Are necrons the most technologically advanced race in 40k?

Where are you getting the idea that the Necrons can't innovate from?

>Tyranids are the only race with FTL useful for intergalactic travel and undisputed mastery of bioengineering, to the point they still have railguns and plasma weapons and such. Tyranids just don't make a distinction between animal and machine.

By FTL you mean create a gravity well? They still take fuck all forever to get anywhere, and dicked around for god knows how long.

Also I know they use short range plasma, but I don't think they have the bio capability for rail guns. Also they stand no match for Necrons.

>They do have a few science-wizard-priests but the vast majority of their people are mindless zombies.

>I don't think they have the bio capability for rail guns

Isn't the venom cannon basically a biological railgun? It uses a bioelectric pulse or something to fire.

... So you mean like real life? (cue laugh track)

But seriously, technological innovation is and always has been the territory of a very small portion of the population. There's nothing about the majority of them being soulless automatons that stops the ones that aren't from innovating.

>Eldar and Orks, of which honestly are far more impressive than anything that the nids created
wrong

and we don't know if their genetic engineering had fuckall to do with their immortality. I'm pretty sure that their immortality actually involved meditation and rituals in order to become a minor warp god, which is why they couldn't share it with the necrontyr

No. There exists a race so advanced that not even Games Workshop can touch them.

the orks were created by the brainboyz, who were just super-smart snotlings

>>They do have a few science-wizard-priests but the vast majority of their people are mindless zombies.
The vast majority is almost never the innovators. You just need enough people with knowledge, which is what they have with their space-tech-wizards, Even more considering each of them will have so much experience and accumulated knowledge due to their immortality and age.

Necrons, Adeptus Mechanicus, Tau, and Eldar/Dark Eldar. Rest of Imperium on par with Chaos. Orks range anywhere from Adeptus Mechanicus level to rock with pole attached. Tyranids are purely biological with extra emphasis on the "logic" part.

Dark age of humanity had some tech the might be on par or even surpass the Eldar and Old Ones in prowess. At least shit like the Chaos Titan, 'course you know how reliable Chaos is.

>Dark age of humanity had some tech the might be on par or even surpass the Eldar and Old Ones in prowess
They were like not that advanced in psychic tech, but it seems like in some parts of pure science, better than the eldar(pre-slaanesh), at some others very lacking compared to them(eldar tech is weirdly distributed). Certainly not Old Ones level,as if they were that developed, then stuff like biological immortality, webway and other stuff like every single human having extreme psychic might would be possible.

True, I take that back. Was always under the assumption that meant muscle impulse, but it's effective against armor and it's covered in something metallic.

Figured the Ad Mech would be on par with that at least, but maybe they do use railguns. Or at least something even more advanced, given shit like this.

they still go faster than light and theyre still the only 40k race capable of traveling between galaxies.
that their gravity bending FTL is the only non-warp based ftl is probably worth mentioning.

They were pretty damn close to at least acquiring the webway until some certain fuck ups *cough* Horus *cough* Magnus *cough* messed things up.

As for immortality, that's also something the Emperor wasn't beyond hoping for. In a sense, we're not to far away from it ourselves. 'course this is theoretical at best. Take this video (with a grain of salt 'course). youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY

As for psychics, the litigation on something the equivalent of "no studying psychic brains" is stopping innovation. The problem with humanity is that it's currently suffering stagnation in the universe of 40k, pardoning Rowboat and his Ad Mech buddy.

Though slow, how they make gravity wells intrigues me. Warp magic?

Dark Eldar have the top tier tech, they just aren't unified enough to make more/properly use it. They run their own pocket universes off of stolen stars, and kidnap entire planets. But they can't do it on a macro level. Necrons have better tech on the base level, but Dark Eldar have better pinnacles.

yeah it is.
devourers are some sort of railgun or coilgun.

most of the others are muscle power or unspecified.

The argument against that being Necrons having a pool of talent that has a hard limit. Humanity doesn't.

