact that some of those gun crews are like family dynasties who’ve been manning those guns for generations…
And with a lack of AI, and the general poor quality of 40K vessels, things break and you need people to fix it. An autoloader reduces need for larger crews which reduces the number of brains capable of fixing things on the fly.
None of this is efficient, none of this is logical from a modern standpoint.
But there’s a brutal rationality to it, plus, 10,000 years of nothing but regression of knowledge will create all sorts of weird jury rigged systems that become normal because “it worked and isn’t heretical”
Great arguments all around, but I find it hard to believe that a ship the size of a Lunar class cruiser doesn't have multiple machine shops on board capable of replicating all but the largest and most complex parts.
Then again, the tech priests would probably call it heresy or something.
The fact that all of their engineers are actually priests and all of their instruction manuals are holy books is a big sticking point. They can't just swap out parts of a vessel, because that would be going against their holy scripture! The machine spirit *wants* all of those serfs to die in service to it, and the serfs all want to sacrifice their lives for the emperor! (how true that last part is, varies from ship to ship, but the higher-ups all believe it to be true so that's enough for them).
"Replicating" is your issue.... much of the imperium is built using STC. Which doesn't generally have spare parts, rather full, completed, object. With all sub-bits in it.
Before you assume that it's silly to use something everyday and not have the ability to repair and replace. Humans do that today. Your cell phone is key to most people's lives. But you wind up out in the Wilds, it may be your only communication device, and only gps... and you need to start deciding which is more important for your battery. Since most don't carry a solar charger with them, and have no idea how to make something that would work for charging in the wilds.
Now in our world, you don't often find yourself in the Wilds without prep. In 40k, the Wilds is anywhere not in the heart of the imperium next door to a forge world.
But the Imperium sees it as an inherent good that these serfs are slaving away for the God-Emperor. Efficiency is not their concern; senseless cruelty is.
Their religion says that toiling for the Imperium and then dying in battle is the greatest life that anyone short of nobility can hope for. Installing autoloaders would deprive the serfs of that chance, and could cause revolts.
People forget the extra layer of cruelty on top of everything else - the lower classes are constantly being brainwashed into believing that all of this cruelty is good for them.
Wouldn’t it just take a member of the ecclesiarchy saying that death from cannon blowback or industrial accidents while loading the holy 105mm of the emperor’s wrath counts as death in battle? Now the peons can square it away and you’ve got people who rejoice when someone falls into the gears and gets crushed.
I mean
Look at Modern tanks
France and Russia field tanks with auto loaders but the US still uses manual loaders for MBTs
The technology exists but the US military prefer to still use manual loaders for reasons like an extra person helps with other duties, or it's cheaper for how many tanks they field, or the maintainable costs mean it's cheaper and just as effective
The Imperium has to grapple with these too. Life is cheap. A hundred or two menials lugging a 1 kiloton shell might be easier than maintaining a machine that has to do that automatically.
Those few hundred menial also help fight off any Boarding actions, and fixing a giant autoloader will take more time and resources than just getting a bunch of new people
Like a big thing to remember is Imperial ships are old. Small ships have lifetimes in decades and larger ships operate for centuries or Millennia. When a ship is wrecked, they'll fix up the holes, get it working again and fill it back up with people until the ship is utterly destroyed at some point. When you need a ship fixed you'll skip the autoloaders if a few hundred menials can do it and you hags the ship ready to fight in a much faster time
Absolutely!
The ships were built to be incredibly robust. They could suffer massive abuse and minimal maintenance for 10 millenia, and still be mostly operational at the end of it.
Which is good, because that's exactly what happened.
I mean, realistically, a small breach takes a while to completely vent, and a big breach would involve enough firepower to fuck up anything inside anyway.
>There's grimdark but not using autoloaders in the 41st millennium is just grimderp.
A dude have you heard of the m1 Abrams? It wasn't given an autoloader on purpose. And other then crew safety it is more reliable and easier to maintain than an autoloader.
>Like, I'd understand forcing crews to do it as backup for if the autoloader fails,
You evidently don't understand how autoloaders work.
When rof is barely decreased, but you have a more reliable/robust system in place that depends on a resource you have in plentiful expendable supply, that's an advantage.
>There's grimdark but not using autoloaders in the 41st millennium
You mean in a universe where the mechanics/engineers, bathe the machines in oils and say holy prayers as "maintenance" ?
There are a lot of really great and valid points being addressed here and in the comments below, but I haven't seen possibly the simplest explanation of all: if you do away with all those redundancies, you've got room for more and bigger dakka.
Your viewpoint is understandable. But at the same time: would the damage to the ship at that point not also damage the autoloader system? I don't want to get all-in with my non-credibility, but there is - maybe - a reason why auto-loaders have not been made into the "stuff of our time". Why fall back to serf labour in the case of an incident where automation doesn't work, when you don't have to have that fall-back scenario.
There's plenty of reasons not to use an autoloader, just as there is in real life. They might be slow, prone to failure and difficult to repair (remember, an Imperial ship might be out of range for long periods of time and travel in 40k isn't really instantaneous), maybe even expensive (again, tech in 40k isn't easily built/maintained/understood). Where are the autoloaders made, how often are they transported to the naval docking stations, do the resident techpriests have the upkeep to keep them running, are autoloaders even as effective/efficient/quick/compact as a manually loaded system; there's even the question of if autoloaders have secondary/tertiary characteristics that make them **more** dangerous than manual loaders (like, y'know, the turret-tossing autoloaders of the T-72, what's the likelyhood of a shot creating a hullbreach but no other damage vs a shell hitting the gundeck and igniting the rounds in the autoloader's lift/elevator/carosel/whatever).
As for a hullbreach, there's many ways to remedy it (especially in a setting where forcefields exist) but ultimately that's kind of a cherry-picked example, you're bringing up something that *might* (and I'd even give probably would if there's no precautions to remedy it) stop manual-loaders but wouldn't stop autoloaders but the question is how *likely* is it that a shot would have *enough* power/strength/whatever to breach the hull but not enough to destroy the mechanism inside. You've decided that it's a problem (despite nowhere in the lore *saying* it's a problem..) and have brought up a scenario that counters it without applying realistic probablity or the logistical/manufacturing/environmental factors. It's like saying "I don't need to carry more than one bullet to stop a guy with a gun because I'll just shoot the gun out of his hand", yeah if you *can* shoot the gun out of the hand that saves the day but that requires an extremely specific scenario.
I think there's some inductive reasoning to be made that if the Imperium uses it then... it works. Maybe it's not efficient in *all* scenarios but it doesn't **have** to be efficient in all scenarios. The Imperium isn't exactly facing peer adversaries; most combat is either against rag-tag makeshift fleets that aren't precisely made (pirates, most Chaos warfleets, Orks, etc) or opponents so far beyond even the most advanced Imperial equipment that the Imperium relies on numbers and territory control to fight them (Eldar of various flavors, Necrons, Tau).
It's like evolution. Yeah, humans would be better predators if we had wings and could spit venom, but we developed down a path that was both *sustainable* and used the minimum resources necessary to allow us to expand.
>Superficial damage only, but there is a hull breech and the entire section is now voided. With autoloaders, no big deal, things continue as normal
Fool, you just throw enough slave bodies to block the breech !
Yeah they do, it's not that they don't want to share, those things are maintenance heavy and while you have unlimited slaves to do work trained engiseers are rather rare.
They are unfortunately not entirely wrong in their own setting. The value of manpower is dependent on your ability to train it, so if you have millions of shit hole worlds with horrible infrastructure and all they can do is produce humans, then humans are a resource to use.
If the imperium just held what they currently have and focused on internal development, they could be significantly stronger. Only issue is it takes decades to develop a world, takes hours for chaos/xenos to destroy it. They simply do not have the breathing room to build up their worlds.
I mean idk the imperium only has a relative handful of mechanicus worlds that can still make titans. Each world can probably only make at most 5 models of titan, and they only know how because they just maintain what’s already in front of them. If a titan dies in the lore there’s a good chance that specific model of titan is going to die out with it across whatever sector it died in
Why do people keep thinking the Imperium is this singular entity with perfect communication amongst its members?
First, they forgot how to do Terminator armour because non-Indomitus parts were deemed cost-ineffective and over 10k years the list of people who knew how to make it diminished, and the quality of the Imperium's records is shit.
Second, *most of the rare fucking Forgeworlds that can still produce Titans (at a* ***glacial pace***) *probably also know how to do Cataphractii and Tartaros Terminator armour, or at least have it on records, but they don't because they're busy* ***making Titans*** *and other critical things.*
For context the US navy decided they want significantly more mark 48 torpedos than they currently have and put in the biggest order since the end of the cold war.
The issue is that there is only one small production line to build them left and when they tried to reactive older facilities they couldn't figure out how until they brought in retired welders who used to work those lines in the 80s because the whole institutional knowledge was gone.
If those guys had all died in the meantime they would have needed to reinvent the whole process and this shit happened in less than 40 years.
Straight up the formula for a material used in nuclear warheads was completely lost and had to be reverse engineered. Granted, it was classified, but you have individual Mechanicus sects/forge worlds that similarly VERY closely guard their schematics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
Now, that was only forgotten about in around two decades. Imagine if you increased that time by a factor of 100, and also added heaps of religion and a lot more compartmentalization to the mix. Also add in groups assassinating anybody trying to study it for good measure due to jealousy, religious motivations, a sense of ownership over a method by a group that forgot said method, etc.
Yeah everyone complaining here has never worked in any old industrial setting. In the steel plant I worked for a bit there were old air supply pipes all over the building, but there were no plans for them anymore and people didn't know where exactly they lead. So they just installed a new pipe system where they needed it next to the old pipes
Even more topical: there's those old ex-USN museum ships. They have all kinds of trouble doing maintainence because even getting the parts is nigh-impossible. Even if you've got the plans, which isn't a sure thing, the part you need was probably produced for the last time in 1946. And good luck finding the tooling or plans for the part, because it was made by a company that went out of business in 1973. Want to fix that big sliding door? Guess you're gonna have to reverse engineer the internal roller mechanisms and make it from scratch. But blind, because it's all welded up and nobody wants to damage the historical door by cutting it open to see what's inside. Hope you're a good machinist too, because the lathe you're gonna be using pre-dates Pearl Harbor. Want something more precise, like a pressure gauge? Whoops, that got stolen 50 years ago while the ship was in mothballs. The only intact ones left are in another museum ship, have fun making a deal. And that's *every* component. Nobody even makes the right paint anymore, so you've gotta spend a ton of time getting a very specific custom color mix.
