So how above the law and Inquisition authority is the Ad-mech?

Timeline in the Cult Mechanicus book mentions them fighting the Inquisition for an artifact. They are effectively autonomous of each other.

To be fair, the =][= fights everyone, including the other parts of the Inquisition.

I'm also a fan of that. Listened to "The Binary Succession" recently, and it seemed pretty much what you'd expect out of a treaty conference until a fucking Imperator Titan held the conference hall at gunpoint.

>Are we the heretics?

Not at all. The Inquisition hunts down hereteks all the time. If an Acolyte comes across a Tech Priest fucking around with xenotech or daemon summoning, they're probably not going to be asking too many questions about jurisdiction before they fill the heretek full of lead.

I think they're about as independent as the Space Marines.

They seem to be pretty into self-policing when it comes to problem tech priests and hereteks, too.

As others have said, in theory not at all, in practice near-entirely, especially on forge worlds. The Admech is a part of the imperium (as of the addition of "adeptus" and the treaties following the heresy), but that legacy of independence, the fact that they joined as independent, as well as their enormous power and importance means they practically are still.

What's also worth noting is that the Mechanicum maintained, (and the Admech inherited) its own secret police and (tech)heresy-investigators, the Prefecture Magisteriuim, which preserves Admech dogma and has Magos, military cohorts and its own hunter-killer claves - presumably a large part of their job is hunting down hereteks before they become an issue for the inquisition and make the admech look bad (and endanger worlds), thus helping to preserve the de facto independence of the admech.

Considering how much gear a regular inquisitor has, a Magos Malagra, the warlords of the Prefecture Magisterium, tend to be pretty nasty and well-equipped bastards (they're certainly pretty mean in HH).
Calling them inspector gadget may get you made into a servitor

>I think they're about as independent as the Space Marines.
So the Inquisition theoretically has authority, but anyone who pokes around too much has a habit of dying and other Inquisitors won't ask questions.

I mean sure, but if they try and muscle in on an Archmagos or High Magos' turf or underlings, they're going to have to tread very carefully, because otherwise their ship will suffer a "tragic warp malfunction" while travelling away from the planet or similar.

Theoretically an Inquisitor could walk into the Synod of Mars and demand a Titan Legion be dispatched to kill the Fabricator General, but realistically they'll kill him and carry on as before. Inquisitorial authority is limited to their ability to enforce it, and the Mechanicus has most of the bigger guns and more of them.

There's an organisation called the Malagra, who are basically Mech Internal Affairs (the "Prefecture Magisterium") heavies. Heretek hunters, and apparently they scare the SHIT out of the other Magi due to being pretty much specced to kill them and swinging around gear that makes Space Marine Terminator Armour look like Guard flak.

I'm right there with you my friend. This is exactly why I get irritated when people spout the usual "lol realism in 40k? nah" diatribe because it has so much potential if they would get good writers to properly sit down and pick at the right strings.

This thread is already more fascinating than 99% of 40k fluff discussions I see on Veeky Forums and it's less than 20 posts in.

About as much as the Ecclessiarchy. An Inquisitor in THEORY has power over them and could deal with an enginseer from a position of power but trying to argue down a cardinal or the fabricator general without some serious backup is not going to go well for him.

It's the nature of the Imperium. It's all about your ability to enforce your theoretically unlimited power, which is why the Inquisition/Ecclessiarchy/Mechanicus are always jockeying and politicking.

>Theoretically an Inquisitor could walk into the Synod of Mars and demand a Titan Legion be dispatched

You know I kind of want to see this in a story now. Just to see just how hellishly bad of a situation it would need to be for them to actually comply.

In case of a high ranking member of the AdMech, kinda like this, but with the C&D coming from the Inquisition. And the Necrons being the AdMech.
youtube.com/watch?v=eJiUfnIzbVM

Well, the Martian Synod in particular is literally THOUSANDS of Archmagi when most Mechanicus planets have like half a dozen. Addressing them in flesh-talk rather than advanced noospheric cant would be like whispering into a hurricane. Half of them probably don't even HAVE conventional ears or voices anymore given that the noosphere is fast enough for one Archmagos to actively command and even possess literally billions of troops. Talking normally would feel like sending an email one letter at a time when you have to strip down and rebuild the computer after each word.

They might be able to try in a different Forge World, though, and while I expect they'd probably tell him to go fuck himself with a cyberdildo they'd probably think about it a while. At that point it isn't really a DEMAND, though, more a suggestion.

Then again, Titans treat everything as a suggestion at best, even their own Princeps telling them to do stuff. Probably the best they'd get.

