So what do the Tau think about the Imperiums approach to technology?

True. Probably don't know what to make of them, though. On one hand, they're dangerously competent warriors with plenty of Clarke's Third Law gear, and are clearly good at building shit. On the other hand, and I say this as a massive Admech fanboy, they're completely and utterly retarded half the time, and clearly don't give even a perfunctory fuck about their allies or their objectives.

Isn't the upcoming Forge World book going to be about a Tau vs AdMech war set on the Forge World of Cyraxis, where the AdMech respond to the Xenos invasion by pulling out all of the good shit they've got stashed away?

it likely depends what their fighting, they would understand the principles on which vanguard work for example but infiltrators would be some incomprehensible pain magic to them

that's actually a big thing now I think on it, they'd understand a lot of the rank and file but as soon as the admech break out the serious toys they'd be totally lost

>"Hur hur hubdur lookit these toaster worshipping savages."
>"Wait why is the toaster trying to kill me all of a sudden oh fuck oh fuck you're telling me demons are real WHAT THE FUCK I THOUGHT THIS WAS HARD SCI-FI NOT SOFT SHIT!"

Tau earth cast research teams discovered daemons on some mission through something and decided to hold off on warp research because of it.

>Tau btfos your meme.

Was this before or after they thought they killed Slaanesh instead of some fucking nobody leader of a Chaos warband?

Its fucking embarrassing how many 40kids dont know the lore well enough to know that in any situation where demon possession is even possible, the warp is already on your doorstep anyway. Objects need to be exposed to the warp, either directly or through dark rituals, for demonic possession to be a thing. It doesnt just happen at random for shits and giggles.

Read the RPG books. It's entirely possible for a devices to form a daemonic rune and trigger a daemonic possession even without anyone deliberately performing rituals to weaken the barrier between the materium and the immaterium.

They've got a stat-block in Creatures Anathema: the Logi Daemonis.

Who cares they're a niche blueberry weeb faction.

>Tau develop Imperium level tech, but with none of the space magic bullshit and superstition that comes with it
What happens?

>niche blueberry weeb faction
That's exactly why people care thou

Their AI finally get smart enough to rebel, Tau of Iron leave the Empire a shadow of its former self.

They get horribly raped by Chaos corruption and/or Man of Iron rebellion, since the "magic bullshit and superstition" is actually rather important. See: Land Raider fighting sans crew, literally all Titans ever mindraping pilots they dislike and the STC in Gaunts Ghosts.

Then slaanesh consumes them all because they became too mary sue and perfect without any character or character flaws, just like the eldar.

Good old Prince Slaanesh, keeping 40K honest.

Aren't machine spirits just a combination of Ad Mech superstition and denial?
>Nah, there aren't any shackled A.I. is this Land Raider or Titan that cause them to act on their own occasionally... Machine Spirits Bro!

What approach to technology?

>Read the RPG books
Not cannon and made by another company that do not have GW IP anymore

>Wouldn't it be easier to just push the 'on' button instead of lighting incense first?

FFG did way better with the fluff than geedubs.

Yup

There's probably enough people who believe in machine spirits for it to have some truth, via the warp. I mean, the AdMech ARE a religion and do dabble in warp-tech on occasion.

Besides that weirdness their higher level thinking machines are just organic brain servitors with a lot of specialized processing bionic modules jammed into the frontal cortex (in which case the nominal 'human soul' attached literally does serve as a 'machine spirit'.)

>BECOZ RED WUNZ GO FASTA

I see what you did there, GW.

They discovered it, sure. But how much of that knowledge is actually disseminated through the ranks? And how much do they actually know?

IIRC they just know that daemons are a "thing," but as a race with a negligible (but still existent) psychic presence they simply cannot comprehend what the Warp actually IS, and by extension how and what Daemons are.

Machine Spirits are "natural" programs that occur as a result of certain designs and technological constructs. Simple things usually have tiny, if any, Machine Spirit, but the more complex you get the more "real" a Machine Spirit gets. Things like Titans and starships are virtually sentient, and even battle tanks and the like have very noticeable personalities and objectively repair more effectively when making prayers and performing "sacred" rituals while performing maintenance as opposed to maintenance alone.

A crucial aspect of most machine-spirits though is that they largely cannot operate without a human pilot (with some notable exceptions). Things that use a MIU can literally "possess" pilots, like starships, Titans, and Knights, but without a pilot to activate them they are largely inert.

