Humanity during its golden age is talked about as an unstoppable force that could beat Orcs...

That's a dumb interpretation of the fluff

Chaos happened. You can't use an electric toothbrush without Slaanesh turning it into a demonic vibrator in your mouth.

>Humanity during its golden age is talked about as an unstoppable force that could beat Orcs,Eldar pretty much every race in the universe easily.

Not really no. The Necrons were sleeping and we were second only to the Eldar, but strong enough they didn't fuck with us too much.

>Yet humanity in the current age has trouble fighting all these races now? What downgraded happened exactly?

The War of Iron happened. Skynet became self aware, the Cylons attacked the Twelve Colonies and the Geth took Rannoch.

The AI rebelled and everything went to shit.

We survived, somehow, but now all the other species that couldn't touch us before suddenly smelled blood in the water and we got fucked again.

Then the Emps pulled some shit together and set about freeing and uniting the scattered survivors and building a new Human Empire ... then Chaos happened and we got fucked AGAIN.

>As far as I know Space Marines, Imperial guard etc etc are all the same now as they were back then?

You clearly don't know anything about the setting. Those things didn't even exist then. The Space Marines were created by Emps and the Guard was formed after the Heresy.

I think we have to remember that humanity in no way was homogeneous. Look at today. You have countries with all the bells and whistles while on the other side of the globe there's tribes living in jungles who have never even seen a white man, let alone any modern technology.

When you really read the fluff, you find stuff like Predators being the principle battle tanks of DAoT humans (IA vol. 2), so it's quite possible vast majority of human worlds were at best non-shit Imperial in terms of technology. The peaks of human technology, the ships with dark energy slings and gravity furnaces, were probably limited to the very core of the empire, the Sol system and such. They might have been powerful, but they did not have the numbers nor the capability to police all the colonies nor fight the major powers of the galaxy, such as the Eldar. They could have isolated skirmishes, but if the full might of the Eldar empire came down on humans, they would have collapsed.

Eldar and DAoT humans were about even. Fighting each other would've been to costly. And the Eldar were past their prime anyway, only hedonism now.

What I don't understand is, where the hell have the men of iron gone? They implode the entirety of human space from within and just disappear without a trace.

I feel like the War of Iron is overblown. The main reason for it's destructiveness is that it coincided with the beginning of the birth of Slaanesh when all those Warp Storms started appearing. Xenos couldn't attack humanity because most species were fucked transportation wise. But if you had natives ready to go wild or you didn't develop an immediate hate for Psykers then yeah you were fucked.

Also he clearly mixed up DAoT with Great Crusade when it comes to the Golden Age of Humanity.

The golden era was even before the emperor had showed himself to humanity yet.
So space marines were not a thing yet, but humanity did not really need them back then anyways.
You see, there were forces similar to that of the guard, but think of it as if every guardsmen had armor better then powerarmor and weapons that were way more powerful than that of a bolter.
AI's that were fighting entire battles for the humans, makeing casualties a 0. (This was also a reason the machines rebelled agains humanity, they kinda got tierd of getting shot at for the humans.)
It were at the point were humans did not have to make an efort for anything. Machines did it all from our daily needs to as I said erlier, our battles for us.
This meant that with time, humanity were at its core, weakened. So when the machines flipped us the bird we got really spooked and kinda paniced.
Thus, after the war against the men-of-iron humanity were damaged and broken in more ways then one.
Then warpstorms showed up and made jumps hard next to impossible. leading to alot of planets to be crushed under its own weight. No food or toilet paper could be transported.
This was the final blow, sent us back to the stoneage and we've been working our way up from there since then. Only we know not to create some stuff like AI's for they may kill us all.
So we are limited when it comes to progress in the 40k universe, since we are so afraid of our past to repeat itself.

I may have fucked up the lore here and there, but thats what I understand it to be in sort terms.

Tzeentch, the god of hope and most powerful god of the age, got ripped apart by the envious Chaos Gods, Nurgle and Khorne. This triggered the Age of Strife and the Iron Men Rebellion.