>dark eldar are tfw to smart incarnate

If I remember right it's less making it versus finding tidal currents and moving along those. The nodal spiny ships are very sensitive to gravity and can guide a hive fleet along them using them like oceanic currents to speed them along their way without using a lot of energy. It's relatively slow but reliable and efficient. If you get an early warning of an incoming hive fleet you may have decades or even a century to prepare but it doesn't help a while lot due to the monolithicly slow bureaucracy of the IoM. A single world or system has little to no hope of fighting off a hive fleet without support even with years of prep time.

Average tech for Necrons is the most advanced. Their progress is more or less stalled based on their status though.

Eldar have more advanced technologies they no longer have safe access to. They are in decline, and it is likely they will never progress again in this form. Dark Eldar are going YOLO on these technologies, putting individuals on par with DAOT tech.

Humanity beats both in specific instances: Average tech is poor, but DAOT relics are fucking universe bending. The mechanicus can hold its own in the universe using the principles of said DAOT gear.

Tau tech is managing the fastest growth and best application of new fields, but they're playing catch-up.

The problem with that though is that when they use the gravity wells, the planets they are coming towards end up suffering severe quakes.

unspecified method of shenanigans with the target systems gravity to bend space.

it sounds suspiciously like an alcubierre drive to me.

Not sure man. They have changed up nid flight virtually every edition from actual warp travel, to sub-light drives over years, to gravity tides, to making gravity wells now apparently. I can't keep it straight anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 'nids bioships contain a sort of psychic ability that does shit like that.

nah its been pretty consistent. It was warp travel until 5e when it got changed to the gravity bending.

theyve just sometimes described the same thing in different ways between codexs.

Dark Age Humanity is fairly inconsistent.

Terminator armor is based in part off civilian exoskeletons, Land Raider's were farm tractors, Baneblade's were cheap mass produced tanks, and Battleships are re-purposed cargo ships. Ok, that's pretty neat, but doesn't seem super duper advanced.

Then you start getting things like the Slaughtersong, Castigator Titans, the Men of Iron, that AdMech ship bending space and time, and you hear the Spirit of Integrity AI REEEEEEEEE about how humanity was the hottest shit in the galaxy and didn't even hit their peak.

Then you find out that humanity and the Men of Iron are just throwing countless sun and planet eating weapons at each other that are so destructive they even damage the warp, and have better versions of Necron scarabs and shit.

Honestly, it looks like they were really, really advanced in an industrial and straightforward way, but being so young and new to the scene they just didn't get the Warp like the Eldar and didn't have the C'Tan there to tell them how to do even crazier and more esoteric shit to the Materium. They could make guns and computers as good as the other two, but couldn't into magic or techmagic.

My headcanon has always been that DAoH's success was almost entirely fueled by super-intelligent AI/Men of Iron. So it goes that super-intelligent AIs build smarter AIs that build smarter AIs and so on until they're making shit that's so far beyond humanity that the latter are simply scrambling just to find uses for the things. All the while it gets harder and harder to grasp it all, then harder still to grasp even fractions of small bits of it until the vast majority of humans simply didn't know how any of the super-tech they all enjoyed and made use of even functioned. They could use it, to a point, but simply couldn't understand it and those that could were more machine than man anyways.

And then it all went to hell and humans found themselves amidst the wreckage of technology they couldn't even grasp at their peak.

Of ffs, Narhval in space... The damn song will be stuck in my head for a day...

>Terminator armor is based in part off civilian exoskeletons, Land Raider's were farm tractors, Baneblade's were cheap mass produced tanks, and Battleships are re-purposed cargo ships.

I'm always amazed by how much messed up IoM is, as Baneblade and Land raider is pretty advanced, kewl and what not.

Don't forget Archo flagelants. Somehow their description (and creation process) tickled my fancy.

And Men of Iron.

And those super advanced Mechanicus ships hosting true AI, which messes even with curious adepts who 'go to deep/far' in comunion with it.