I remember reading some lore on the old GW website years ago describing a Tau force encountering a chaos warband of Slaanesh, and concluding that the leader of that band must be the Slaanesh they were all shouting about.

I imagine the Tau approach all of the phenomenon traceable to the warp with this kind of empirical but naive deduction. Their lack of psychic presence no doubt keeps this sort of mentality alive, since they don't have to contend with direct daemonic attention and have no psykers randomly manifesting their powers in the worst way. Higher level Imperial technology is probably viewed as something they haven't "cracked" yet, unaware that their very nature prevents them from truly understanding it, or something that can be safely ignored, the underlying brilliance of millennia past buried under crude wetware computation and ages worth of extraneous ritual, which was again developed in service to threats the Tau simply have never experienced and have no knowledge of.

sound just about right

...

>Dah rokkit din't even blow up last time
Wot good is a rokkit what don't even go boom? 'Ow you gunna krump whatever's at the landin' spot?

No, don't be dumb. Anrakyr and Necron crypteks communed with and controlled the "machine spirits" of Imperial machines. As we all know, Necrons are utterly soulless and have no spirituality. Machine Spirits are just a form of primitive AI.

Image related. Shadowsun sees the nobility in the martyrdom/sacrifice, but still sees it as a vile, twisted take on the greater good.

Fires of Cyraxus has the best good guys invade a world full of crazy old men who rummage around in a junkyard. The Red Scorps show up, and the admech unleash the robo-zombies they have, who've gone insane over the ages, and probably kill everyone on both sides.

I wounder how they would feel about dreadnoughts, probably better than the servitor I'd imagine.

^This^

The machine spirit is just a tested and warp-proofed AI that is carefully replicated and the Admech turned into a spiritual object because of ignorance and tradition.

Are we ever gonna get a storyline when the Tau finally fuck themselves with their AI or is it plot armor all the time?

Drone uprising soon, fellow organics.

I like to look at that image whilst listening to this

youtube.com/watch?v=K956y2om92I

Of course it is. Only human AI will ever go bad. Xenos AI, be it Tau or Necron, will never go bad. Unless it's a plot convenient thing for a story, but those are just isolated cases and not a trend.

The Sarkoni Emperor. Look it up.

>Something was moving inside the torso unit. Something broken and sick.

>Bravestorm held his plasma rifle steady and extruded a hand from his battlesuit’s shield gauntlet. Gripping the blackened metal of the machine’s midsection, he carefully lifted the flaking hull plate up and outward, leaning forward to peer inside.

>The creature that stared back made his breath catch.

>A twisted and grotesque figure was trapped inside, all barrel chest and atrophied stumps. It stared up at him from sunken sockets, its undisguised hatred almost palpable. Wires and tubes penetrated its horrifically abused body in a hundred places. It wheezed, red-black fluids spilling from a broken jaw that worked and gummed as if it could click back into place through willpower alone.

>A glut of milky liquid poured from around its sutured waist as it jerked, spitting a gobbet of half-clotted blood onto Bravestorm’s ochre paintwork. Bravestorm’s sensor suite performed a threat analysis as the liquid burned through his synth layer. The clot was laced with a potent acid.

>The commander recoiled as the thing’s stink was filtered through his olfactory relay, and the battlesuit jerked upright in response. His autotrans flashed, spool-script rendering the creature’s slurred words in the tau lexicon.

>‘– –DIE IN PAIN – – FOREIGN WORM THING – –’

Suprisingly warp proof considering they use grown brain tissue with bits of tech jammed in.

Also in the Mechanicum HH novel when that female tech preist taps into some of the Emperors power during an experiment it protects her forge from the scrap code. I wouldn't be half surprised if there is some soul/warp magic involved.

>Standing upright, the commander placed a hoof-like foot upon the creature’s torso and triggered the punch-cylinder under its sole. A thin tube of titanium thumped into the thing’s ruined flesh before withdrawing with a neat click. The device was intended for geological analysis, installed by the earth caste to be used whenever the tau set foot on a new world, but Bravestorm knew from experience it could read biological information just as well.

>Keeping one eye on the plasma rifle’s designator, he used the other to scan the assessment screen in the rounded corner of his cocoon. The necrotic thing was human, or a close derivative. Extensive tissue damage, rejuvenation scars, and…

>The commander looked again in horror.

>Somehow, the vile thing was over six thousand years old.