The Eldar were still in their prime, their hedonism was a result of that and both sides were using robotic armies so the skirmishes they did have weren't particularly terrible. Human Men of Iron couldn't get close to the Eldar Border without getting blown the fuck out by the Eldar defenses.

...

>As far as I know Space Marines, Imperial guard etc etc are all the same now as they were back then?
lol wut? Are you thinking about 30k? 30k was not humanity's golden age. 30k was the beginning of the Imperial age; the dark age of technology was 10k years before that

see pic for how to understand the difference between 40k human tech and humanity's technology at the pinnacle of pre-Age of Strife civilisation. Humanity at its peak was coming close to Necron-levels of tech (possibly because they looted Necron technology from Mars). 40k is just a pale shadow of the apex of mankind's civilisation

>Human Men of Iron couldn't get close to the Eldar Border without getting blown the fuck out by the Eldar defenses
>both sides were using robotic armies so the skirmishes they did have weren't particularly terrible
Source? Sounds like Eldar wankery. Fluff rarely touches DAoT and especially other races and galaxy at large at this time period. Additionally, Eldar don't use AI and they would use safe and obedient robots if they could. Eldar have to reanimate wraithbone bodies with soulstones and many despise it.

Human Psykers as well as Chaos happened. Every untrained psyker is a potential vector for Chaos.

They used to have AI to help them, both for things like development and calculation, which let them have more miniaturized technology. AI also let them build disposable machine armies. Now AI tries to kill anyone and/or join Chaos so they're stuck with cogitators that may or may not include wetware.

Nearly every colony used to have full STC's with which to easily mass produce produce tech, or distribute info on how to make it. Most of that would be on par with the best IoM shit. (With exceptions.)

DAoT Humanity didn't have as many worlds to defend as the IoM had at it's height. This is because of the Great crusade conquering tons of former Eldar exodite planets and those belonging to many other Xenos. IoM is spread out fighting more enemies while using weaker tech.

>As far as I know Space Marines, Imperial guard etc etc are all the same now as they were back then?
Space Marines didn't exist and were unnecessary due to the aforementioned machines. Far flung colonies may have had militia using things like Predator tanks and Rhino APC's.

I always found it weird that the article that mentioned that never gave a name to humans that came before if they're not the stone men or whatever..

The Tau fits the place that humanity had during the early times of the Dark Age of Technology. I think humanity didn't get psykers or warp travel until far later at the very end of this age.

You forgot the warpstorms after the pyhrric victory against the Men of Iron.

So it's: Skynet, followed by warpstorms and a shitload more psykers, which lead to deamons everywere, unless they were killed fast/mastered their skills fast.
Then most of the Xenos that were either allied or at least kept to themselves deemed "fuck mankind, we conquer/genocide now."
While this went down the human worlds with high populations, that could not support those people with their own ressources (Terra,Mars among others), starved and ultimately went into total war for the last scaps.

That went 5000 years.

Some centuries before the end of that shit the Mechanicum formed on Mars, a bit later big E started to reunite Terra.
The Cogbros found ways to traverse the warp storms from time to time and sent out fleets. These fleets founded the first forge worlds.

The Clusterfuck finally ended when the eldar did it: They fucked Slaanesh into existence.
It's birthing scream opened the Eye of Terror which wrecked most of the Eldar worlds. Slaanesh nommed their souls and gods.
It also calmed the warp storms, so the great crusade could begin.

The war of Iron as you call it was: All of mankinds tech used by incedible AI vs. mankind.

Mankind won by destroying their own technological base, their AI.

Yet there were human colonists on Cadia...

Pretty coexistance if you ask me.

>What I don't understand is, where the hell have the men of iron gone? They implode the entirety of human space from within and just disappear without a trace.
They are still there, hiding in plain sight...
Masters of disguise, two factions wage a secret war across the Galaxy!
youtube.com/watch?v=Ae-Pl-Q34ng

Note that all history of Dark of Age of Technology comes from Imperium's utterly corrupted, misinterpreted, and decayed records.