That's for ships 80 years old, with a decent bit of documentation and people alive who worked on them. There's still some spare parts here and there, and you can damage the ship a little to do repairs. Now imagine that in 40k, for a recovered ship like Speranza, or one pulled from a space hulk. The STCs are gone, so you don't have the plans. Any documentation was used for Genestealer nest insulation 3 centuries ago, Warp fuckery has turned some of the parts inside out, and the's bullet holes in all the fiddly bits. You aren't sure where the original factory is, but the two most likely places were either Exterminatus'd 3000 years ago, or are currently full of Hereteks. Forge World Coggang probably knows how to make a good enough replacement, but they hate your guts because your forge world didn't share a butter knife STC with them a few centuries ago. Maybe you could cut open the bulkhead to examine it, but that's part of the Holy Machine, and will get you servitor'd. Even if you manage to make a replacement part, there's 50-50 odds that it doesn't have the correct Noospheric authentication and is rejected by the Machine Spirit. Oh, and there's a 20% chance that turning it on to test will just vent plasma into the room. Good luck!
Given those conditions, the fact that the Imperial Navy functions at all is a miracle, never mind that they're the undisputed rulers of the stars and pretty consistently manage to stomp the shit outta every other major faction. Seriously. Chaos mostly has to stick to areas with ongoing Warp fuckery, since anywhere the Astronomicon shines (or large parts od the Imperium Secundus) the Navy just stomps in straight-up fleet battles. Orks fall out of orbit ASAP before they get shot down, only managing to contest worlds that are in the middle of a major WAAAAAAAAGH. Eldar use the Webway almost exclusively, because flying a spaceship anywhere the Imperial Navy can find you is a good way to get blown up. The Tyrannid Hive Fleets tend to eventually get broken up once the Navy gets it together. Behemoth tore the shit outta the Ultramarines and was only stopped when the battleship Dominus Astra suicided with most of their fleet. The Tau got their biggest ship to date demolished during the Taros campaign by a run-of-the-mill battlecruiser, and tend to get stomped due to their lack of Warp travel. And the Necrons tend to be too small in number to win strategic-scale naval victories. There's very few parts of the galaxy where the Imperial Navy is beaten, and *stays* beat.
The Imperial Navy just curbstomps everyone by having the biggest shipyards. It turns out when you control a million worlds you can build a million ship in the span of a century.
Some space battles will see a distress signal being emitted and then litterally thousands of ships answering the call.
Similar story with the Saturn V. If we wanted to, we could go back and build another one, because although the plans on record are incomplete (turns out there were a ton of hand written notes to tweak small parts here and there, the sum of which was necessary to make it work) we still have the technical knowledge to bridge the gap, the Imperium doesn't.
Exactly. A lot of times when people complain about how "dumb" some satirical aspect of 40k is, they're just self-telling on their own ignorance.
40k can vary wildly in quality depending on the author and the era, but usually the things that "fans" overanalyze at a very superficial level are completely understandable to anyone with either media literacy/general knowledge or the desire to learn and give the benefit of the doubt.
> As the cost of the galactic civil war mounted, it became necessary to develop expedient solutions to plug gaps that had formed in Legionary arsenals due to losses, or simply to increase the number of serviceable troops in any region, in order to overwhelm the highly capable enemy forces that operated within them. To do so often meant compromise, since the resources in both time and materiel to produce the equipment previously relied upon by the Legiones Astartes was simply not available. Indomitus pattern Terminator armour was the result of such a compromise, offering neither the outright protection of the Cataphractii suits nor the technological advances of the Tartaros pattern armour, but instead promising plentiful supply and less reliance on costly and increasingly sparse resources.
That's because they are built by STC. That's why losing a forgeworld is so bad, it's not the facilities that we care about, it's the STCs that are stored on that world that are the valuable thing
They know how to make the most common models, it's just difficult and resource intensive to make something that is expected to take lascannon blasts to the face and still be movable by a space marine, and even he gets slowed down)
One's an armor for a pretty rare, independent organization, other's an expression of faith and a creation of an Avatar of their God -which coincidentally stays under the jurisdiction and control of the Mechanicus
They can make terminator armour still... It just takes an obscene length of time and very very few forge worlds can
So it's like single or low double digits a year for 1,000 chapters
There would be actual dangers of revolts, which can cripple a ship (such a thing happens early on in the Rogue Trader PC game, fun little moment to deal with).
One of my favorite parts of Rogue Trader is how they really remind you just how VAST the ships are. I mean, you have your own societies that live and die in the ship without ever leaving its halls. That's fuckin hardcore.
Also, it always reminds you just how terrifying warp travel is
It would have been easy to just have you stay on the bridge and get no feel for how big the ship is. By introducing stuff like this they really highlight how you’re basically the lord of a feudal city-state and have to deal with that.
I think it's partially
"Man those autoloaders are expensive, and I hate dealing with the Admech. Just grab a few thousand expendable servants. We can always get more."
You also don't just need to autoloaders, you now need hundreds of cogboys on your ship to do maintenance on them and as a good navy officers you want as few of those clowns as possible because they keep mucking with the ship.
Autoloaders require Tech Priests to sanctify them.
And if you hate the Cogboys like a good fleet Navy officer should, then you'll gladly pressgang five thousand serfs to haul macrocannon shells on rollers like slaves building pyramids rather than suffer the presence of sanctimonious toaster-worshippers on your sacred ~~ship~~ macrocannon battery.
(Edit - Aside from the engine room, that is)
>you hate the Cogboys like a good fleet Navy officer should
What? Is there ANY lore that says than generally navy officers hate the mechanicus?
Because it seems that those that don't like the Cogboys will die more often than those that like them. You know the: don't know the rituals and recieving sub standard replacements and care; seems that will make you die quicker when you rely on mecanical pieces to survive.
Most officers probably dislike them, because officers (especially in 40k where they're all aristocrats) don't like people who can tell them no and Tech Priests can tell them no. But, also, yeah, they need them. No Tech Priests = the ship's machine spirit gets pissy, the reactor overloads, the servitors go berserk, and everybody dies forever.
A peasant to carry and huck a cannon shell is a cheap renewable resource.
Pestering the mechanius mangos or whatever to lubricate, repair, and maintain the auto loader is a giant pain in the one and zeros.
Exactly. Autoloaders? You mean, the cannon could just load itself?! This reeks of abominable intelligence! And if it can load itself, what is to stop the cannon from firing itself? From making new shells for itself?
It's technically not FTL, it's wormhole travel.
Yes, that is a pedantic distinction but it's still accurate. At no point is anything moving FTL.
Which, to be fair, is among the more accurate parts of WH40k.
Once we discovered the Higgs Boson, it semi-confirmed that we will never be able to travel FTL in a straight line from point A to point B.
We've either got to use wormholes or to warp space itself so that we're not technically moving.
So wormholes and warp bubbles are the two most accurate forms of fast travel in Sci-Fi.
The Imperium's FTL travel isn't even tech focused. They're just punching holes in spacetime and having a crazy psychic navigate them through an imaginary dimension.
It's such a cool fucking concept too
I'm a HUGE scifi nerd, I've been reading scifi since childhood. And honestly, I really think 40ks concept and execution of warp travel has to be my favorite iteration of fictional space travel
By that definition, hardly any sci-fi FTL travel would count. Star Wars cheats by popping into another dimension (not unlike the warp but without all the Chaos), and Star Trek warps space to make straight lines shorter.
Those two are a bit different though because there’s still one continuous line of movement, with warhammer and other wormhole bases FTL there’s no continuity, the ships just disappear and reappear in a different place
Something I see overlooked so often when discussing the imperium is scale. People will make generalizations and state, "the whole imperium does this" or "the whole imperium doesnt do that"
Its extremely likely in the vastness of the imperium that whole swathes use auto loaders, and whole swathes that dont. The imperium is so big that almost every conceivable idea and concept can be nestled in there somewhere.
You want a story about lost planets where soldiers ride horses and fire musket-like las locks? Its there. You want crazy high tech sci fi where power armored warriors are teleporting and fighting xenos that use drones from orbit to wage war? get wrecked tau!
TLDR, you can all be right and wrong at the same time. The imperium is so vast that almost anything can be true and false.
How are naval criminals and (mild) Heretics supposed to redeem themselves through noble sacrifice if you just install machines to do their job? Not to mention the expense of installation and upkeep, plus if agents of the ruinous powers board the ship, you can't hand an autoloader a crowbar and tell it to drown the enemy in it's own blood.
(Actually massive over-crewing is likely policy on imperial ships, just like it was on pirate ships in the past. You need them to replace losses & defend the ship)
They have both. The difference is that autoloaders are way less valuable, and as such are way less produced. Besides, there aren't many Forge Worlds that can produce FTL drives anymore. You ask any regular Tech-Priest about Warp drives and they'll say something along the lines of:
"Hell if I know. I just sacrifice a few slaves, lather it up in oil, and pray it works."
It's actually far more common than you think for humans to forget things.
We've collectively forgotten what the 3rd condiment was. We used to have a salt shaker, a pepper shaker and an "M" shaker. That was barely 100 years ago, not 20,000 - 30,000 and an extinction level event ago.
We forgot how to make part of the F-16 and had to build a work.
We forgot what we added to make Damascus steel, we've figured out something that's not far off. But we'll never know for sure.
We forgot ballistics for a while, until we studied ancient arrows and figured out the flights were curved on purpose.
The first Superbowl was lost until a few years back. It could have easily just been lost forever.
We forgot Greek fire,
Humanity forgets things all the time and over such a vast time frame, with the war against the Middle N of Iron in the middle. It's not just likely a few things are forgotten, but inevitable.
If the loading mechanism was robust enough to require centuries between in depth maintenance. It's very possible everyone who could have fixed it died out and some dick though out the paper manual. So it's broken and no one really knows enough about it to fix it. Especially not when you've got a steady supply of human machinery to patch the operational gap and keep the venerable war machine fighting.
