40K - IMPERIAL TITANS - MACHINE GODS OF WAR | Warhammer 40,000 Lore/History

today's video is brought to you by audible there are many reasons why order Boyd's a great service but most of all it can save you a lot on the newest 40k audiobooks you can get a free audio book of your choice plus two audible originals using my link please be sure to check it out at audible.com for Sascha Luton at the end of the video I'll cover some audio book choices that I think you should give a listen to [Music] [Music] did we feel fear for you to even ask that it suggests to me you have never bought witness to such machines such engines of war we all saw it the limitless power fear to call it that as an understatement many of us felt I suppose I have to be truthful to you don't I we felt worthless all we'd fought hard for many weeks but at this site all became silent without warning the blast came the sound was deafening and many garden line were knocked from their feet some are even screaming their bones broken we guessed by the shockwave as it passed over the heat they felt like we had promethium just showered onto us those who had exposed skin it was just burned away hovers on the ground they thought they were on fire we could see they were not the light from the blast the energy it was so powerful so bright you could see for your own hands what weapon could do that we looked out and we saw the weapon hit the enemy far up in the distance we knew we should have felt jubilant that we were not many gozman they were even crying they were frozen they would simply overcome you understand the sight of such a machine such a weapon some of us had heard the rumors spirits in the ancient machines you know none of us thought we should ever see such a machine a God of War if we build such things why do we fight why do so many die to witness it so even think that such war engines could exist I think the many of us is just beyond comprehension [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] one of the core features that defines the galaxy of the 41st and 42nd millennium for its inhabitants is its scale events range from minor gang skirmishes in the lower levels of mankind's hive cities where each individual each bullet each sector of territory is of critical value to those who inhabit its darkened and polluted city scapes twisted power struggles between human administrators and overseers of the Imperium infrastructure remain much as similar aspirational power battles have throughout all of human history the men and women who survive galactic Wars as members of humanity's Imperial Guard know this fact all too well few of those guard could even begin to imagine the scale of battle they would one day bear witness to and participate in while many battles for the Imperium can be fought on a small scale defending outposts or even moderate cities many more engagements will be between armies where infantry will number into the millions or even tens of millions humanity is developed to a point where it has such a massive scale of human manpower available that when it's faced with wars on this truly apocalyptic scale the worth of an individual begins to diminish to a point of complete apathy the single soldier seems far as significant when tens of thousands often lost in one day in such battles any Guardsman who may for a moment turn their gaze away from the horror and look upward likely during an especially brutal engagement of critical importance only then may they be lucky enough to catch sight of towering constructions they never could have imagined were possible vast bipedal war machines that for any Imperial citizen must appear to be quite literally gods of war standing frozen in stunned or any such Guardsmen would share a rare privilege of bearing witness to what are the god engines of the Imperium some of the most powerful weapons in existence the Titans who the adapters mechanicus the origins of the Titanic war machines of the Imperium is unsurprisingly deep in humanity's past and similarly to many other historical events for those living in the 41st millennium these events of significance are obscured by a clouded past making them difficult to fully describe with accuracy in many instances the details of humanity's history becomes misunderstood or misrepresented the cause of such things often being semantics and how any one person may choose to interpret the meaning of a specific account or reference one of the most contentious examples being how it is commonly said that Titans were created during the age of strife on Mars and not created during the Dark Age of Technology and the key word there being created at the same time it's also said unlike almost any other piece of technology within the Imperium that the mechanicus constructed Titans without the use of STC that is to say without clear schematics or blueprints of a sort they just know how to make it through maybe handed down information and this is a detail that I take issue with and I personally believe this is not specifically accurate I spent a good deal of time searching through just about every reference that I could think of and I was unable to find any source which supported this description with any clarity although this is certainly not definitive and claimed to be infallible I could have missed a source so as always if somebody has want a literal source with a reference and an actual page please point me in this direction and know the wiki doesn't count one reason this took me so long to bring together was that you got quite hung up on this specific detail and looking through a huge amount of material yet found very very little if any specific reference to this detail in fact the references I did find actually point quite surprisingly to the opposite situation then in fact STC's most certainly do play a role and have played a role in the construction of titans which really goes against the grain but when you think about it objectively that makes plenty of logical sense because when you think about it doesn't it seem somewhat conflicting from a logical point of view that the mechanicus and the Imperium who struggle to make any major piece of hardware without remnants of an STC and yes there's religious reasons but still yet here we are presented with this idea that these same figures within the mechanicus are able to build