It is Eldar wankery from the Eldar codex, though I forget the edition. We already know everything was automated in the Eldar Empire, that's what allowed their hedonism in the first place. Craftworld Eldar have to use Wraithbone constructs because it's largely the only material available to them. That problem wouldn't exist for the Homeworld Eldar who had an entire half an arm of the Galaxy reserved for themselves

More like the later battle, in which that pilot was ripped out of his mech. Sans arms and legs.

Cool idea actually. But you forgot that Tzeentch is also plotting against himself. The galaxy grew stagnant two superpowers living (mostly) peaceful side by side... TIME FOR CHANGE BITCHES!

Powerarmor is an STC, it's save to assume rank and file wore them.

The warp storms were the birth of slanesh in fact the eye of terror is the epicentre of the old eldar empire.

The Eldar controlled the galaxy back then. Humanity basically existed on it's borders and constantly had to skirt around them.

That isn't, of course, to say that they were significantly more powerful than they were now, just that the Eldar were even more powerful than that.

Humanity was crippled and left pretty retarded by the Age of Strife, but the Eldar were left almost extinct.

It should be logically as you say.
But in the fluff the thunder warriors are the first men that wear a proto-power armor.

It's also not an STC. They redesigned power armor fairly significantly multiple times over the course of the Great Crusade.

We do know that terminator armor is an STC Pattern. Used for Reactor maintenance techs iirc.

No. That's a much later event. The Birth of Slaanesh was a good thing for humanity broken into independent worlds. Warp travel was impossible during the Age of Strife. The Birth of Slaanesh which gave birth to the Eye of Terror also made Warp travel possible once more.

>Note that all history of Dark of Age of Technology comes from Imperium's utterly corrupted, misinterpreted, and decayed records.

I like how this whole thread is exactly like a group of Imperial scholars debating about the Dark Age of Technology. Everybody knows some vague bits of information, but none has a clear picture of what actually happened.

IIRC humanity reached FTL when Gellar field and Navigators were discovered. Machines needed human navigators to travel between worlds. Without them men of iron were trapped on their worlds and later destroyed by scavenging Orks and Great Crusade.

Which opens another question. How the fuck Big E managed to find surviving Navigators on Terra? Thousands years after the disaster they would be wiped out in psyker purges or simply die out as their abilities were no longer needed. Did the Emperor navigate the Warp himself before he found Navigator families? Can other psykers do that?

Mars launched fleets over the course of the Age of Strife during temporary calm periods to found other Forge Worlds. Odds are they would have had some navigators.

Semmed to got hit by the retcon hammer. In the second or thirs HH novel Horus fleet finds a human realm which used power armor for their rank and file. According to them, that would be only naturall as it was an STC pattern and they had a working STC.

I would say that the Sm power Armor was developed from corrupted files and half rotten scrapped the Emperors engineers and later the Mechanicum found. Hence the different versions.
The MK1 would be just what they found on Terra and was was necessary at that time, so no hermetical sealing or powered leg armor.

Slaanesh is the God of perfect warp travel

Remember Space Marines, when you're about to jump into the Warp, always remember to thank Slaanesh. Clear Immateriums and a bright Astronomicon will come to you.

Mars had some actually. They died out eventually.
Part of the treaty of Mars was making the Navigator houses subserviant to the Mechanicum to replace their lost ones.

All this tech talk has me wanting to play a sci-fi game or read some neat sci-fi stories.

Any suggestions? Just finished reading Asimov's "The Last Question" which is concerning the evolution of man alongside an advanced thinking machine.

Wasn't this also canon in Fantasy? His pieces become the first mortal magic while in 40k it brought psykers to everyone not Eldar. I think he even got a Chaos Daemon who seeks for the missing bits.