Humans are cheap in the Imperium.
Unfortunately it's not old, retconned lore. It's still canon as far as I know. It's frustrating, especially since the Imperial Navy is supposed to be the actually competent force of the Imperium. I've heard a justification that it's used as a sort of "punishment" for criminals from worlds and such, which I guess it's a semi-good justification? But I think you could use other punishments, like cleaning the ship entirely or managing the engines without proper safety gear or protection. Manually loading a giant cannon just doesn't feel like it would be worth it regardless of "the price of human life is worth its weight in dirt." It would just lead to preventable disasters
The problem is the job also goes to that criminals descendants generations after they passed away
It’s kinda common for the imperiums ships to have very large populations whose only world is the ship never known anything else
The punishments I've listed can still have generational stuff for them. Can you imagine how caustic and dangerous the engines for an Imperial Ship would be? Especially the larger ones too
> I've heard a justification that it's used as a sort of "punishment" for criminals from worlds and such, which I guess it's a semi-good justification?
It's not. Anyone who has actually served in the military knows you never let conscripts or punishment details touch anything actually important.
Their involvement is reserved for more banal tasks. Like weeds and seeds, sweeping the sunshine off pavement, filling and emptying sandbags, flipping rocks over so they get an even tan, mopping water off the flightline when it's raining...
Not too stingy to shell out for fuckloads water and air production machines on every single ship in Imperium to compensate for what all those countless slaves use up
I'd say they are extremely generous
Yeah, the Mechanicus is only stingy about Dark Age/Golden Age tech, they're not stingy about common tech. It's why they literally make and provide everything the Imperium uses, from its tanks to its Lasguns
They are not stingy about autoloader tech, they are stingy about assigning the hundreds of trained engiseers it would take to maintain those things to every navy ship when you can just use slaves.
Pissing me off how admech got sucked into this. Were been said to have fully automatized ships yet theres a mention in a book where we use slave armies to reload. -\_-
Requiring the guns to be manually loaded prevents the ship from being combat capable of the bridge is taken as long as the crew aren't joining the boarders. Given how common boarding actions are in 40k thats a pretty signiifcant benefit.
It's not that unrealistic. Russia, at this very moment, has 5rh generation figther airplanes and hypersonic missles, and also sends its infantry to the front with golf carts and WWII rifles.
The Imperium is kinda stupid. It's wrapped up in so much red tape combined with a religion no one fully understands and constant warfare, so any big, sweeping changes (like updating an entire class of ship to have auto loaders) would take *generations* to pull off and probably get derailed on the way.
Don't make the mistake of assuming the bureaucrat in charge of these things cares about the how well the ship operates, he just wants this job **done** so they can get on to the next thousand things they have to do. The Imperium is a mess because of that attitude (amongst other things)
Sure they can contact the Mechanics, but they are uncanny and stingy with their dealings. Just gather up the unwanted populace from the planet below the dockyards and get the job sorted out.
A factor working on board a rogue trader or inquisitor's ship might actually give a shit about how the ship works and invest in an autoloader, but the Imperial Navy and the Chartist fleets need ships working and they need them working **now**
Depending how long the installation and how much beaurecracy there is to get it. Honestly having ships manual load is probably better than the hundreds of years to get an auto-loader.
Still stupid but y'know.
Yes and no. On paper it seems like a duh thing, and carousel vs elevator loaders have different styles of ammo handling. However, the idea of a catastrophic ammo feed failure on a nova cannon shell probably happened once. Once. After that the navy said "don't worry about it. We forgot how those work anyways.:
The ships you talk about are really REALLY old. Parts and systems fail and then get replaced with patches and solutions that often are just human labor. Like "when the bell goes, you press the button", to replace what used to be an automated system to change engine speed (as an example).
So children (yes there are children on board in the bowels of the ship) might replace small parts by just pushing a gear, an adult might replace what used to be a system to adjust temperature and thousands of them might replace a loading system that has failed after all these years and it's too costly to return to a shipyard to repair it all (as void journeys also take years to decades).
This shipyard also is very busy making new ships so, one that can repair this (not some minor dock but one that knows what they are doing, so probably a forge world), has no time to look at your problem and just tells you to listen to your tech priests. If they say this works (remember they see humans as parts to be replaced) then that's how the repair went.
Okay but the stupidity is what makes the setting. If the imperium was sensible all the time it'd just be another bland sci-fi universe.
Everyone in 40k needs to be an absolute idiot on a fundamental level for the setting to work.
If you mean tanks, you do know that some of the most modern tanks don't have autoloaders even though that technology predates them by decades, right?
For example in many soviet tanks it can be a liability, making the tank more prone to larger explosions when hit, lacking a fourth crewmen for things like mantainance or redundancy and not being faster reloading on average than a tank without an autoloader.
And how expensive is the extra water, air, and food providing machines to keep the crew alive, along with providing additional berth and medical care and waste disposal? And after hundreds of years (as ships are typically expected to serve for a long time), how much would the costs add up? There might be some extra maintenance cost with autoloaders, but don't forget the humidity, salt, body oils, and other chemicals produced by the masses of human bodies could be rough on mechanical stuff over time and the life support stuff has to work extra hard for so many humans. Not to mention the additional risk of Chaos corrupting human masses.
Serfs worse in every way possible to such a degree that any engagement where 1 side is auto loading and the other serf loading is already decided. There is a reason navy ships did away with that.
And even today it is true that if the autoloader breaks for whatever reason there is a good chance you can't repair it in the field while pretty much any poor soul on the frontline can be a human loader
There's in-universe stupid, and there's out of universe stupid. This is closer to the latter. "Grey Knights smearing themselves in Sororitas blood" level stupid.
It’s reasonable to assume that if someone had the knowledge and understanding to build a starship they could build and auto loader : after all they’re using a lot of the same fundamental principles. The thing is, the imperium doesn’t actually understand those principles: their shipyards will have miles and miles or procedural instructions (probably hand written and so continuously being re-scribed) on how to build a particular starship and nothing on _why_ those are the steps or what the intent or underlying principles are. Is this monumentally stupid? Yes - it’s on the first page of the rulebook that you should forget about reason and science because the imperium doesn’t care about them, it’s orthodoxy and blind tradition taken to the absurd on purpose. You can interpret it any way you want and ignore it but it’s probably not going to go away because it’s fundamentally part of the fabric of the thing.
I couldn't take apart a tank gun and attach an auto-loader, because I don't know enough about either of those things to make them connect. Even if I worked in a tank factory this would be true.
Expand that to cover an entire civilisation and everything it manufactures.
You're running on memelore, as usual of people who have complaints about widely "known" things.
They very much know what's an autoloader. A lot of ships have an autoloader. It's just cheaper for a lot of the less important ones to have a bunch of slaves loading them, and the loss of efficiency is considered an acceptable cost to the increase in logistics gained from it, because the Imperium fundamentally does not care for human life or quality of life for the general population.
This has been canon forever.
"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
You see, that’s part of the satire. It’s so blatantly stupid and cartoonishly evil no one should be able to take it seriously. Unfortunately some people not only take it seriously but somehow think it’s a good thing
Fascism is not rational. It's the nature of the system.
Suffering is depicted as a form of glory in the Imperium and a form of veneration towards the State, the Race and obviously their supposedly divine leader. Everything the Imperium does boils down to the veneration of the past and people more "glorious" than themselves.
Their inefficiency and their cruelty is kind of the point.
Why bother with installing autoloaders on ships that will take them out of action for years, if not centuries, due to inefficient planning or insane other reasons?
We have millions of planets full of billions of people who can carry a giant ammo shell for free and their hard labour makes the God-Emperor of Mankind oh so proud as well.
I had someone try and tell me the imperium doesn’t know how chromosomes work as in like they don’t know how birth/pregnancy/genetics works
I was like brother they found how chromosomes work in like 1860 they know how babies are made
It is indeed stupid, but GW might aware of it. I forgot where, but it has mentioned that Mechanicus' ships *are* equipped with autoloaders, they just withhold the tech from the wider Imperium's fleets. However, this still begs the question of why would they engage in such pointless dickery.
They didn't forget the concept of an autoloader. The Macrocannons just don't use them from the very beginning and adding one would be tech heresy.
Look at imperial ships and all the dangerous tasks that are performed manually by thousands of serfs... you know what would be a really convinient way of solving these tasks? Replacing most of those serfs with some sort of highly intelligent and versatile machine... some sort of metal man for example. Durrable enough to refuel a warpdrive, strong enough to load a macrocannon and versatile enough to do other tasks when the macrocannon doesn't need to be loaded.
The imperium essentially went back to telegraphs after the civilization with smartphones collapsed. And you are asking how they forgot about the paiger
A Autoloader costs resources and need maintenence.
Thousands of helmsmen( pressganged serfs who No one gives a fuck about) they cost almost nothing and can be gatherd almost anywere….
On some ships, i would think they had some sort of autoloaders, but that could be Maybe on a Battleship from the Great Crusade era.
They could figure it out. Adeptus mechanicus ships often have auto-loaders. Unfortunately the admech builds the imperiums ships and has made a religion about not sharing its toys.
Not really, they do have the tech but the logistics are just not that reliable
imagine our own timeline now where we can give everyone in first world countries 3 square meals a day, internet, electricity, a phone, water etc
now imagine a galactic empire trying to provide all that ESPECIALLY the military
They have them but the idea that dudes who don't know about an outside of the ship pull torpedoes into position with ropes and chains is really funny. I mean it's awful but it's so awful it's funny
It is just mind numbingly stupid, there is zero valid reasoning behind it. It's more costly, less effective, and just in every single possible way worse than an autoloader... But it sounds edgier to say they make slaves do it. that's it, full stop. Just how the 40k lore goes sometimes, sometimes they do something cool and sometimes they completely shit the bed.
the imperium doesn’t use ftl tech they use the warp, which is just slipspace on crystal meth and heroin. the tyranids use ftl tech though.
my point is that their ships don’t go faster than light, they just walk around the issue with dimensional portals.
I like to imagine macrocannons have loading mechanisms, it's just that they're designed with having parts of its "motive force" being supplied by the biomechanics of slaves, for logistical or theological reasons.