Yeah. I was mostly thinking more in just how bad would things need to be to cause them to hear the context. Then instantly send a Titan without needing much thought. That's some rebirth of the Iron men tier level bad.

Tyrannid Hive Fleet invasion, the formation of an Imperial Crusade, responding to a major Chaos Black Crusade.

>I do like the element of real politik that exists beneath the veneer of the monolithic imperium
It would make sense if this real politik actually worked in 40k. Nothing ever happens between these powers.

>The Inquisition hunts down hereteks all the time
Hereteks are rogue elements expelled by Admech, stripped of their protection by the Cult and pretty much announced as valid targets for Inquisition and other Imperial forces. While within hierarchy and obeying their superiors Admech enjoy rampant tech-heresy while remaining virtually untouchable.

Anyone with enough clout and power can be above the law in the Imperium, and the Ad-mech has quite a lot of power.

Still, if one magos goes to far off the deepend and gets an inquisitor on him it's not likely that the whole ad-mech would fall in behind him. Neither the Ad-mech or inquisition would want a war between them.

There was a bigass ship built inside. He bombed it free. And killed all witnesses.

For it to be an inquisitor specifically doing the asking, rather than a more regular "shit, we need help" all-hands call to arms I'd say it'd have to be something like a rogue titan, or an AI being found/waking up - there's an account in HH7 Inferno of a single DAoT vault on a world being breached by the mechanicum.

It wiped out all the cities on planet and the special "it's an AI" distress call (Heretek Omege) went out from the forge-base before it died - in response to getting the call Mars itself sent a warfleet with the Fabricator-General's personal forces, and enlisted the help of an entire Great Company of Space Wolves.
After the bloody battle, despite the fact that the infrastructure of the planet was pretty much fine and it still had a decent amount of exploitable resources and tech to be uncovered, the place was designated a dead world and off-limits. Because that was just one vault, and they knew there were others.

as stated by most people, the inquisition is theoretically capable of bossing around the ad-mech, but in practice would have difficulty getting higher ranked members to do what you want

even if you bring your own fleet to try and stop a suspected arch-magos, they would simply drag archaeo-tech from the basement and blast your precious inquisitorial seal to pieces

so approaching any of the more powerful members of the ad-mech would require a pretty please before doing anything

also, get them angry enough and they will simply threaten to cut off exports, a single forge world can supply hundreds of other planets, and sothe ad-mech will always have the bargaining chips
messing too much may simply result in the skitarii or another inquisitor simply offing you for the trouble you caused

a single tech priest is low enough to press ganged, but flashing your inquisitorial seal to someone like cawl would not be a wise idea

Maintaining GW's trademark status quo may seem like nothing, but considering the grind between these two powers, I imagine the politicking to be pretty heavy to keep that kind of amicable working relationship.

depends, i see the admech as like the astartes, they can both listen or ignore the inquisition, though if they did ignore the inquistion, ork snipers might shoot their supierors after invading said forge world.

The AdMech is perhaps the single most powerful institution though, with the possible exception of the Administratum. They have fuckloads more clout than a single Astartes chapter and a lot more toys to throw back at any hapless Inquisitor who tries to gaslight them.

>They have fuckloads more clout than a single Astartes chapter
Frankly, everything Astartes chapters have was produced by Admech from geneseed to ships and armor and half of it was given for free during chapter foundation.

Whoops, get out the HUGE blue tents everyone. The bullet we found in the magos' pipes shows signs of fungal lifeforms. We'll have to shut down this forge world for a few weeks...maybe months big planet and all that, to fumigate the place.

Sure would be a shame if someone actually needed all of these munitions we produce. I'm sure they can wait. Didn't even pay for express.

You know how First Founding and similarly important Chapters can give the middle finger to the Inquisition without batting an eye?

Admech can do the same, depending on where they are. On a Forge World? Yeah, Admech trumps Inquisitor.

In the Imperium, every major Adepta has to answer to the Inquisition theoretically. However, like most major Adepta, they are pretty hard to infiltrate deep enough to get a hold on them and it's generally not worth it because they can police themselves.

Now, if shit hits the fan, it will bring Inquisitors with enough clout to get shit done despite the mistrust and conflicting ideologies.

Well presumably it's paid for by the Administratum.

...Not sure what you'd pay the tech priests with in the first place. Bitcoin? Tubes? Transformers porn?

Raw resources and convicts to turn into servitors

You do realise that that's just asking for whoever gave that order is now going to get fucking raped to death by his fellow Inquisitors?

>grand-inquisitor hans, inquisitor billy dicked around with magos tommy - i'll give you 200 master-crafted digi-plasmaguns if you get some revenge on him
>say no more magos paul! i'm on it!