They had some warp capabilities, which got better as the age went on - according to lexicanum, the full warp drive and gellar field was made by M18, and navigators were also developed at some point, with the DAoT generally reckoned to be from M15/18 - M22/25

They were incredibly dangerous, leaving them around would be a huge mistake.

It's worth noting that, other than the orks (probably), none of the old races have anything like their max power:
The Necrons can't recreate their wonders, the weapons the used against the C'tan were destroyed and the Silent King broke his command protocols, leaving them divided against each other.

The core of the eldar empire exploded, leaving only those who'd run away, or who were hiding in their pleasure-realms; those who remain have much less power, especially psyker powers

Humans have lost most of their DAoT tech and the armies of the Men of Iron - the tech that survives is near irreplaceable for most of the good stuff, and the best stuff they can replace still takes decades

...

You should drop HH altogether.

Astartes armor is designed to have more functions than regular power armor. Bodies and armor of the marines are built to work together. Mechanicus engineers could make mistakes while designing it or sacrifice some qualities.

Foundation? Forever war? The city and the stars?
According to Veeky Forums Dune is a blast. Haven't read it yet, though.

Effectively the whole story is about Islam. The God Emperor is Mohammad that's why they all want to die for him to get their virgins. They stopped making machinery and just started praying to it like retards, effectively the same way ISIS has inherited smart phones and stuff.

Compare ISIS to any developed, civilized army and then you'll know why the contemporary imperium sucks.

The Emperor was a master of Gene manipulation. Made the Primarchs and all that. He might have just thrown some together, or he found some humans with the recessive traits of Navigators during the Age of Strife and orchestrated them to have kids until they popped back up into existance when he needed them.

Dropped it long ago.
Just thought it worth mentioning.

Was adapted from, it's not a direct STC - even the designs for land raiders, land speeders, baneblades and the rhino (which comes from RH1N0) aren't full STCs, they're just highly complete fragments and printouts that can be pieced back together

IIRC, the storms built and built during the age of strife until the Birth - so not impossible, just horrifically difficult

/pol/ as always: nope. How's your boyfriend, did you two adopt a child now or not?

>When humanity were the Tau.
Anime, not even once.

They were infected by the Imperial equivalent of MLP.

Hope you're not claiming 40k takes place inside a simulation.

I like to think that half of the designs used by the Imperium are actually movie props or something from the style from the year 2527.

>Note that all information in the Imperium comes from their utterly corrupted, misinterpreted, and decayed records.
fixed

Weren't all, or at least most, of their warships actually re-purposed civilian transports?

This is a false notion - eldar use the webway, a limited form of travel with limited destinations. That is, they can't go wherever they like. Add to this the fact that, during the DAoT, the eldar are murderfucking themselves into destruction.

Thus, it seems highly unlikely that the eldar and DA humans ever even met. The Craftworlders will have interacted; but this is the time when the craftworlds were still relatively small.

As I understand it, a lot of the military hardware the Imperium uses in 40k was, during the DAoT (which I assume is the golden age you're talking about) was considered to be not good enough for military standard issue.

Terminator armor was originally for hot repairs on reactors, baneblades were originally tractors or some shit, lasguns were probably the AK-47s of the setting (cheap, readily available, very reliable, but the army has better), and so on. They're used by the Imperium in warfare because that's the best that survived.

Trying to find that article on Lexicanum about a ship some chaos warlord found. It was supposed to be made up of silver and light and predated the age of strife. Had enough room aboard for a fighter wing.

>note that all information comes from utterly corrupted, misinterpreted and decayed records.

Fixed again

Here we go found it.

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Slaughtersong

My understanding is that most of the surviving worlds from Old Night were the ones that went full /pol/ and killed everyone who looked funny, such as psykers. The ones that played nice, and were the most advanced, didn't do this and came down with a serious case of daemons. This meant that the most primitive worlds during the Dark Age were the most advanced during the Great Crusade. In short the factors that made humanity rise up were the exact same ones that damned it later.