>was almost entirely fueled by super-intelligent AI/Men of Iron
I'm thinking along the same lines. Basically, on the way of making The Culture.

>And then it all went to hell
Yeah, so what happened? Eldar bum-fucking was indeed so bad? In my mind it makes no sense. Ok, warp warps the AIs and makes them mad (Men of Iron). Ok, so why we have perfectly ' AI-sane' mechanicus space time bending ships?

Landraiders weren't tractors. They where always APCs.
The tractor tank you're thinking of is the seigfried light tank. A custom tank used by the death korp instead of sentinels in epic.

My take on it is that the AIs the the predictable thing and simply dug too deep. They poked at something they thought they could classify, like everything else, and it infected them. They, in turn, infected everything else, and it all went to hell. Humans remember it as the Men of Iron turning on them, but they simply all went crazy and turned on everything else, even themselves. There were no specific targets, just madness, destruction and self-destruction. Madness that they spread to everything they could and that laid low everything they'd built. Humans simply survived the downward spiral their AIs had gone into and destroyed whatever pitiful mess survived. Whatever's left is simply changed and forever effected by the warp. They might even all be insane by pre-fall standards.

There was no epic war between humans and machines, only a tale of curiosity and doom. At least in my headcanon.

>Land Raider's were farm tractors
The baneblade one is often debated (with sources calling the Predator one of the mainstays of the DAoT and the Russ STC existing), and the Terminator one is 100% confirmed, but the Land Raider one is a misconception - Arkhan Land discovered the STC tech for and had his name put on 3 imperial vehicles: the Land Speeder, the Land Raider, and the Land Crawler.

The Land Crawler is a tractor, and in terms of overall impact is probably the most important non-spaceship vehicle in the imperium, bar non.
The Land Crawler was also turned into a tank (the Siegfried Light Tank, a Sentinel replacement) at one point during the Kreig civil war, and occasionally this design sees use in Siege Regiments and second-line forces, who also use a Land Crawler variant, the Bruennhilde, as an artillery tractor or transport when Centaurs or bigger tow vehicles aren't available.

The Land Raider was always a tank/exploration vehicle

Yes.

I think this is somewhat supported by that First and only book where they found STC producing Men of Iron. The pre-produced ones were ok, however, once activated it started to spill out the corrupted versions (meaning, Men of Iron were ok, but STC was messed up). So could be that up until some point everything was a-ok, and then boom, rocks fall and everyone iz kill.

Could also be that at that point of no return capability to make untaineted AI was lost (similar to how raw genetic materic was messed up by alpha legion when bird loving bastards tried to fast-track cloning).

Half of the stuff they have hidden away they can't use since it requires a psychic touch to activate since it's freefall technology. Things such as
wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Fireheart

Necrons have far and away the best tech in the setting, they just don't have a lot of people left who understand how it works and a lot of it is very personal/one offs.

Think about the one cryptech who has mostly stable time travel or the celestial orrery.

>headcanon

Unfortunately that's not how it went now. Perpetual and some of the other HH novels pretty much state that the war with the Men of Iron was worse than the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy combined and multiplied, and involved both sides flinging worse and worse weapons at eachother. Apparently it was so bad the other races of the galaxy got involved, though I'm guessing the Eldar were busy giving birth to Slaanesh. And apparently, not all AI turned on humanity, mostly just the Iron Men in particular.

It makes sense when you think about it. Humanity and much of the galaxy barely squeak by the worst conflict seen since the War in Heaven, and are left crippled and totally unable to respond to unending warp storms, psykers and mutants everywhere, and a apocalyptic tear in reality appearing where those creepy Eldar mainly lived.

It's just kind of sketchy, because the Eldar codexes state pretty unequivocally that they were the unchallenged masters of the galaxy which in turn makes the idea that humanity had such a huge conflict/powerful technology kind of strange in context. Unless the Eldar were really that much more advanced somehow.