Raw materials, especially flesh (consider how much imperial tech uses brains), and peace - how much less Science! would get done if the bulk of the tech-priests had to be on the front lines or overseeing battles all the time

>cubert
>get the wry

Like the Space Marines, as far above the law as they are able to get away with before the magos/chapter slips up and gets caught.

At some point though you're just going to get a Magos or Inquisitor Lord that pragmatically looks at the situation, considers both sides, realises everyone is being an asshole and then settles the whole thing with either stern words or killing both sides.
Grudges and favours will probably be built up, but that's business as usual in the realpolitik of the Imperium.

Or someone slips into heresy that their peers can see, and they fuck off to chaos. Or get killed by their own.

And probably a lot of acolytes, citizens, soldiers and tech-thralls will die for no reason, because that's just the way of these things in the Grim Darkness of the 41st(?) Millennium

>Tubes?
Kek, the most probable answer. W40k, Ad-Mech in particular, is obsessed with dem tubes.

Off topic, but do ultra augmented ad mech still die of old age? Between rejuvenation treatments, and being 90% metal, they must last quite a while.

Anyone have lore or fluff examples of ancient cogboys? I'm talking 500+ years here.

Well, you got Cawl.

>Anyone have lore or fluff examples of ancient cogboys? I'm talking 500+ years here.
I'm fairly certain that Fabricator-General is the oldest among the Lords of Terra and at least one of them lived for more than 1500 years. Of course dramatic events like the Beheading and Age of Apostacy threaten even these living fossils.

Well, there's Cawl. He's at least over 10,000, since he's been active since the great crusade.

They're the kind of- "Obliterate the Planetary Governors ceramic gold-plated palace doors with a massive industrial press battering ram piloted by a titan, invade your palace, immediately shittalk you for some slight, then they proceed to take you beloved daughter and surgically rearrange her undeveloped reproductive organs with Christmas light implants on her ovaries color coded to indicate when she's on her period, when she's ovulating, and when she's pregnant so that when stitched up after the live gruesome procedure you can see her glow florescent light at times, and as a finishing touch, installed flood doors and re-directive tubes to her vaginal cavity to redistribute lost moisture to lubricate these devices, and with this, installed a security system to 'prevent unwanted entry.' all without anesthetic. "

I've still yet to find and publicly execute the man responsible for incurring their wrath.

Kotov in Forge of Mars had been alive since before Telok's lost expedition, so he's at least 600.
Cawl is 10k+, Cogboy lifespan at that rank is pretty much "until dismembered then incinerated while inside a sealed warded lead box three feet thick with Void Shields to deny teleportation or transmission". Tough bastards.

Old fluff said that the the highest of archmagos could live for thousands of years, but are pretty much all quite insane from their longevity and contribute in their way to the Imperium's decline.
Cawl is apparently the exception, and apparently "thousands of years" means "forever, for all intents and purposes."

I wonder if Cawl's use of AIs is the reason why he's still mostly sane after so fucking long.

It would be absolutely hilarious if that's the case.

Probably.

Didn't he die and get his consciousness cloned to a new body at one point?

They have the own analogous organization which operates in the machine gods name. Not so much above the inquisition as neighboring it.

Let me put it this way. They very clearly do not in fact worship the Emperor, rather a machine-god. This would be Heresy of the highest sort anywhere else and get the whole lot of them burned, but the Admech gets away with it with only the tiniest of glossing over their ignoring one of the pillars of Imperial stability.

Has the inquisitor in question made friends with a Magos Juris and/or the prefecture magisterium as an organization?

If not and she's just trying to navigate the politics of a forge world as an outsider, you can probably ignore her and keep on with your heretical self. She isn't getting anywhere.

If so? You're going to be dragged out of your hidey hole and hopefuly die in a really horrible way because they are very capable of inflicting something wore than death working together.

This pretty much works exactly the same way if you're an imperial who's getting up to something the tech police don't like. If they're buddies with your own religious cops you're double fucked but if they aren't you'll be more or less scot free.

>ork sniper shoots magis
>the servitor that serves wine overheard the order
>all servitors are connected to priests in some way
>inquisitor bob orders wine servitor to pour wine
>servitor is actually an archo-flagellant
>"took 3 fucking weeks to clean up that room, how an ork kommando got on this ship is anyone's guess"

Based Grimnar

You can't BLAM!!! if we take your gun

Not sure cloning would work it doesn't usually end well in 40k iirc.

