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Dear everyone
I'm going to take advantage of this thread for a bit of a rant about the background.
The main bugbear I have with the Imperial fluff is the complete lack of natural inquisitiveness and study found at supposedly any level, whether by the normal Imperium or tech-priests. It seems paradoxical and mutually exclusive that they do not try to understand and appreciate the symmetry, design, and function of what they claim to protect.
Surely if so much technological knowledge has been forgotten the very fact of maintaining, repairing and creating the technology they do have (which includes warp travel, anti gravity, teleportation etc.) would increase understanding to such an extent that some bright spark would try and understand something else, or see if some algorithm/material/process/design could be used for another purpose or to improve something. How do they train people in such a way that they could actually fix an uncommon or rare problem in a sustainable fashion so that the span of the Imperium (both time and space) would be possible. It wouldn't. Aaargh.
It seems a fundamental shift in human nature that in any population large enough (even amoung the tech-priests themselves) the necessity of maintaining some archaic piece of technology would not require some lateral thinking and originality, rather than let it 'die'?
Surely an STC that introduces a new material (the first Gaunts Ghosts novel talks about one I seem to remember) would describe/show why and how that material is designed to do what it does, which would increase the understanding of the scholar and suggest the same process could be applied to another material family as well?
Maybe the fact that they are introducing some sort of entropy (in it's broadest sense) into the Golden Throne is a way of bringing this into the Imperium. Some hero will discover an STC that describes the programming of an AI algorithm, rather than constructing an object, crushing the machine-spirit belief, and so allow the Golden Throne to be repaired. Or at least start a process of learning to save it before it and the Emperor 'dies'. There seems to be a direct conflict of interest there.
I don't know if I managed to adequately phrase the 'wrongness' of that whole background system, assuming they want the fluff to be a consistent whole.
It annoys me even more than the Eldar 'forgetting' to download/backup the plans/theory of their race before the fall, despite the fact that they were forwarned sufficiently for the Exodites to move out, craftworlds to be prepared etc. For a supposedly artistic pinnacle race they show a remarkable disregard for the beauty of mathematics and physics to just leave them behind, for example. Maybe they only had a 256 MB pen-drive available. Also, are we to assume that all of their worlds with 'libraries' were located in the centre of their empire and were sucked into the eye of terror?
Sorry about that all, but it feels good to get it off my chest. So much of the fluff has great scope, but in the process of introducing things for dramatic effect the inconsistencies drive me up the wall.
Cheers,
Lookatmybiglongname
Also, two questions:
1. I remember reading somewhere that the Tau may have been created by the Eldar (pheromones possibly?) as a means of combating the nid's. I can't remember it exactly, can anyone fill me in?
2. Did the C'Tan do it all?
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