That, or Mankind and the Eldar simply agreed to leave each other the fuck ALONE, simply out of the understanding that any conflict would leave both sides irrecoverably fucked.

That would work if the Eldar weren't stated to be unquestionably all powerful but they are. There's not a whole lot of wiggle room on the official stance for Eldar Supremacy pre-Fall.

They just chilled out on their own worlds. Space is huge and the "territories" can easily overlap. Eldar entered the decadent phase in about M20 per the Codex:Dark Eldar timeline, so they probably didn't even bother going out to other worlds. They had automated defences around their worlds so humans probably decided to leave them the fuck alone. And Eldar didn't bother them as long as humans didn't encroach on Eldar worlds.

Basically, think "The Last Emperor" on a galactic scale except with more sex and drugs.

The Eldar were literally just that advanced at the time - humanity had no real answer to their warp based tech or the webway, and they had their own automated fighting forces. Thing is, they were already doing the whole death-orgy thing and pretty much were content to sit on their core worlds and not pay attention to the young whippersnappers setting up everywhere on their lawn.

Humanity wasn't a single entity at that point, and we know that at least some groups had trade and peace deals with some branches of Eldar. We also know (according to that one Harlequin) that the Eldar had bested humanity and their "undying legions" at some point - likely some uppity human civilization had gotten ballsy and stepped on their toes, and got beat down and the rest of humanity learned to not poke at the hyper advanced space elves busy fucking themselves to death.

>screams in dial up

It's not that Dark Age humanity was completely inept in regards to the warp. The existence of the Golden Throne and other similar tech points to them starting to figure shit out. It was just too little too late. But to be fair, the Chaos Gods were staying much more on the downlow before then, and even most of the Eldar didn't realize they were giving birth to Slaanesh. No wonder humanity wasn't ready for the onset of the Age of Strife.

>The existence of the Golden Throne and other similar tech
> other similar tech
care to refresh the memory

I've nerver quite figured out if Empra found the Golden throne, built it from some STC, or invented it in the first place. Fluff is not very clear and there are heavy implications that it can't be replaced. At the same time it is impled that Big E built it, so whats the problem with 'brain imprinting' it to someone else for replication?

Also, when Magnus came knocking, he burnt out human made doorway into webway + bored quite big hole into webway from warp. From what I recall, webway was through 'deep warp' thus full of really good stuff, thus absolute total war faced by Empra through his (Dark Age human made?) webway access.

>the Spirit of Integrity
I always thought this dialogue was interesting. It showed that a lot of AI probably stayed loyal to humanity, and also gives insight into how humanity was on the cusp of reaching the level of the Eldar and Necron. It goes off about how it had no soul, laughing at the voodoo nature of the Mechanicus, but also knowing about Chaos was also interesting.
>the Castigator
This is where things get confusing. The Castigator Titan and the Men of Iron STC both clearly got corrupted by Chaos, with the former literally turning into a demon (or perhaps being one all along).

So did the Men of Iron revolt for Skynet reasons or due to Chaos? Or maybe indirectly due to the latter - maybe it was more of a Alpha Legion reason like: kill off the meat bags to kill off the scary shit in the warp we don't get.

>care to refresh the memory
Dark Glass, which was essentially a prototype/testbed for the tech in the Golden Throne that was also a DAoT relic.

I'm fairly certain that the Emperor found certain core bits of the Throne, and modified and added onto it to suit his own purposes. But we don't know the how's and why's in regards to why humanity originally built it.

And yes, when Magnus brute forced his ways through to Terra, he caused a flood of bad warp nasties to break out in the Imperia Palace.

>kill off the meat bags to kill off the scary shit in the warp we don't get
that would actually be cool reason

>he caused a flood of bad warp nasties
this is what really rustles my jimmies. Its been said more than couple of times that 'broken' pathways 'gunk up' and don't let warp in freely, although you are free to have one way ticket out of said pathway into warp. so why nasties keep flooding in?

>Dark Glass
ah, right. It was bit-spooky in cool way.