How did the Emporer pull of the blant bullshit of being the Omnisiah? He knew it was bullshit the leaders of the mechanicum at the time knew it was bullshit. It had to be obvious to lower officials and commoners of terra and the mechanicum of the contradiction. Lets not even get into how absurd and mindfucking it had to be for the Primarchs. I get why he did it but I dont understand how he did it or justified the contradiction to himself.

the omnissiah is believed by some scholars to be a different aspect of the emperor

at least according to some people in the cain novels

How he did it? He did it all at literal gunpoint.

How he justified it? The future of humanity needed technology to prosper and these guys are the only ones who know what little there was left after the age of strife. He might not of been happy about it but killing them off would have caused more harm then good, and becoming the Omnisiah was basically a bullshit thing on both sides and both kept it up because they both needed it to survive, it was a win win in the long run.

Also the Emperor was a super scientist himself. There were probably scientific disciplines in which he left the tech priests in the dust. I imagine that did a lot to endear him to them.

Well he did use his psyker powers to "heal" a machine (might have been something like a titan) at a touch, and he'd obviously read the prophesy of the Omnisiah (hell, he might even have wrote it, though given his aversion to godhood that seems less likely) because he played that role to the hilt - loads of other people thought he was a god, why would the bulk of the mechanicum be any different?

Sure, a fair bit of the senior mechanicum had doubts (being very old, and commonly raiding Terra for tech, they'd seen psyker-warlords before), but nearly as many seem to have believed.

Justifying the contradictions that came with being the Omnisiah made flesh were probably the same as the justifications he made about having armies of psykers and worse abominations - he needed them to get the job done.

This textbox was from third edition, but I'm fairly sure the oldest Magi (or really anyone getting up in years) being completely daffy was taken as read until Cawl turned up.

Post yfw the AdMech is the true face of humanity in the future and the Imperium of Man is a convenient delusional puppet state that breeds meatshields and components for the Fabricator General.

Realism in muh fantasy has always been a shit argument. A fantasy setting is distinct from reality in that it makes up its own rules instead of following those of the real world. But if it doesn't even follow it's own rules it's shit writing. A ton of the basic structure of the 40k setting is there to justify a certain aesthetic of dark fantasy in space, but beyond that, it's both realistic and very cool that people behave like people would (albeit in a very alien place and time). The bureaucratic nightmare of the Imperium is both a fun conceit to add to how fuckhuge everything in 40k is (oops your planet got misfiled, enjoy fighting off those orks on your own), but also to reinforce that people are still people. Also great plothooks for low level stuff like Dark Heresy.

Can the higher ranks of the machine cult still laugh?

In all fairness, there is evidence that the imperium are not the decedents of all of humanity, but just the men of stone, who were genetically engineered to be a hard-working, unthinking, servile labor force for the REAL humans. It would actually make sense that the Admech are the real humans, and the whole accord where the Admech kneecapped themselves by being chained to the imperium was humanity being forced to make a deal with their genetically-engineered-servant-race that had turned against them.

...

>then they proceed to take you beloved daughter and surgically rearrange her undeveloped reproductive organs with Christmas light implants on her ovaries color coded to indicate when she's on her period, when she's ovulating, and when she's pregnant so that when stitched up after the live gruesome procedure you can see her glow florescent light at times,
pretty hot tbqh

>but are pretty much all quite insane from their longevity
Are they insane? Or do they just transcend the madness of low meat to find true sanity?

To be fair, the Admech hardly kneecapped themselves. They lost basically none of their independence given they can still tell pretty much anyone in the Imperium to fuck off and stay gone, and they are now completely indispensable to the Imperium because they don't have even the sparse non-Mech manufacturing that was there in the days of the Great Crusade. Ships need the Priests to fly, the Admech basically has a veto on all Imperial military action and Space Marine chapters 'cause they're the ones who equip them.

This. Ego is for meat. Tell them that you serve them and nothing changes except your lessers are happy. Much cheaper than having to demonstrate your superiority.

A lot of people seem to be assuming that in this situation an Inquisitor will turn up and immediately flash their badge and make demands. There are those who do that, but most Inquisitors and their staff tend to use stealth, guile, infiltration and other sneaky tricks. Going in loud is a really good way to make sure all the clever members of a conspiracy go to ground and destroy all the evidence of their existence. Quiet infiltration means you don't have the same official clout, and means that the likelihood of you suffering a nasty accident increases dramatically if you get caught, but it also means that you can get to your targets much more easily. Nobody higher up the chain of command is going to complain if they don't know you were even there. And when you eliminate the heretical Magos before they do and they do find out after the fact, what are they going to do about it? They're still an Adeptus, and no matter what they think they're not beyond the Emperor's left hand, and the Inquisitor is going to be able to ask awkward questions about what was going on that got them involved.