I clearly recall one of the older rulebooks talking about how the last moments of the Dark Age were marked by absurd numbers of psykers and some attempts to keep them under control. I always thought it was clear that the psyker population has been increasing for thousands of years by 40K.

...

...

...

...

...

He didn't find it, he left it there. It's possible the dude was a Sensei. I remember reading that he appeared in another story, where he talked about the Men of Iron in a very personal manner.

Another ship of note is the Blade of Infinity, which predates known human warp travel, yet was lost in the warp and appears from time to time, usually followed by bad things.

...

...

...

Whats strange to me is why no one outside of the Admech starts to invent/advance on their own.

Also their complete inability to reverse enginer anything.

It gets a bit silly sometimes.

>As far as I know Space Marines, Imperial guard etc etc are all the same now as they were back then?
Back in the day the Marines WERE the Guard, and Titans were MBTs.

The Men of Gold didn't survive to the Unification Wars I think. They were dependent on the Men of Stone and suffered greatly to the Men of Iron.

Psykers are still around and if anything increasing in number and potency.

Everything
>Emperor
Can no longer lead, and his greatest projects have ended in failure. No webway for mankind, no Primarchs, no Great Crusade. Humanity is now forced to rely on bureaucrats and leaders who literally or only a fraction as competent as he was in commanding the Imperium.

>Space Marines
Split into chapters now. Any force against the Imperium would feel the might of a legion slamming into them. Now, rather than forming the unbreakable wall of a legion, they are split into a thin film across the entire Imperium, threatening to buckle at any time. If not against a threat they weren't expecting, then because someone turns traitor and it takes forever to find out about it.

>The Guard
Relegated to numbers in the Administratum. Under the crushing weight of itself, the Guard's best abilities are seldom used properly anymore. Their supply and deployment are reduced to numbers on paper that some scribe lightyears away rubber stamps. They don't see a regiment that is an expert at city fighting and close quarters combat. They just see a regiment of 1000 soldiers in it, and finds the closest warzone that needs an extra thousand bodies, regardless if it plays to the strengths to that regiment. Also there is a focus on chain of command rather than competence so people who actually know what they are doing tend to get shot, or promoted to a position where they no longer know what they hell they are doing.

>Technology
Mechanicus didn't know what they fuck they were doing then, they know even less now. Despite all their expeditions, the Inquisition sending them loads of captured xeno tech, and generally everything they need, the AdMech is basically throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. They have no process to follow, not means of keeping track of what they learn, or backing up what they know. One fuck up, and all that knowledge is gone. And the Imperium fucks up a lot so...

>Necrons, Tau, and Tyranids
nuff said

Nobody understands it. A 3rd world tribal warrior can operate a machine gun and call on a mobile phone, but you really think they have any understanding of the complex technology that goes into one? Do you, without a wiki?

Technology is next to sorcery to average Imperials and Admech, the only people who know anything about it, do not like to share knowledge. Why would they, their whole power is tied to their ability to control technology. If someone else starts making tech, their power diminishes.

Besides, nothing stops little shops from doing tech (Necromunda gangers, for example. can get creative), it's just that for them to reach wider audience, they'd get the attention of the Admech, and you think they'll award this genius for their innovation or burn them as a heretech to send a message to anyone else trying to stop on their turf?

Someone might read a book at some point. If they did, the admech would fall in a couple of centuries.

What do you think the book contains? Because it's not the 40k lore bible. If it was, it'd sound like flat Earth creationist insanity to them.

>Someone might read a book at some point
You're talking about an Imperium with literal book burning squads. Even in Terra, there are squads assigned flamethrowers to burn away and destroy any records that can't be censored, or if censoring isn't enough.

>Humanity during its golden age is talked about as an unstoppable force that could beat Orcs,Eldar pretty much every race in the universe easily.
Where?
Because fluffwise, Humanity was never even remotely a threat to the Pre-fall Eldar empire.
The Eldar were the top dogs of the galaxy during humanity's "golden age".

m8, the only reason the Eldar exclusively use the webway in modern 40k is Slaanesh. Before their fall, nothing prevented them from using the warp to travel. There is no reason to think that they didn't use both means.