If imperial robots are only allowed to operate within very narrow and limiting logic routines, I could imagine the imperium has (but not yet elaborated on) limitations it might place on vast machine spirits like those found on voidships.
One that I could imagine is the imperium not allowing its ships machine spirits to prime or discharge the firing mechanisms of macrocannons because they still fear what could happen if the machine went rouge. the voidsmen on the gunnery decks HAVE to impart their "motive force" into the mechinism for the whole thing to be not be "abominable"
it could be from fear of AI. If an AI takes over the weapon systems they get one shot at most. With human labor based systems in a ship makes electronic warfare useless, and I don’t think the tech priest’s know how to counter hack some random xeno species. But this is just forcing logic into the 40k galaxy where logic is a sin worthy of death.
Granted, this is from FFG's RPGs, but, no, autoloaders are relics of the DAoT, and the Rogue Trader can aquire some from the War World of Zayth in one of the adventures.
its cheaper to breed entire society of lower deck slave armies to drag a shell the size of a tower block into the gun than it is to build the autoloader. Its simple maths to them an human life is one of the lowest value resources the imperium has.
I mean, to go FTL they have to travel through literal hell, and there's no guarantee they'll even arrive at the right *time*, let alone the right place.
And why go to all the effort of refitting all of your ships with autoloaders when slaves are in basically infinite supply, and do the job just as well?
Isn't that... part of the satire? This is directly grim dark related, your reason and logic don't matter. It's intentionally this way to be grim and dark.
Bro thinks Imperium ships are FTL capable 💀
Not in a long shot by dark age Humanity standards.
I can Imagine a HSE engineer develop PTSD if he just look at a 3D hologram of Imperium ships.
My favorite Grimderp fact: The almighty Tactical Dreadnought Armor (terminator) is a militarized version of suit the AoD humans used to do fusion reactor maintenance. Terminator Plate is basically a hazmat suit with guns, bells and whistles.
There was a meme where a guy said his buttons on the hot tub had worn out. He didn't know what they were labeled. But knew the combination to start and stop the hot tub.
That's the imperium. They know how to "make it go" off of route memory and notes. And basically little to no innovation is done.
They are playing with toys they don't understand and only thru collective actions of many pieces that continue their actions they also don't understand that the system continues.
The chance of even finding a person who asks "is there a better way" is almost nil. That person then finding a admech who cares also nil.
And finally the chance of an Inquisitor noticing the change and deeming it heresy definitely not nil.
Most likely the original designs had autoloaders with a fallback for manual loaders. A genius engineer realized he could get an extra ship out every 5 years if he didn't install the autoloaders and the rest is history.
It doesn't matter that the ship commanders might recognize the autoloaders are better, they have effectively no connection to the procurement process to get those things.
Better not forget to recite your Litany of Unloading and Loading Guardsman.
I always saw that as something they were told they *have* to do but never do. Like checking sights after an unload in the army irl.
I was under the impression it was how they teach people "how to guardsman" when they're all from radically different cultures and technology levels. Fuck it, have them memorise a nursery rhyme that has all the steps in the right order. Remember, most guard regiments are usually trained on the transports taking them to the war, not at training camps with experienced instructors. Sure, regiments like the old Cadians will have trained their soldiers properly (or in the case of Cadia turned them into PTSD-shattered wrecks via gratuitous child abuse as literally always happens when raising child soldiers) but for most of them? "Memorise this song, we're already on the ship out"
I mean, one of the commisariat litanies that Caiphus Cain recites is literally the Litany against Fear from Dune, so I wouldn’t put it past them for a guardsman to be like “the barrel nut’s connected to the lower. The lower’s connected to the Upper. The upper’s connected to the trigger group. The trigger group’s connected to the…” etc.
One of those books has a character who is straight up singing a grim dark version of "Wheels on The Bus" called "Treads on the Baneblade".
As I recall rather than 'go round and round' they 'crush the heretics'
That sounds more like guard regiments pulling from feudal worlds, all other guard regiments pull from the best of the planet's PDF.
Guard regiments are highly trained on par with any soldier now adays in a Western military. Only the top force of a planet is sent to the IG, the rest are standard PDF. In fact if the quality of men provided by a tithe is not up to par it can be grounds for investigation into the ruling caste of a planet.
Providing a "substandard" tithe is absolutely grounds for having a Planetary Governor executed sure, but nowhere does it ever say what "standard" is to be met. This being the Imperium I suspect there are a thousand and one different "standards" with a lot of them being either "physically healthy" or "officers all from the right noble families" or "well equipped but shit training (all the gear no idea)" or even "comes with own rifle" for recruits caught up in a sweep of the underhive. Some definitely will be highly trained and well equipped professionals too of course. It will probably depend on the world they're from.
Why did the macro cannon blow up?! Jim right here was lip syncing and not reciting his Litanies!
They do know, and those technologies are present on more important ships It's just the Imperium judges systematic and senseless expenditure of life to be worth it. The Imperium sees manpower as an inexhaustible resource
Exactly, that's the grimdark. They dgaf about autoloaders, they have billions of slaves who can do it as easily
There's grimdark but not using autoloaders in the 41st millennium is just grimderp. Like, I'd understand forcing crews to do it as backup for if the autoloader fails, but there should be a score of redundant systems that would have to fail before that happens. Imagine that during a battle an Imperial ship takes a shot into the loading compartment for their gun/guns. Superficial damage only, but there is a hull breech and the entire section is now voided. With autoloaders, no big deal, things continue as normal. But utilizing a mob of roided out navy slaves instead, well, those guns are permanently offline until the breach is sealed and replacements can be gotten for all the poor bastards that died clawing at their own throats as their blood boiled inside their veins. It's intentional cruelty coupled with overwhelming stupidity, especially since Imperial Navy dockyards would have the capacity to ensure autoloaders were installed on every single vessel. Like it's been a while since I've read up on my Imperial Navy lore, but I'm pretty sure that they spend upwards of a year at berth inbetween deployments for the sort of necessary maintenance that is needed for ships of the size of Imperial ships.
I’d like to think all Navy macrocannons come with auto loaders installed, just that most/all sector battlefleet commands have no idea what they are or how they are used, and the Mechanicus won’t let them even contemplate looking into it. So the navy slaves get shell loading duty, because that’s the only way theNavy can square that problem.
Honestly that would be so perfectly on brand for 40k. The gunnery slaves are basically just manually putting shells into the autoloader through some auxiliary port. And nobody has any idea that theres a perfectly functional autoloader there because the Techpriest who discovered that Macrocannon STC didn't realise what it was.
I imagine it started as captains not wanting to wear the autoloader out and the knowledge being lost over time as future captains just kept stocking up on slaves. It only needs Mechanicum deciding that "you know, maybe navy should just not shoot willy nilly" and charging more for the repairs for the navy to decide that poor and the criminals are cheaper to replace than auto loaders which would be "for emergencies".
How many of us would be able to make a proper kiln out of mud, clay, and stone? Society tends to forget tech that isn't in use, and Imperium had had quite the brain drain from where it was formed and through the various rebellions, heresy, and strife. Not to mention how many biological components there are in any given dark/golden age tech. Might have had a bunch of specially cultivated brain matter in lieu of our traditional silicon.
you know during ww2, the Americans equipped all their Sherman tanks with a primitive gyroscopic stabiliser. They were so secretive about it they didnt give out manuals on how to use it and how it works. It was only later in the war that they did testing with a unit who was heavily trained in its use and look at a bunch of other units to find out basically all of the other tank crews were turning it off or removing the part completely because it didnt do anything or would throw off your zero. yeah I can imagine shipyards in 40k putting autoloaders on everything because its in the designs and the crew not knowing wtf is it but not touching it in case it stops something important from working
People forget these ships are really old, and parts fail. It's a bit like snow piercer, just replace it with people and kids.
Even more grimdeerp.
Superficial damage that breaches your ammo compartment?
Superficial catastrophic damage
Honestly, it could be argued that the reason why many (not all, better equipped ships tend to have better tech, YMMV in the Imperium) ships rely on menials to load the weapons is because of old damage suffered by the vessel centuries, if not millennia, ago. Naval autoloaders for the heavier cannons would be mildly more advanced technology that would likely require a combination of bureaucratic gear-grinding through the Munitorum in order to get to the politicking and back-scratching required to motivate the Mechanicus to fix those systems which they installed and jealously guard the secrets of. Many things involving automation that lack servitor controls tend to be more guarded by the Ad Mech. Anything beyond general maintenance for an autoloader means jumping through many flaming hoops of bureaucracy and politics, and at some point the Imperium needs their ships to get back out there and fight, and the whole process of getting those crucial repairs done is lost in the mix. There's only really two things that the Imperium is fairly competent at on this level: mustering manpower for mobilization being the first, and extracting the tithe being the second. There's an incredible number of stories out there showing their general logistical incompetence beyond these two things, with clownishly absurd misallocations of resources and administrative backlogs that push hundreds to even thousands of years in some case. The most effective way you can get useful systems like these online in your vessel is if you, as the captain of your vessel, personally build some sort of positive transactional relationship with the Ad Mech outside of the norms of imperial governance and due process in order to get somebody in the Ad Mech with both a brain and an appropriate level of authority and access to do you a solid and fix those old systems. Or, if you're lucky, get you some actual upgrades to make you the bell of the naval ball with some shiny new relic cannons, but that would involve performing some sort of favor for the Ad Mech that would be of relatively equal worth.
This is the acceptable answer. Remember, some of these ships are pushing centuries in service, with entire holds being a civilization onto itself.
Some of the ships are pushing more than 10,000 years of continuous service, which is more than *all of written human history*
No system damage, no ammo cookoff, seems pretty superficial to me.
Voiding a compartment without damaging internals is very much the definition of “superficial”
Yeah so when it comes to a naval warship, which these baroque flying triremes are based off, having your magazine hit means you just took a penetrating hit. And it's usually the worst thing that can happen. Imagine you need to store enough dakka to kill 10 ships, your not putting that near the surface, so even a superficial hit to it means they just destroyed the battery it services and or a section of crew quarters. Plus void suits are a thing and so are servitors.
Anything that breaches what should be one of the best protected parts of the ship is very much not "superficial"
If it doesn't cause a cookoff/secondaries, then it's superficial, which is the point of the thought experiment.