No Inquisitor worth their salt who stumbles across a heretic is going to just walk away, particularly over a "jurisdictional matter". They're the secret police on a mission from God, they don't just let people get on with things. Going after a high-ranking Magos could be very difficult, but so is going after a Chaos lord,an alpha psyker, a rogue planetary governor or any number of horrible alien threats. Difficult jobs nobody else can do is the entire purview.

its hard to imagine any living inquisitor capable of outsmarting someone like belisarius cawl

and while subertfuge to prevent people from realizing the inquisition is involved is possible, its easier said than done, and people with literal computers for brains would be a lot faster to pick up the paper trail than even anyone

and if the space wolves or black templars can give the inquisition a run for their money, a forgeworld would definitely stall anyones attempt
if the ad-mech get even a whiff of inquisition getting the way of science, they are going to plunge a whole sector into destruction
fail to kill a chaos lord, send someone better
get caught trying to get one over the ad-mech? forget using archaeo-tech, they just need to threaten to cut off supplies, and you can bet most people will not appreciate the inquisition

I'm pretty sure people are saying less they can't take down a powerful Magos. More that they won't attempt to get into a pissing match with the admech due to how powerful of an organization they are.

>a pissing match with the admech
>Hey cogboy, bet I can piss farther than you can with your shrivelled old cock
>Beep Boop Bring it on meatbag
>Guardsman pees fifteen feat from where he's standing
>Bet you don't even have your meat anymore, huh toasterfag?
>unzips fire hose
>Pushes the guardsman twenty feet back from the sheer force of his used oil while screaming "THE FLESH IS WEEEEAAAAAK"

Problem is, unlike a Chaos Lord or similar, the Admech is going to completely stonewall you if you try to investigate like that. Hell, a decent chunk of Inquisitors probably can't even understand Binharic, you need specialist implants for that, and Magi are good enough at data parsing to realize you're there and GTFO if you try and pick your way through forge bureaucracy without even some kind of high-up Admech help. If you attempt to force the matter, it's the Admech. They can threaten to cut off supplies to an entire sector to prove a goddamn point, and they've got almost no qualms about doing exactly that.

No Inquisitor can understand lingua technis.
In general no imperial without strong connections to the AdMech can.
They tried to decipher it for 10 millenia. All they got out of it is that young cogbros troll them by speaking in it to each other while someone of the Inquisition can listen.

Point is: The admech have their own people for this.
Without the proper implants and upbringing the whole AdMech is a blackbox.

There is no evidence that the men of stone were even organic. They could've also been AI.

Well there was that one adept in a grey knight novel who transfered his mind into old databanks.

It was a knight.

In the 41st millenia it's only partly bullshit.

The Absolute Madmen of the Inquisition declare the Space Wolves excommunicatus traitoris during the Space Wolves/Inquisition War shortly after the Armageddon War.

What happens?

Plot armor happens

Yeah, this is an important point - there's a LOT of techpriests, most of them aren't 10000 year old badasses with a garage full of superweapons, and the majority of the admech do genuinely worship and recognise the emperor as the avatar of the omnisiah - most won't have the resources or the inclination to tell the Inquisition to fuck off.

There's also a lot of internal rivalry in the admech, you can bet that at least a few magos will gleefully dob their rivals in it given half the chance.

And it's not like the Inquisition lacks tech-priests on side, given the amount of stuff they have in their fortresses and vaults. They spy on other imperial organisations as a matter of course, given that most imperial organisations have been major players in the many, many civil wars and schisms that have wracked the imperium, the admech may be harder to spy on than most, but they're not an exception.

Course senior magos are still likely as not to tell them to fuck off, but that's just the imperium

1000 pages where the most common word is WOLF and nothing important actually happens because first founding chapters are too popular to squat.

It matters not. Only the insane have strength enough to prosper. Only those who prosper may truly judge what is sane.

The Imperium does have power over the Mechanicus too though. Otherwise Cawl wouldn't be petitioning Guilliman to appoint him as the next fabricator-general.

>one shit nonsensical mary-sue sucking up to another
typical

Just as this guys saidGW just need to tie two plot pushers together

>most of them aren't 10000 year old badasses with a garage full of superweapons
True.

Most just have a spare room of them.

That doesn't change the fact that Guilliman has a great measure of power over the Mechanicus (and he doesn't want to make Cawl FG anyway).

>that Guilliman has a great measure of power over the Mechanicus
How?

>That doesn't change the fact that Guilliman has a great measure of power over the Mechanicus
Guilliman has a great measure of power over everything because he's a mary sue. The smurfs are best ignored.

He's Guilliman. No one farts without first deferring to him.