>A macabre realisation crept through Bravestorm’s mind. This abomination had been trapped in its armoured war-coffin long before the tau’s ancestors had first emerged from their caves. What manner of enemy were they fighting upon Dal’yth?

>‘– – KILL ME – – VEXING FOOL – –’ spooled the autotrans. ‘– – KILL ME – – OR I SHALL HUNT YOU UNTIL DEATH – –’

>Bravestorm triggered his plasma rifle, and the creature met its final oblivion.

-"Blades of Damocles"

>The Sarkoni Emperor. Look it up.

Like I said "Unless it's a plot convenient thing for a story, but those are just isolated cases and not a trend." That was 3 editions ago and nothing has come of it.

>they probably think the AdMech are a different "caste" of human.
If that's what they think, the Tau aren't entirely wrong.

I'm just waiting for the Tau to learn that the Imperium has lost more planets to bureaucratic fuckups than the Tau have ever had.

They get stomped because their numbers are too small and the only way they might ever matter is tipping the balance in a close war between two or more of the other factions.

The Severed Necrons which are AI controlled Necrons exist beyond Sarkon Empire.

And the Sarkoni Emperor made an appearance in the "Cold Steel" short story.

>Imperium
>Computer Viruses

they barely know what a computer is, they don't do e-war

Necrons don't use AI, they turned traditional intelligence into synthetic intelligence and their constructs are literally slaved to their will.

>Machine Spirits are just a form of primitive AI.
Depends. In some cases it's an AI.

In the case of less complex machinery (eg, a lasgun), the machine spirit is a belief. Nothing more, unless warp fuckery gets involved.

No, the Tau already conquered a vast swathe of the galaxy and they have the numbers and tech to match the massive numbers of their enemies. Though, the Tau are said to be tiny compared to the Imperium it's said that they have become a great power in the galaxy

Except Necrons corrupt in at every opportunity with little effort and they are completely material.

Don't confuse War Spirits with machine spirits.

Wrong. Necrons use AI, Tomb complex computers are used to maintain and run tomb worlds. One of them went fully sapient and insane.

It's called scap code, the AdMech dabbles with it on occasion.

>Wrong. Necrons use AI, Tomb complex computers are used to maintain and run tomb worlds. One of them went fully sapient and insane.

True but Necrons are legitimately the only race with the means to counter warp bullshit completely by technology.
Tau just get really lucky, all the time.

Cawl is reverse engineering Necron and Old One anti-Warp technology. If an admech dude can do it so can the Tau if given the chance.

I really want a story about a bunch of corrupted Ghostkeel AIs turning on their pilots.

That actually requires some understanding of the warp to even make use of.

Cawl isn't just some admech. He's a ten thousand year old magus who's so radical he can be a heretek. Not to mention the man who improved on the Emperor's space marine formula.

If he can do it, then the tau need to pull out their own super smart earth cast character.

>own super smart earth cast character.

They have that. His name is O'Vesa

What about mr. giant roboto who kept making bigger and bigger suits?

Isn't he too busy being tau dreadnought?

>If an admech dude can do it

First off, he still can't. He's just looking into it.
Second, the Admech are still leagues ahead of the Tau technologically. Third, Cawl is older than the collective racial memory of the Tau (kinda the Imperium too) and is a super heretic who spits in the face of tradition (literally the only thing holding the Imperium back)

I could be because of the Void Dragon on Mars or because GW doesn't track their own fluff properly. Hence all the contradictory evidence.

No, that's another guy.

Sho'Aun is the one making bigger and bigger suits. O'Vesa is the guy with Farsight keeping himself alive in a suit.

Or, more likely, the Machine Spirit is superstitious jank.

This is suppose to be an intellectual dark age. They just know that it works and they have the blueprints to build it. Why it works is beyond them so they make a spiritual appeal.

Dude, you can just google the name. O'Vesa is the old Earth Caste scientist friend of Farsight who uses nanomachines to be immortal.

>Or, more likely, the Machine Spirit is superstitious jank.
The Machine Spirit has been shown to exist and spiritual rituals have been shown to appease them. And in the case of titans they've been seen to be finicky and unpredictable at times and other machine spirits are no different just on a smaller scale.

Again. you are confusing War Spirits with Machine Spirits. Iskandor Khayon explains both in "Talon of Horus" and notes how the Admech tends to confuse themselves between the two.

And machine spirits don't need to be placated. Necrons and rogue AI have taken control of the "machine spirits" of machines by hacking into them.