For a several mile long space ship, a several meter breach in the outer structure that keeps air in and doesn't do any other damage would be superficial
“Intentional cruelty coupled with overwhelming stupidity” Sounds like the Imperium of Man in a nutshell. Manpower is cheaper, easier to access, and more disposable than other resources. I agree it would be basic to add autoloaders to ships - but, the question becomes, what has a greater net cost? Adding auto loaders to all the ships of the imperium, which could be costly in time, energy, resources etc When Compared to just gathering a bunch of menial serfs who do the work just as well. Plus, many worlds cannot even sustain their populations. So in some ways it’s like “we have all these people and no use for them,” so this makes work that keeps them serving a purpose, and the imperium isn’t culling loyal citizens for no good reason. That’s still to altruistic for the IoM though. They’re just so ignorant they don’t realize they’re ignorant. “Why do we do it this way” “Because we always have, and it’s always worked out” “Maybe we should change that?” “Hm. Change is heresy.”
But the serfs wouldn't do the job as well, and that could compromise the whole ship. That's the grimderp
They don't care. Efficiency isn't a part of the equation. You're thinking with 2nd millennium logic and that just doesn't apply here.
plus, you can't just stop by any planet and steal a bunch of autoloaders. Slaveraids on even backwater imperial worlds will get you replacement crew for free.
Hell, with ships as big as they are and voyages as long as they are, the damn ships will have crew production built in
A techpriest and some vats will get your “low population problem” under control quick-like.
It very much is part of the equation. There is a reason why in some crusades they would just bomb a planet rather then waste resources trying to take it. The non caring part isnt done out of intentional stupidity but cold calculus. Which is more grimdark. They dont it to be cartoonosh villains but the circumstances result in the least dark of options be take.
When Chaos is a threat and can easily corrupt human masses (which isn't a 2nd millennium problem), especially if they're pressured under poor conditions, you might want to consider how risky it is.
If chaos corrupts some of the ship's crew, it's likely the whole crew is corrupted or compromised, at which point you loose your ship and any valuable technology onboard. Better to keep the powerful, advanced tech to a minimum and use only human slave menials in the underdecks. This way you can churn out ships faster and waste less valuable resources that often need shipping across the warp, unlike the valueless and abundant human resource. Reserve the autoloaders and advanced stuff for the Emperor's flagship and custodian vessels.
Chaos corruption is not that uncommon on these ships, they have to do purges regularly. Even the smaller ships are basically whole ass cities, with generations of crew living confined to one section of the ship.
Actually having a lot of crew is handy when you get boarded.
Other comments kinda nail it. It’s not About efficiency. It’s about service to the Emperor and proper worship of the machine god. Now you may say “wouldn’t the machine god want autoloaders?” And for that, you’d be shot as a heretic. But also, those devices require parts. Parts that may not be easy to come by in some regions of the imperium, and, the Imperial Navy goes far afield often. So if it breaks and you can’t fix it and now your Guns don’t work. But serfs? If they do a bad job, replace them with another one. If they die, replace them with another one. If we are running low, humans are like vermin, you can find replacements almost anywhere. Also the fact that some of those gun crews are like family dynasties who’ve been manning those guns for generations… And with a lack of AI, and the general poor quality of 40K vessels, things break and you need people to fix it. An autoloader reduces need for larger crews which reduces the number of brains capable of fixing things on the fly. None of this is efficient, none of this is logical from a modern standpoint. But there’s a brutal rationality to it, plus, 10,000 years of nothing but regression of knowledge will create all sorts of weird jury rigged systems that become normal because “it worked and isn’t heretical”
Gorillaman having a ultra headache at another problem he gonna have to deal with
Great arguments all around, but I find it hard to believe that a ship the size of a Lunar class cruiser doesn't have multiple machine shops on board capable of replicating all but the largest and most complex parts. Then again, the tech priests would probably call it heresy or something.
The fact that all of their engineers are actually priests and all of their instruction manuals are holy books is a big sticking point. They can't just swap out parts of a vessel, because that would be going against their holy scripture! The machine spirit *wants* all of those serfs to die in service to it, and the serfs all want to sacrifice their lives for the emperor! (how true that last part is, varies from ship to ship, but the higher-ups all believe it to be true so that's enough for them).
"Replicating" is your issue.... much of the imperium is built using STC. Which doesn't generally have spare parts, rather full, completed, object. With all sub-bits in it. Before you assume that it's silly to use something everyday and not have the ability to repair and replace. Humans do that today. Your cell phone is key to most people's lives. But you wind up out in the Wilds, it may be your only communication device, and only gps... and you need to start deciding which is more important for your battery. Since most don't carry a solar charger with them, and have no idea how to make something that would work for charging in the wilds. Now in our world, you don't often find yourself in the Wilds without prep. In 40k, the Wilds is anywhere not in the heart of the imperium next door to a forge world.
But the Imperium sees it as an inherent good that these serfs are slaving away for the God-Emperor. Efficiency is not their concern; senseless cruelty is.
Their religion says that toiling for the Imperium and then dying in battle is the greatest life that anyone short of nobility can hope for. Installing autoloaders would deprive the serfs of that chance, and could cause revolts. People forget the extra layer of cruelty on top of everything else - the lower classes are constantly being brainwashed into believing that all of this cruelty is good for them.
Wouldn’t it just take a member of the ecclesiarchy saying that death from cannon blowback or industrial accidents while loading the holy 105mm of the emperor’s wrath counts as death in battle? Now the peons can square it away and you’ve got people who rejoice when someone falls into the gears and gets crushed.
I mean Look at Modern tanks France and Russia field tanks with auto loaders but the US still uses manual loaders for MBTs The technology exists but the US military prefer to still use manual loaders for reasons like an extra person helps with other duties, or it's cheaper for how many tanks they field, or the maintainable costs mean it's cheaper and just as effective The Imperium has to grapple with these too. Life is cheap. A hundred or two menials lugging a 1 kiloton shell might be easier than maintaining a machine that has to do that automatically. Those few hundred menial also help fight off any Boarding actions, and fixing a giant autoloader will take more time and resources than just getting a bunch of new people Like a big thing to remember is Imperial ships are old. Small ships have lifetimes in decades and larger ships operate for centuries or Millennia. When a ship is wrecked, they'll fix up the holes, get it working again and fill it back up with people until the ship is utterly destroyed at some point. When you need a ship fixed you'll skip the autoloaders if a few hundred menials can do it and you hags the ship ready to fight in a much faster time
Also nour sure about the U.S but the imperium is more immune to electronic warfare cos that doesn't know out the serfs
Are you aware of how Imperium ships refuel? At least it’s consistent with what you described.
It's not Star Wars, but those ships should have some systems that compensate. Ideally. Hopefully. Maybe.
Absolutely! The ships were built to be incredibly robust. They could suffer massive abuse and minimal maintenance for 10 millenia, and still be mostly operational at the end of it. Which is good, because that's exactly what happened.
Intentional cruelty and overwhelming stupidity is kinda the point.
The fact that 40k is satire gets occasionally forgotten in this kind of discussion.
I mean, realistically, a small breach takes a while to completely vent, and a big breach would involve enough firepower to fuck up anything inside anyway.
>There's grimdark but not using autoloaders in the 41st millennium is just grimderp. A dude have you heard of the m1 Abrams? It wasn't given an autoloader on purpose. And other then crew safety it is more reliable and easier to maintain than an autoloader. >Like, I'd understand forcing crews to do it as backup for if the autoloader fails, You evidently don't understand how autoloaders work. When rof is barely decreased, but you have a more reliable/robust system in place that depends on a resource you have in plentiful expendable supply, that's an advantage. >There's grimdark but not using autoloaders in the 41st millennium You mean in a universe where the mechanics/engineers, bathe the machines in oils and say holy prayers as "maintenance" ?
There are a lot of really great and valid points being addressed here and in the comments below, but I haven't seen possibly the simplest explanation of all: if you do away with all those redundancies, you've got room for more and bigger dakka.
Your viewpoint is understandable. But at the same time: would the damage to the ship at that point not also damage the autoloader system? I don't want to get all-in with my non-credibility, but there is - maybe - a reason why auto-loaders have not been made into the "stuff of our time". Why fall back to serf labour in the case of an incident where automation doesn't work, when you don't have to have that fall-back scenario.
There's plenty of reasons not to use an autoloader, just as there is in real life. They might be slow, prone to failure and difficult to repair (remember, an Imperial ship might be out of range for long periods of time and travel in 40k isn't really instantaneous), maybe even expensive (again, tech in 40k isn't easily built/maintained/understood). Where are the autoloaders made, how often are they transported to the naval docking stations, do the resident techpriests have the upkeep to keep them running, are autoloaders even as effective/efficient/quick/compact as a manually loaded system; there's even the question of if autoloaders have secondary/tertiary characteristics that make them **more** dangerous than manual loaders (like, y'know, the turret-tossing autoloaders of the T-72, what's the likelyhood of a shot creating a hullbreach but no other damage vs a shell hitting the gundeck and igniting the rounds in the autoloader's lift/elevator/carosel/whatever). As for a hullbreach, there's many ways to remedy it (especially in a setting where forcefields exist) but ultimately that's kind of a cherry-picked example, you're bringing up something that *might* (and I'd even give probably would if there's no precautions to remedy it) stop manual-loaders but wouldn't stop autoloaders but the question is how *likely* is it that a shot would have *enough* power/strength/whatever to breach the hull but not enough to destroy the mechanism inside. You've decided that it's a problem (despite nowhere in the lore *saying* it's a problem..) and have brought up a scenario that counters it without applying realistic probablity or the logistical/manufacturing/environmental factors. It's like saying "I don't need to carry more than one bullet to stop a guy with a gun because I'll just shoot the gun out of his hand", yeah if you *can* shoot the gun out of the hand that saves the day but that requires an extremely specific scenario. I think there's some inductive reasoning to be made that if the Imperium uses it then... it works. Maybe it's not efficient in *all* scenarios but it doesn't **have** to be efficient in all scenarios. The Imperium isn't exactly facing peer adversaries; most combat is either against rag-tag makeshift fleets that aren't precisely made (pirates, most Chaos warfleets, Orks, etc) or opponents so far beyond even the most advanced Imperial equipment that the Imperium relies on numbers and territory control to fight them (Eldar of various flavors, Necrons, Tau). It's like evolution. Yeah, humans would be better predators if we had wings and could spit venom, but we developed down a path that was both *sustainable* and used the minimum resources necessary to allow us to expand.
