Are Skaven actually intelligent?

Knowing how a machine works is little more than trying something and seeing it working so...

>but do they actually know whats going on?
I'm pretty sure it's a "thousand monkeys with typewriters" situation. For every successful bit of tech, there were literally infinite amounts of failures. They just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks.

And it's not like the "finished" stuff they use in combat is very reliable or well understood. I've seen enough weapons teams and warp lightning cannons explode to know better.

Yes, they are just so goddamn narcissistic, that they will start backstabbing over a loose screw.
That said, they aren't genius-tier either.

More than anything the Skaven's scientific prowess is a result of their use of Warpstone.

Concivebly other races could make similar advances but the skaven are good at hordibg the stuff for themselves and I think most importantly they don't care at all about all the radioactive fallout.
Their lack of morality is really what has grated them the ability to advance the way they have.

I've only ever played vermintide but they seem intellegent. The Grey Seer came up with an invasion plan for a large city at a crossroads. They have tech powered by the warp unlike almost any other race in Warhammer Fantasy. They have Gene Splicing too. It seems that they just have a culture that is ass backwards. They lack all the things said so they seem pretty dumb to us but I'm certain there is no one else in the age of sigmar who could make a rattling gun or a war wheel.

I assure you that human engineering does not usually work that way.

The empire eventually had working repeater handguns, so it's not like an upscaled version of the tech's beyond them.

>Their lack of morality is really what has grated them the ability to advance the way they have.

Actually, how much does humans have codes of ethics, and morality hold us back from scientific progress? Would we get more done, or would it not because we'd all be backstabbing eachother?

Wartime and the rules/standards reduction that comes with it is still the time of greatest innovation across the globe.
Not to mention the ridiculous amount of research and advancements the Nazis did in their short existence.

Morality definitely holds us back, but I think I'd rather what we have now then become like the Skaven.

Wouldn’t the dark mechanicus of Warhammer Fantasy be the Chaos Dwarves?

The Skaven are the evil genius trope amplified to 11 with pure evil and tongue-in-cheek humor. The Skaven are giant talking rats where half their gear are puns and the other half tend to blow up if you look at it wrong. They’re the exact opposite of Orks; instead of a piece of shit being willed to work, their tech are marvels of engineering nobody knows how to care for properly.

That's actually a decent point, 40k is missing a Skaven like faction.
Crazy, prolific and amoral engineers, DEldar are the closest but too dignified and purposely evil as opposed to the Skaven's incidental evil.

On that note, fantasy is kind of missing a Tau-esque faction.

Worldwide co-operation and exchange of ideas is the absolutely most efficient circumstance for innovation to occur in. It's no coincidence that the greatest scientific eras have all been ushered in by improvements in communication possibilities. It's also why we're witnessing an unprecedented boom in scientific and technological progress. The Englightenment is another example, which was ushered in by Gutenberg's revolutionary printing press. Or earlier Catholicism's spread of knowledge (compared to pagan societies, standards weren't exactly high in Europe at the time) through their much more efficient and organized scriptoriums.
This has been true at times, but usually because nations were more prone to protecting their innovations in order to get a leg up over the competition, so when wars happened and ideas were stolen (and thus communicated) and the good separated from the bad. Between societies with more free exchange of knowledge there is absolutely no benefit to having conflicts to drive progress.

It's not gene splicing more like literal splicing and Breeding.

>so when wars happened and ideas were stolen (and thus communicated) and the good separated from the bad, it led to more improvements than when they were simply withholding everything from everyone else

So basically it's a fine balance of competition and cooperation?

>For every successful bit of tech, there were literally infinite amounts of failures.
Are you saying that canonically there are infinite skaven?

Or "were" I guess. I don't know the sigmar lore.

>Fantasy is missing a Tau-esque Faction

That’s the Lizardmen to a T; weird blue guys obsessed with order and the Great(er) Plan (good) given to them by their creators who are just as likely to wipe out a colony as they are to aid it.

The only difference is Tau are gun nerds while Lizardmen are built around melee.

Well, a little competition rarely hurts, there's just no benefit to making it a bloody competition or having competitors holding out on each other. Unless we're talking advances in methods strictly for war, of course, but that's a very small part of all innovation that occurs. Then there's also that a state trying to get a leg up on its competitors may be more motivated to grant resources to scientific endeavours, which may result in leaps of progress outside of military matters, but again even that is usually trumped by cooperation and interest. You always gotta have an interest in innovation as a people, otherwise no amount of war or communication is going to result in much, and in that case, both war and less bloody communication can serve to spark that interest, either through funding and promotions, or through new foreign ideas sparking inspiration, excitement, creativity and so forth. There are a lot of factors both economic, cultural, psychological etc.. But generally you want people who value progress for reasons other than conquest (although valuing it for conquest is better than not valuing it at all), a social climate that doesn't inhibit the spread of ideas, and as good communication channels as possible.

Fair enough, they even have the fantasy equivalent of Tau mechs with their big dumb dinos.

There's just a shitload of them and you don't really hear about the failures, given that their inventors are likely to either get killed by them or backstabbed by other Skaven.

They are intelligent but their advances are through trials and errors rather than careful analysis

Skaven are kind of like gnomes but dirtier, more numerous, and slightly less malevolent.

>I'm certain there is no one else in the age of sigmar who could make a rattling gun or a war wheel.
gentleman

Cooperation is definitely necessary, but I can't help but think that we could get a lot more done if researchers weren't held back by having to treat their test subjects in an ethical manner, especially in the field of medicine. Animal testing and other alternatives are great and all, but there's really no substitute to testing on live humans.

But that's a gatling gun, not a rattling gun :^)

Imagine how unwilling people would be to submit themselves to any kind of medicinal or scientific attention if they might be randomly kidnapped and experimented to death. I'd say there are definitely cases where a lack of ethics could result in leaps forward, but on average as a field, I think a many times higher willingness to subject oneself to study, benefits more in the long run. I mean, take anesthesia, which did wonders for medicinal science during the 19th Century and onwards, if only because people weren't afraid of being sawed open without any form of anesthesia anymore, and also suffered much less of dying unexpectedly from complications arising from chock (which made them considerably worse test subjects for any medicinal study, except if they needed corpses more than living subjects).

Are you sayinbg they DON'T lack for wisdom, ethics, logic and forethought?

Well, from a technological standpoint they don't have much forethought at least. Lots of scheming and shit obviously requires forethought.

>Are humans actually intelligent?
>I know they have engineers and harness cathonic oil energy, but do they actually know what's going on?
>Or do they not even know how to slap machines together and hope for hotpockets like almost everyone else?

>comparing human intelligence to a race that shits itself and lives in a hole

>Not knowing that some humans do just that

>dwarves arent humans

>The most scientific advanced race

>Lizardmen have energy weapons, bionic limb replacements, and during the end-times bullshit they had SPACE SHIPS.

pfft, if so advanced-smart, why they fight-kill with club-stick?

Checkmate, Scalie-thing

>implying those are humans

>killed so many Skaven it gave birth to a new god