War Spirits needs to be placated since they are an actual developing soul.

Cawls not-AI appears to warp/soul based. I don't think the machine spirit is a true AI made from code but more a vat grown and indoctrinated being with bits of computer attached and possibly a soul.

The Inferior-Cawls are not AI. They are portions of Cawl's sentience being spread across multiple cyborg vessels.

>To say Cawl was a single sentience was untrue. Not anymore. He was a collection of iterations of himself. Creating them had taken him over the line of blasphemy that he had skirted most of his life, but he did not care. Duplication of psyche equalled multiplication of effort. They were limited things, these copies of himself, but utile. Half a dozen sub-Cawls worked in perfect synchronicity, overseen by the core intelligence that was the original Cawl. Though Cawl would only put it in such crude terms if he were forced to, he was like the conductor of the music he listened to, directing a host of lesser Cawls, all playing different instruments.

This is probably true for smaller and newer machines, odds are older ones like titans are closer to true AI's as they have full personalities, and in the case of Knights I would assume they might be some full gestult of old mind fragments if that fluff is still accurate.

Isn't Bravestorm basically a dreadnought too?
He'd relate to it

Bravestorm is the guy perma-locked in his suit, yes. He would totally relate to the Dreadnoughts pain and ennui.

>Laugh at some primitive charging at you with a sword
>send sword to lab to be studied
>sword baffles scientist for 50 years.
>eventual results in research have manage to increase materials science by leaps and bounds as well as aiding in the miniaturization of power cells.

that's sort of how i see it.

according to the (no-defunct) RPGs, it kind of goes both ways - Tau are so cut off from the warp that Daemons actually have a hard time seeing them if they don't actively draw attention to themselves.

Isn't Bravestorm dead now?

Pretty sure it is, some titans and ordinates weapons have echos of entire past crews if they've been involved in a particularly memorable moment. Knowing the imperium it's probably a mix of a bunch of things that are better not thought to hard about.

No?
When did he die?

Took a Vindicare bullet meant for Farsight in Mont'ka.

No.

...

Have the Tau gone after any forge worlds yet? If not it's unlikely they'll of fought with AdMech outside of small rarified explorator groups.

The AdMech doesn't deploy for war unless it's a crusade or if it's defensive. At which point they start pulling Titans.

You really need to read well.

>Even from his perch far up in the ruins, the Vindicare felt the air rush of the landing Orca dropship. Within moments, the red-armoured battlesuits began appearing. When his mission target was sighted, the Vindicare fired two swift shots. The first was with shieldbreaker ammunition – a shot that passed through Farsight’s force field and destroyed his shield generator, the device imploding with a flash. Without that protection, the second shot would penetrate the Tau Commander’s armour, exploding his head.

The Vindicare needed two shots to kill Farsight. One shot to switch off Farsight's shield and another to kill him.

The Vindicare being a dumbass didn't notice that is surrounded by 8 sub-commanders acting as his bodyguard each with his own shield. Bravestorm intercepted the Vindicare bullet with his shield causing it to bounce harmless off his shield.

>Since a bodyguard had intercepted his second shot on his mission target, the master sniper had been under siege. With uplifted shield generator, Commander Bravestorm had covered Farsight, while the rest of the Eight formed a crimson wall before their esteemed leader.

Imperials are total morons. Always have been.

What the fuck is with that Tau's hooves?

Yes, the Tau conquered the Forgeworld of Halfus.

Assassinated many people, have you?

Link? I'd be curious why the AdMech would allow such an asset to be lost.

>He doesn't identify with Marines on a personal level
not the hobby for you

Yes, I played Sniper Elite, Assassins Creed, and Hitman Absolution.

Except I do. I'm just wondering why another individual's forcefield can be expanded to overlap another individual.

Warzone Damocles (mentions the Forgeworld as being conquered by the Tau), the short story "Pantient Hunter" (features one of the Tau battles on the Forgeworld.), and Shield of Baal Devourer which has the text below :

>‘Fire,’ Korbel whispered. The ship shuddered and torpedoes, loaded as the ship achieved a stable orbit around Perdita, raced forward. Forged on Halfus, half a segmentum away, the torpedoes acted like frag grenades.

>Halfus-pattern torpedoes were notoriously effective against tyranid swarms, originally seeing use on Deathwatch vessels. Since that world’s fall to the Tau Empire, the torpedoes were rare and precious things. The Golden Promise only carried four.