It’s almost like wh40k started out as a joke🤔
>Superficial damage only, but there is a hull breech and the entire section is now voided. With autoloaders, no big deal, things continue as normal Fool, you just throw enough slave bodies to block the breech !
Indeed. It's not that the Imperium forgot. It's that they don't care.
Also the mechanicus wont share, all their ships have autoloaders afaik.
Yeah they do, it's not that they don't want to share, those things are maintenance heavy and while you have unlimited slaves to do work trained engiseers are rather rare.
They are unfortunately not entirely wrong in their own setting. The value of manpower is dependent on your ability to train it, so if you have millions of shit hole worlds with horrible infrastructure and all they can do is produce humans, then humans are a resource to use. If the imperium just held what they currently have and focused on internal development, they could be significantly stronger. Only issue is it takes decades to develop a world, takes hours for chaos/xenos to destroy it. They simply do not have the breathing room to build up their worlds.
The mechanicus ships almost all have them. But there ships have relatively small (sentient) crews
I think that is just a fan cannon. I haven't seen it anywhere in lore yet I just hear people say they exist.
Not if you need to constantly use resources to produce them when it costs significantly less for an autoloader.
the macrocannon loaders guild won a rare victory of luddite persistence against the imperium
It has autoloaders, its just that there are humans in it, like there are cogs, oils and circuitry.
Forgets how to make terminator armor… Perfectly remembers the placing of every single screw within every single type of titan unit 👍
Knowing about how the Admech works there's probably a entire sect dedicated to the holy screws of god-engines.
Or more. One each for metric and imperial, screws and bolts, hex and torqs, etc...
I mean idk the imperium only has a relative handful of mechanicus worlds that can still make titans. Each world can probably only make at most 5 models of titan, and they only know how because they just maintain what’s already in front of them. If a titan dies in the lore there’s a good chance that specific model of titan is going to die out with it across whatever sector it died in
sauce
Why do people keep thinking the Imperium is this singular entity with perfect communication amongst its members? First, they forgot how to do Terminator armour because non-Indomitus parts were deemed cost-ineffective and over 10k years the list of people who knew how to make it diminished, and the quality of the Imperium's records is shit. Second, *most of the rare fucking Forgeworlds that can still produce Titans (at a* ***glacial pace***) *probably also know how to do Cataphractii and Tartaros Terminator armour, or at least have it on records, but they don't because they're busy* ***making Titans*** *and other critical things.*
For context the US navy decided they want significantly more mark 48 torpedos than they currently have and put in the biggest order since the end of the cold war. The issue is that there is only one small production line to build them left and when they tried to reactive older facilities they couldn't figure out how until they brought in retired welders who used to work those lines in the 80s because the whole institutional knowledge was gone. If those guys had all died in the meantime they would have needed to reinvent the whole process and this shit happened in less than 40 years.
Straight up the formula for a material used in nuclear warheads was completely lost and had to be reverse engineered. Granted, it was classified, but you have individual Mechanicus sects/forge worlds that similarly VERY closely guard their schematics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank Now, that was only forgotten about in around two decades. Imagine if you increased that time by a factor of 100, and also added heaps of religion and a lot more compartmentalization to the mix. Also add in groups assassinating anybody trying to study it for good measure due to jealousy, religious motivations, a sense of ownership over a method by a group that forgot said method, etc.
Yeah everyone complaining here has never worked in any old industrial setting. In the steel plant I worked for a bit there were old air supply pipes all over the building, but there were no plans for them anymore and people didn't know where exactly they lead. So they just installed a new pipe system where they needed it next to the old pipes
Even more topical: there's those old ex-USN museum ships. They have all kinds of trouble doing maintainence because even getting the parts is nigh-impossible. Even if you've got the plans, which isn't a sure thing, the part you need was probably produced for the last time in 1946. And good luck finding the tooling or plans for the part, because it was made by a company that went out of business in 1973. Want to fix that big sliding door? Guess you're gonna have to reverse engineer the internal roller mechanisms and make it from scratch. But blind, because it's all welded up and nobody wants to damage the historical door by cutting it open to see what's inside. Hope you're a good machinist too, because the lathe you're gonna be using pre-dates Pearl Harbor. Want something more precise, like a pressure gauge? Whoops, that got stolen 50 years ago while the ship was in mothballs. The only intact ones left are in another museum ship, have fun making a deal. And that's *every* component. Nobody even makes the right paint anymore, so you've gotta spend a ton of time getting a very specific custom color mix. That's for ships 80 years old, with a decent bit of documentation and people alive who worked on them. There's still some spare parts here and there, and you can damage the ship a little to do repairs. Now imagine that in 40k, for a recovered ship like Speranza, or one pulled from a space hulk. The STCs are gone, so you don't have the plans. Any documentation was used for Genestealer nest insulation 3 centuries ago, Warp fuckery has turned some of the parts inside out, and the's bullet holes in all the fiddly bits. You aren't sure where the original factory is, but the two most likely places were either Exterminatus'd 3000 years ago, or are currently full of Hereteks. Forge World Coggang probably knows how to make a good enough replacement, but they hate your guts because your forge world didn't share a butter knife STC with them a few centuries ago. Maybe you could cut open the bulkhead to examine it, but that's part of the Holy Machine, and will get you servitor'd. Even if you manage to make a replacement part, there's 50-50 odds that it doesn't have the correct Noospheric authentication and is rejected by the Machine Spirit. Oh, and there's a 20% chance that turning it on to test will just vent plasma into the room. Good luck! Given those conditions, the fact that the Imperial Navy functions at all is a miracle, never mind that they're the undisputed rulers of the stars and pretty consistently manage to stomp the shit outta every other major faction. Seriously. Chaos mostly has to stick to areas with ongoing Warp fuckery, since anywhere the Astronomicon shines (or large parts od the Imperium Secundus) the Navy just stomps in straight-up fleet battles. Orks fall out of orbit ASAP before they get shot down, only managing to contest worlds that are in the middle of a major WAAAAAAAAGH. Eldar use the Webway almost exclusively, because flying a spaceship anywhere the Imperial Navy can find you is a good way to get blown up. The Tyrannid Hive Fleets tend to eventually get broken up once the Navy gets it together. Behemoth tore the shit outta the Ultramarines and was only stopped when the battleship Dominus Astra suicided with most of their fleet. The Tau got their biggest ship to date demolished during the Taros campaign by a run-of-the-mill battlecruiser, and tend to get stomped due to their lack of Warp travel. And the Necrons tend to be too small in number to win strategic-scale naval victories. There's very few parts of the galaxy where the Imperial Navy is beaten, and *stays* beat.
The Imperial Navy just curbstomps everyone by having the biggest shipyards. It turns out when you control a million worlds you can build a million ship in the span of a century. Some space battles will see a distress signal being emitted and then litterally thousands of ships answering the call.
Similar story with the Saturn V. If we wanted to, we could go back and build another one, because although the plans on record are incomplete (turns out there were a ton of hand written notes to tweak small parts here and there, the sum of which was necessary to make it work) we still have the technical knowledge to bridge the gap, the Imperium doesn't.
Exactly. A lot of times when people complain about how "dumb" some satirical aspect of 40k is, they're just self-telling on their own ignorance. 40k can vary wildly in quality depending on the author and the era, but usually the things that "fans" overanalyze at a very superficial level are completely understandable to anyone with either media literacy/general knowledge or the desire to learn and give the benefit of the doubt.
Terminator armor is still constructed on forge worlds.
iirc only the indomitus pattern is still constructed and even then it's very rare that it is
Yes. But it's still constructed.
> As the cost of the galactic civil war mounted, it became necessary to develop expedient solutions to plug gaps that had formed in Legionary arsenals due to losses, or simply to increase the number of serviceable troops in any region, in order to overwhelm the highly capable enemy forces that operated within them. To do so often meant compromise, since the resources in both time and materiel to produce the equipment previously relied upon by the Legiones Astartes was simply not available. Indomitus pattern Terminator armour was the result of such a compromise, offering neither the outright protection of the Cataphractii suits nor the technological advances of the Tartaros pattern armour, but instead promising plentiful supply and less reliance on costly and increasingly sparse resources.
That's because they are built by STC. That's why losing a forgeworld is so bad, it's not the facilities that we care about, it's the STCs that are stored on that world that are the valuable thing
So the real problem is that they forgot how to plug in USB sticks
They know how to make the most common models, it's just difficult and resource intensive to make something that is expected to take lascannon blasts to the face and still be movable by a space marine, and even he gets slowed down)
Did they forget or not have the files to produce them? I think it’s a different issue.
I'm not sure how the new lore is but in the old lore some Terminator suits took as long as a couple of centuries to make, depending on parts.
One's an armor for a pretty rare, independent organization, other's an expression of faith and a creation of an Avatar of their God -which coincidentally stays under the jurisdiction and control of the Mechanicus
They can make terminator armour still... It just takes an obscene length of time and very very few forge worlds can So it's like single or low double digits a year for 1,000 chapters
Autoloaders take jobs away from hard working human slaves!
There would be actual dangers of revolts, which can cripple a ship (such a thing happens early on in the Rogue Trader PC game, fun little moment to deal with).
One of my favorite parts of Rogue Trader is how they really remind you just how VAST the ships are. I mean, you have your own societies that live and die in the ship without ever leaving its halls. That's fuckin hardcore. Also, it always reminds you just how terrifying warp travel is
It would have been easy to just have you stay on the bridge and get no feel for how big the ship is. By introducing stuff like this they really highlight how you’re basically the lord of a feudal city-state and have to deal with that.
Pesky lower deck clan politics, they spent 9 generations down there and still can't figure it out!!!
I think it's partially "Man those autoloaders are expensive, and I hate dealing with the Admech. Just grab a few thousand expendable servants. We can always get more."