Because it wasn't true Webway, and was much less sophisticated than what was created by the Old Ones. It was really just the Emperor brute forcing pathways with his psychic might, and probably lacked those failsafes.

>not a single mention of Jokaero in this thread
SPACE APES are the most advanced as they are basically the Old One's tech still functioning as designed.

Some of the perpetuals and the Emperor knew of Chaos, though to what extent their understanding went is up for debate. But whatever exactly happened on Molech turned the Emperor from a very powerful perpetual into the Anathema, so he must of had a pretty good idea.

Necrons beat the Old Ones, so they couldn't be that advanced.

Well that was after the Necrontyr had all been converted into super tough robot bodies and had the C'tan working with them.

Until that point the Old Ones whooped the Necrontyrs.

And don't forget that the Old Ones got tentacle raped by the Enslavers.

MUH
INERTIALESS
DRIVES
I will accept Necrons with funny hats and clownish personalities, but I will never accept the gutting of their technology.

According to old flugg, the C'tan gave them a lot of their super-technology. Seeing as most of the C'tan are enslaved in the new fluff, I see no reason why the Necrons couldn't continue to mine them for new weapons and technology.

They were pretty deadlocked until the Immaterium got corrupted into the Warp and daemons exploded out. Necrons lost in lone engagements but C'tan made up the difference winning large victories.

>Seeing as most of the C'tan are enslaved in the new fluff, I see no reason why the Necrons couldn't continue to mine them for new weapons and technology.
Because the "enslaved" C'tan are filled with nothing but endless burning hatred for the Necrons and their betrayal?
How you gonna pick someone's brain when all they say is HATE?

I think the issue is that in regards to certain tech, they've already hit their peak. They and the C'tan went all out versus the Old Ones.

That said, they could probably learn how to apply their current technology in different ways, and they are actively studying things like biology and stuff and advancing in those fields.

Stop lying, you idiot. The Necron 5th ED codex has the Necron deathmarch curbstomping the Old Ones all the way to their final strongholds. After which the Warp horrors were unleashed and the surviving Old Ones were sandwiched between the daemons and Necrons and were either driven to exile or died out.

The fluff outright says that the Old Ones of Legend were no match for the Necron Empire's might.

Necrons are still inventing and researching things. They have made new invention and innovations. Look at Szeras lore who is churning out new mods for the Necron forms. It's vastly slower than the T'au but it's moving along.

The Necrontyr pre C'tan got whooped by the Old Ones. The Necron and C'tan whooped the Old Ones pretty hard though, with the latter group being the real MVP's. The Enslavers were kind of just a nail in the coffin. But the Necrons alone were pretty depeleted by the end of the War in Heaven and their betrayal of the C'tan, and decided to tap out and hide from the Eldar.

According to the 5th ED codex, the Necrontyr had superior technologies and number to the Old Ones. However, the Webway is what made the Old Ones dominate in the war since they can strike everywhere at once disallowing the Necrontyr ability to deploy their technology and vast numbers to full effect.

Again, though. That's really just them taking the obscenely high take they already have and using it in new, innovative ways. I'm not sure how many new actual discoveries they can make as near masters of the materium.

See

There is Apotheosis.
There is that one Cryptek from the Maynarkh dynasty who is working on eliminating the concept of time
Then there are Szeras and Orikan who plan to transform themselves into C'tan-like beings.

how is that a problem?

What does that have to do with anything I said?

What you said is wrong. Lone engagements? deadlocked? No, the lore does not say that. The Necrons were dominate in the war because now they can corner the Old Ones and overwhelm with their technology and numbers.

The Necrons did most of the heavy lifting in the war. It's their victory.

That wasn't me. I'm well aware of the fact that the Necrons and C'tan shit on the Old Ones. All I said was

>tfw angry space skeletons are the only ones left that actually try to fix this whole mess
I wish the Emprah had thrown his lot in with them instead of striking the most retarded deal of human history