Also, the Eldar knew how to MAKE webway gates, portals, new paths, entire fucking subrealms within it, back then. They could connect it to any fucking place they wanted. They didn't inherit the webway as it is from the old ones, they continued to expand it far after the Old ones were dead.

You're thinking the age of strife. user is referring to Emps strolling about curb stomping everything that got in his way.

>Eldar and DAoT humans were about even.
Source: My Ass.

The Eldar have been consistently stated as having been the unopposed masters of the galaxy at the time, both in their codexes, as well as even in the big rule book itself.
Humans were at no point, even a friggin blip on their radar. They were a non threat to the Pre-fall eldar.
There is nothing that supports the claim that DAoT humanity was "about even" with the pre-fall eldar.

Humanity's Golden age was Dark Age of Tech, not Great Crusade era.

>nothing prevented them from using the warp to travel

Nothing stops you from walking everywhere, yet people just don't.

Also: Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle.

>Additionally, Eldar don't use AI and they would use safe and obedient robots if they could.

Modern Eldar don't. The pre fall Eldar did. The codexes state that they pretty much lived in a post scarcity society, where everything was automated, and the Asurmen novel mentions that the Eldar war machinery was largely automated and fought the wars of the Eldar for them. This automation ended up giving the Eldar all the time they wanted to do whatever the fuck they pleased, which in turn, led to the fall.

If civ has taught me anything, you can have more than one Golden Age.

Plus I think the reference to Space Marines in OP should be a clear message that he wasn't referring to DAoT

Except you know all those warp storms that lead to the Age of Strife.

Many STC designs aren't designs as we'd understand them in the traditional sense. In this millennia we have 'templates' and some magos somewhere will make a new one. It's not like an old STC template though. The new ones will say exactly how to make it. Make the bore .50 inches in diameter, make it 18 inches long, relief cut here, thread here... That's not how a real STC works.

The STC contains information for an AI to 'know' how to make something. The AI will try a hundred billion times a second to remove virtual chunks of iron from a virtual billet, and try to load a virtual projectile in it until it fires. It will continue doing this until it works in its mind. When it works and fulfills all of the requirements of the STC, it will publish it as a local pattern for use with available materials. That is why they are gibberish and make no sense. You MUST be an AI to understand them, and process them impossibly fast in order to create the pattern in a reasonable time frame. That's why an STC could make a 'Rhino' from ceramite instead of steel, and still have it be better than anything we could make.

damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

THIS is the sort of antenna a STC makes.
It works across all frequencies and is a fraction of the weight of something we could make with anything like the same performance.

Which only occurred towards the climax of the fall, a tiny portion of the overall Eldar empire's existence. There is no reason to assume that the Eldar didn't use warp travel back then, when Slaanesh still didn't exist.
They sure as hell had the technology, seeing how the Craftworld Eldar, who, by the way, were the equivalent of a bunch of redneck truckers of the pre fall Eldar empire, have that technology and regularly use it, just not for long jumps. Picture fucking related.

Also this sort of evolutionary technology is prime breeding ground for chaos. You could have a perfectly good and functional STC Rhino, but there's a hidden gene in there that was no selected out by the STC, the gene make it pulp its pilots when certain nearly impossible conditions are met, and seems totally unpredictable to us.

I still doubt they'd use it if they have the safer webway. Being witness to the fuckery of the Old Ones would probably leave a sour note on warp travel with them.

It's not that it's hard to read STCs, it's just that we don't have any STCs. All STC designs Imperium has are just hard copies people made, possibly of things they were very likely to use a lot, so having a print with you instead of having to pop back to the STC all the time made sense.

I'm sure Rhinos are made with plasteel and ceramite, just like all the other Imperial tanks.