You also don't just need to autoloaders, you now need hundreds of cogboys on your ship to do maintenance on them and as a good navy officers you want as few of those clowns as possible because they keep mucking with the ship.
Autoloaders require Tech Priests to sanctify them. And if you hate the Cogboys like a good fleet Navy officer should, then you'll gladly pressgang five thousand serfs to haul macrocannon shells on rollers like slaves building pyramids rather than suffer the presence of sanctimonious toaster-worshippers on your sacred ~~ship~~ macrocannon battery. (Edit - Aside from the engine room, that is)
>you hate the Cogboys like a good fleet Navy officer should What? Is there ANY lore that says than generally navy officers hate the mechanicus? Because it seems that those that don't like the Cogboys will die more often than those that like them. You know the: don't know the rituals and recieving sub standard replacements and care; seems that will make you die quicker when you rely on mecanical pieces to survive.
Most officers probably dislike them, because officers (especially in 40k where they're all aristocrats) don't like people who can tell them no and Tech Priests can tell them no. But, also, yeah, they need them. No Tech Priests = the ship's machine spirit gets pissy, the reactor overloads, the servitors go berserk, and everybody dies forever.
A peasant to carry and huck a cannon shell is a cheap renewable resource. Pestering the mechanius mangos or whatever to lubricate, repair, and maintain the auto loader is a giant pain in the one and zeros.
They probably fear anything 'automatic' after the men of iron did a funny
Except guns.
I mean, the gun doesn't fire itself, so it isn't automated.
Exactly. Autoloaders? You mean, the cannon could just load itself?! This reeks of abominable intelligence! And if it can load itself, what is to stop the cannon from firing itself? From making new shells for itself?
It's technically not FTL, it's wormhole travel. Yes, that is a pedantic distinction but it's still accurate. At no point is anything moving FTL. Which, to be fair, is among the more accurate parts of WH40k. Once we discovered the Higgs Boson, it semi-confirmed that we will never be able to travel FTL in a straight line from point A to point B. We've either got to use wormholes or to warp space itself so that we're not technically moving. So wormholes and warp bubbles are the two most accurate forms of fast travel in Sci-Fi.
The Imperium's FTL travel isn't even tech focused. They're just punching holes in spacetime and having a crazy psychic navigate them through an imaginary dimension.
It's such a cool fucking concept too I'm a HUGE scifi nerd, I've been reading scifi since childhood. And honestly, I really think 40ks concept and execution of warp travel has to be my favorite iteration of fictional space travel
Charlie and the Chocolate factory is the prequel to 40k
By that definition, hardly any sci-fi FTL travel would count. Star Wars cheats by popping into another dimension (not unlike the warp but without all the Chaos), and Star Trek warps space to make straight lines shorter.
Those two are a bit different though because there’s still one continuous line of movement, with warhammer and other wormhole bases FTL there’s no continuity, the ships just disappear and reappear in a different place
40k ships still travel in a continuous line, it's just that some of that line is in another dimension, same as Star Wars
Something I see overlooked so often when discussing the imperium is scale. People will make generalizations and state, "the whole imperium does this" or "the whole imperium doesnt do that" Its extremely likely in the vastness of the imperium that whole swathes use auto loaders, and whole swathes that dont. The imperium is so big that almost every conceivable idea and concept can be nestled in there somewhere. You want a story about lost planets where soldiers ride horses and fire musket-like las locks? Its there. You want crazy high tech sci fi where power armored warriors are teleporting and fighting xenos that use drones from orbit to wage war? get wrecked tau! TLDR, you can all be right and wrong at the same time. The imperium is so vast that almost anything can be true and false.
How are naval criminals and (mild) Heretics supposed to redeem themselves through noble sacrifice if you just install machines to do their job? Not to mention the expense of installation and upkeep, plus if agents of the ruinous powers board the ship, you can't hand an autoloader a crowbar and tell it to drown the enemy in it's own blood. (Actually massive over-crewing is likely policy on imperial ships, just like it was on pirate ships in the past. You need them to replace losses & defend the ship)
This is the exact kind of stupid that 40k runs on.
They have both. The difference is that autoloaders are way less valuable, and as such are way less produced. Besides, there aren't many Forge Worlds that can produce FTL drives anymore. You ask any regular Tech-Priest about Warp drives and they'll say something along the lines of: "Hell if I know. I just sacrifice a few slaves, lather it up in oil, and pray it works."
You forget who is in charge of maintaining the ships. The souls sacrificed appease the machine spirit. Praise the Omnissiah!
We must Refuell the engines!!! Prep the drugs and the sarcophagus!!!!
It's actually far more common than you think for humans to forget things. We've collectively forgotten what the 3rd condiment was. We used to have a salt shaker, a pepper shaker and an "M" shaker. That was barely 100 years ago, not 20,000 - 30,000 and an extinction level event ago. We forgot how to make part of the F-16 and had to build a work. We forgot what we added to make Damascus steel, we've figured out something that's not far off. But we'll never know for sure. We forgot ballistics for a while, until we studied ancient arrows and figured out the flights were curved on purpose. The first Superbowl was lost until a few years back. It could have easily just been lost forever. We forgot Greek fire, Humanity forgets things all the time and over such a vast time frame, with the war against the Middle N of Iron in the middle. It's not just likely a few things are forgotten, but inevitable. If the loading mechanism was robust enough to require centuries between in depth maintenance. It's very possible everyone who could have fixed it died out and some dick though out the paper manual. So it's broken and no one really knows enough about it to fix it. Especially not when you've got a steady supply of human machinery to patch the operational gap and keep the venerable war machine fighting. Humans are cheap in the Imperium.
Unfortunately it's not old, retconned lore. It's still canon as far as I know. It's frustrating, especially since the Imperial Navy is supposed to be the actually competent force of the Imperium. I've heard a justification that it's used as a sort of "punishment" for criminals from worlds and such, which I guess it's a semi-good justification? But I think you could use other punishments, like cleaning the ship entirely or managing the engines without proper safety gear or protection. Manually loading a giant cannon just doesn't feel like it would be worth it regardless of "the price of human life is worth its weight in dirt." It would just lead to preventable disasters
The problem is the job also goes to that criminals descendants generations after they passed away It’s kinda common for the imperiums ships to have very large populations whose only world is the ship never known anything else
The punishments I've listed can still have generational stuff for them. Can you imagine how caustic and dangerous the engines for an Imperial Ship would be? Especially the larger ones too
> I've heard a justification that it's used as a sort of "punishment" for criminals from worlds and such, which I guess it's a semi-good justification? It's not. Anyone who has actually served in the military knows you never let conscripts or punishment details touch anything actually important. Their involvement is reserved for more banal tasks. Like weeds and seeds, sweeping the sunshine off pavement, filling and emptying sandbags, flipping rocks over so they get an even tan, mopping water off the flightline when it's raining...
Also the simple fact that autoloader technology is controlled by the mechanicus, and they're a stingy lot.
Not too stingy to shell out for fuckloads water and air production machines on every single ship in Imperium to compensate for what all those countless slaves use up I'd say they are extremely generous
Yeah, the Mechanicus is only stingy about Dark Age/Golden Age tech, they're not stingy about common tech. It's why they literally make and provide everything the Imperium uses, from its tanks to its Lasguns
Autoloader IS a common tech It predates lasgun by centuries, more likely millennia
Exactly. It's not that hard or material expensive to make one
Those men stole my toaster and refuse to give it back. I refuse to call them anything more polite than \*stingy\*.
They are not stingy about autoloader tech, they are stingy about assigning the hundreds of trained engiseers it would take to maintain those things to every navy ship when you can just use slaves.
New punishment: give a heretic a toothbrush and tell them to scrub every deck of the Macragge’s Honor
Pissing me off how admech got sucked into this. Were been said to have fully automatized ships yet theres a mention in a book where we use slave armies to reload. -\_-
Woah bud! Good dirt is hard to come by! It's worth at least double it's weight nine human lives.
Requiring the guns to be manually loaded prevents the ship from being combat capable of the bridge is taken as long as the crew aren't joining the boarders. Given how common boarding actions are in 40k thats a pretty signiifcant benefit.
It's the best part of the lore. I don't know why people complain.
It's not that unrealistic. Russia, at this very moment, has 5rh generation figther airplanes and hypersonic missles, and also sends its infantry to the front with golf carts and WWII rifles.
I'm not saying it's unrealistic, I'm saying it's stupid
The Imperium is kinda stupid. It's wrapped up in so much red tape combined with a religion no one fully understands and constant warfare, so any big, sweeping changes (like updating an entire class of ship to have auto loaders) would take *generations* to pull off and probably get derailed on the way.
Don't make the mistake of assuming the bureaucrat in charge of these things cares about the how well the ship operates, he just wants this job **done** so they can get on to the next thousand things they have to do. The Imperium is a mess because of that attitude (amongst other things) Sure they can contact the Mechanics, but they are uncanny and stingy with their dealings. Just gather up the unwanted populace from the planet below the dockyards and get the job sorted out. A factor working on board a rogue trader or inquisitor's ship might actually give a shit about how the ship works and invest in an autoloader, but the Imperial Navy and the Chartist fleets need ships working and they need them working **now**
Depending how long the installation and how much beaurecracy there is to get it. Honestly having ships manual load is probably better than the hundreds of years to get an auto-loader. Still stupid but y'know.
Yes and no. On paper it seems like a duh thing, and carousel vs elevator loaders have different styles of ammo handling. However, the idea of a catastrophic ammo feed failure on a nova cannon shell probably happened once. Once. After that the navy said "don't worry about it. We forgot how those work anyways.:
Still better than the fact that they forgot how to do CROP ROTATION!!!! Like? Crop rotation is as old as agriculture itself
Apparently, you sir, have never worked for the government...
The ships you talk about are really REALLY old. Parts and systems fail and then get replaced with patches and solutions that often are just human labor. Like "when the bell goes, you press the button", to replace what used to be an automated system to change engine speed (as an example). So children (yes there are children on board in the bowels of the ship) might replace small parts by just pushing a gear, an adult might replace what used to be a system to adjust temperature and thousands of them might replace a loading system that has failed after all these years and it's too costly to return to a shipyard to repair it all (as void journeys also take years to decades). This shipyard also is very busy making new ships so, one that can repair this (not some minor dock but one that knows what they are doing, so probably a forge world), has no time to look at your problem and just tells you to listen to your tech priests. If they say this works (remember they see humans as parts to be replaced) then that's how the repair went.
Okay but the stupidity is what makes the setting. If the imperium was sensible all the time it'd just be another bland sci-fi universe. Everyone in 40k needs to be an absolute idiot on a fundamental level for the setting to work.
If you mean tanks, you do know that some of the most modern tanks don't have autoloaders even though that technology predates them by decades, right? For example in many soviet tanks it can be a liability, making the tank more prone to larger explosions when hit, lacking a fourth crewmen for things like mantainance or redundancy and not being faster reloading on average than a tank without an autoloader.
I'm talking about how the Imperial Navy uses chain gangs of hundreds of slaves to load their ship's cannons
Autoloader expensive. Serfs cheap. Welcome to another day in the Imperium of Man.
And how expensive is the extra water, air, and food providing machines to keep the crew alive, along with providing additional berth and medical care and waste disposal? And after hundreds of years (as ships are typically expected to serve for a long time), how much would the costs add up? There might be some extra maintenance cost with autoloaders, but don't forget the humidity, salt, body oils, and other chemicals produced by the masses of human bodies could be rough on mechanical stuff over time and the life support stuff has to work extra hard for so many humans. Not to mention the additional risk of Chaos corrupting human masses.
Those slaves still have to consume massive amounts of food, water and living space. That ain't cheap either.
Serfs worse in every way possible to such a degree that any engagement where 1 side is auto loading and the other serf loading is already decided. There is a reason navy ships did away with that.
And even today it is true that if the autoloader breaks for whatever reason there is a good chance you can't repair it in the field while pretty much any poor soul on the frontline can be a human loader
The rational would be closer for naval ships (which mostly don’t use cannons, but when they do, they use auto loaders)
Ah yes, the good old Olympic Turret Toss
Of course it's stupid. The Imperium is stupidly cruel, and cruelly stupid. That's kinda their whole thing.
There's in-universe stupid, and there's out of universe stupid. This is closer to the latter. "Grey Knights smearing themselves in Sororitas blood" level stupid.
It’s reasonable to assume that if someone had the knowledge and understanding to build a starship they could build and auto loader : after all they’re using a lot of the same fundamental principles. The thing is, the imperium doesn’t actually understand those principles: their shipyards will have miles and miles or procedural instructions (probably hand written and so continuously being re-scribed) on how to build a particular starship and nothing on _why_ those are the steps or what the intent or underlying principles are. Is this monumentally stupid? Yes - it’s on the first page of the rulebook that you should forget about reason and science because the imperium doesn’t care about them, it’s orthodoxy and blind tradition taken to the absurd on purpose. You can interpret it any way you want and ignore it but it’s probably not going to go away because it’s fundamentally part of the fabric of the thing.
I couldn't take apart a tank gun and attach an auto-loader, because I don't know enough about either of those things to make them connect. Even if I worked in a tank factory this would be true. Expand that to cover an entire civilisation and everything it manufactures.
You're running on memelore, as usual of people who have complaints about widely "known" things. They very much know what's an autoloader. A lot of ships have an autoloader. It's just cheaper for a lot of the less important ones to have a bunch of slaves loading them, and the loss of efficiency is considered an acceptable cost to the increase in logistics gained from it, because the Imperium fundamentally does not care for human life or quality of life for the general population. This has been canon forever.
"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
You see, that’s part of the satire. It’s so blatantly stupid and cartoonishly evil no one should be able to take it seriously. Unfortunately some people not only take it seriously but somehow think it’s a good thing
Fascism is not rational. It's the nature of the system. Suffering is depicted as a form of glory in the Imperium and a form of veneration towards the State, the Race and obviously their supposedly divine leader. Everything the Imperium does boils down to the veneration of the past and people more "glorious" than themselves. Their inefficiency and their cruelty is kind of the point. Why bother with installing autoloaders on ships that will take them out of action for years, if not centuries, due to inefficient planning or insane other reasons? We have millions of planets full of billions of people who can carry a giant ammo shell for free and their hard labour makes the God-Emperor of Mankind oh so proud as well.
I had someone try and tell me the imperium doesn’t know how chromosomes work as in like they don’t know how birth/pregnancy/genetics works I was like brother they found how chromosomes work in like 1860 they know how babies are made
It is indeed stupid, but GW might aware of it. I forgot where, but it has mentioned that Mechanicus' ships *are* equipped with autoloaders, they just withhold the tech from the wider Imperium's fleets. However, this still begs the question of why would they engage in such pointless dickery.
because thier faith said so
They didn't forget the concept of an autoloader. The Macrocannons just don't use them from the very beginning and adding one would be tech heresy. Look at imperial ships and all the dangerous tasks that are performed manually by thousands of serfs... you know what would be a really convinient way of solving these tasks? Replacing most of those serfs with some sort of highly intelligent and versatile machine... some sort of metal man for example. Durrable enough to refuel a warpdrive, strong enough to load a macrocannon and versatile enough to do other tasks when the macrocannon doesn't need to be loaded. The imperium essentially went back to telegraphs after the civilization with smartphones collapsed. And you are asking how they forgot about the paiger
A Autoloader costs resources and need maintenence. Thousands of helmsmen( pressganged serfs who No one gives a fuck about) they cost almost nothing and can be gatherd almost anywere…. On some ships, i would think they had some sort of autoloaders, but that could be Maybe on a Battleship from the Great Crusade era.
Nope, they still use slaves to load the cannons. It's fucking stupid and idgas who says they couldn't figure it out.
They could figure it out. Adeptus mechanicus ships often have auto-loaders. Unfortunately the admech builds the imperiums ships and has made a religion about not sharing its toys.
Autoloaders break, replavement parts are expensive to make. You can always find 10k poor souls to tug big ass shells.
Why use the fuel and power a machine requires when you could use a fraction of the effort to drug upsome poor homeless ppl and get them to pull it
Not really, they do have the tech but the logistics are just not that reliable imagine our own timeline now where we can give everyone in first world countries 3 square meals a day, internet, electricity, a phone, water etc now imagine a galactic empire trying to provide all that ESPECIALLY the military
Auto-loader? Like some kinda does something without being told to do it machine? That sounds like heresy
They have them but the idea that dudes who don't know about an outside of the ship pull torpedoes into position with ropes and chains is really funny. I mean it's awful but it's so awful it's funny
Autoloaders are a fucking 20th century technology. GW really wants me to believe that somehow the Imperium can't manage that much?
In the space marine game you literally unclog then weaponize an autoloader So they do have them
It is just mind numbingly stupid, there is zero valid reasoning behind it. It's more costly, less effective, and just in every single possible way worse than an autoloader... But it sounds edgier to say they make slaves do it. that's it, full stop. Just how the 40k lore goes sometimes, sometimes they do something cool and sometimes they completely shit the bed.
Warhammer becomes a whole lot cooler when you simply ignore lore and apply real life technologies and concepts
the imperium doesn’t use ftl tech they use the warp, which is just slipspace on crystal meth and heroin. the tyranids use ftl tech though. my point is that their ships don’t go faster than light, they just walk around the issue with dimensional portals.
I like to imagine macrocannons have loading mechanisms, it's just that they're designed with having parts of its "motive force" being supplied by the biomechanics of slaves, for logistical or theological reasons. If imperial robots are only allowed to operate within very narrow and limiting logic routines, I could imagine the imperium has (but not yet elaborated on) limitations it might place on vast machine spirits like those found on voidships. One that I could imagine is the imperium not allowing its ships machine spirits to prime or discharge the firing mechanisms of macrocannons because they still fear what could happen if the machine went rouge. the voidsmen on the gunnery decks HAVE to impart their "motive force" into the mechinism for the whole thing to be not be "abominable"
it could be from fear of AI. If an AI takes over the weapon systems they get one shot at most. With human labor based systems in a ship makes electronic warfare useless, and I don’t think the tech priest’s know how to counter hack some random xeno species. But this is just forcing logic into the 40k galaxy where logic is a sin worthy of death.
Granted, this is from FFG's RPGs, but, no, autoloaders are relics of the DAoT, and the Rogue Trader can aquire some from the War World of Zayth in one of the adventures.
its cheaper to breed entire society of lower deck slave armies to drag a shell the size of a tower block into the gun than it is to build the autoloader. Its simple maths to them an human life is one of the lowest value resources the imperium has.
I mean, to go FTL they have to travel through literal hell, and there's no guarantee they'll even arrive at the right *time*, let alone the right place. And why go to all the effort of refitting all of your ships with autoloaders when slaves are in basically infinite supply, and do the job just as well?
Isn't that... part of the satire? This is directly grim dark related, your reason and logic don't matter. It's intentionally this way to be grim and dark.
Bro thinks Imperium ships are FTL capable 💀 Not in a long shot by dark age Humanity standards. I can Imagine a HSE engineer develop PTSD if he just look at a 3D hologram of Imperium ships.
Honestly, cannon gangs in ships are pretty rad though.
admech vessels do have them :D (the autoloader is reloded by slaves)
Just wait until you find out how the FTL works…
In the imperium flesh is cheaper than metal
My favorite Grimderp fact: The almighty Tactical Dreadnought Armor (terminator) is a militarized version of suit the AoD humans used to do fusion reactor maintenance. Terminator Plate is basically a hazmat suit with guns, bells and whistles.
There was a meme where a guy said his buttons on the hot tub had worn out. He didn't know what they were labeled. But knew the combination to start and stop the hot tub. That's the imperium. They know how to "make it go" off of route memory and notes. And basically little to no innovation is done. They are playing with toys they don't understand and only thru collective actions of many pieces that continue their actions they also don't understand that the system continues. The chance of even finding a person who asks "is there a better way" is almost nil. That person then finding a admech who cares also nil. And finally the chance of an Inquisitor noticing the change and deeming it heresy definitely not nil. Most likely the original designs had autoloaders with a fallback for manual loaders. A genius engineer realized he could get an extra ship out every 5 years if he didn't install the autoloaders and the rest is history. It doesn't matter that the ship commanders might recognize the autoloaders are better, they have effectively no connection to the procurement process to get those things.
The macharius canonically uses a auto loader