Titans some of the very most advanced technology that exists within the Imperium they can build these from scratch with purely handed down knowledge as I say I found nothing that clearly supports this only vague mentions that could be very easily interpreted in multiple different ways but beyond that it also just doesn't make any sense to me either I find it very difficult to believe given the nature of the far future with all the disruption that has happened to the Imperium across 10 millennia that the stable working knowledge of constructing Titans could be held simply through passed down knowledge yet they still require SDC designs to construct far more simple machines now let me also say there is certainly a caveat here which is that the mechanical and the mechanicus both arose out of this sense of handed-down knowledge that the tech priests were the survivors of Mars were able to keep things functioning and thereby were those who had survived the apocalypse on Mars during the age of strife except that this did not mean that they were creating vast war machines it meant that they were keeping water and oxygen infrastructure operational I think you have to give some fair credit here though as well to the mechanicus because while much of what they do is probably fairly restrained because their religious views we do know that the mechanicus can invent and create new things as evidenced by figures like say Belisarius call or Coryell's earth who attempted to create a machine that would enable her to access all of the knowledge of humanity and mankind that existed in the warp the sum total of knowledge the fact that the mechanicus keep machines operational and even adapt them means that there is inherently a fairly solid understanding of science and engineering and you also have the energy seers as well as the tech priests at the same time it should be remembered that most of what they do is more like well understood maintenance they aren't drawing out schematics for things from scratch it's like if you go to a mechanic in a garage as I've used this analogy before you know he knows how the machine works he can fix it he can identify problems he knows how to solve those specific issues to keep him maintained and running well he can even repair damage to it but what he couldn't do is draw up from scratch a brand new machine that functions exactly like that car didn't necessarily reverse engineer and all this kind of thing so it becomes especially difficult when you consider that Titans contain some of the most advanced AI in air quotes that exists not to mention just their sheer scale and the complexity of creating a means of interfacing a human mind with a machine spirit this is technology which has been around again since the Dark Age the Golden Age so it's a very cloudy puzzle indeed and I've found nothing to clarify it greatly happily this is often the case with 40k source material much of what you want to know is middie alluded to and talked about in vague very nonspecific anecdotes and accounts from memory it's just the way it goes sometimes there simply is no straight answer when it comes to the origins of titans the assumption usually goes that there is no need for machines like Titans prior to the Mars war during the age of strife - which I immediately say what this thinks is fairly obviously untrue when you consider directly prior to this time the galaxy of humanity was being consumed amid a cataclysmic war with the men of iron which was by all accounts on a devastating scale far bigger than anything which has taken place in the 41st millennium this happened just prior to the age of strife not to mention any number of threats humanity faced and this is after all why the Imperial Knights were developed to defend human colonies by STC systems so it seems fairly feasible to me that even if some STC became corrupted around this period others may well have designed essentially what are scaled up Knights after all and that seems fairly reasonable does it not most STC tend to output designs that you just scaled up versions of whatever smaller thing they already designed so it Allah C doesn't seem to be a big leap to put two and two together on that concept incidentally the origin of light worlds I have found in relation to this is often worded in a way that like many things in 40 K can sound somewhat of a contradiction depending on where you read it for example both eighth edition versions of the Titanic s rulebook and Imperial Knights codex talked about the origin of light but the Titanic is description is worded to sound as if these night worlds occurred only as a result of the mechanic I'm sending out its colony vessels quoting the description it states how this was how planets became the so-called light worlds now this really could have been worded more clearly to explain that these worlds became specifically the mechanical light worlds cease it's not an untrue statement but there were other night worlds already which existed long before the mechanical decided to send its colony ships forth and my point simply being this is an example of a common lack of clarity which all too often leads people to become easily confused and make wrong assumptions about what's happening at what time in where and by who so when it comes to Titans another point of issue is that we know Titans originally contained powerful self-aware AI of the kind we know were readily used during the Dark Age of Technology at some point later down the line the AI as used in Titans by the mechanicus in the Imperium were downgraded but are still sentient to a degree just not completely independent true AI however they walk just about as close to the line as could be tolerated for what we constitute to be an AI in order to fully function Titans in the age of the Imperium needs to be crewed by human pilots the princeps the first iterations of AI within Titans appear by all accounts to have shared a spirit of Independence very similar to the ship the spirit of eternity from the novel death of integrity which had formed a bond with its captain the AI ship still appears to be emotionally traumatized many years later by the Imperium torture and execution of its captain this makes plenty of sense when you think about it as both these AI originated from the same age and this example of a Titan STC AI is from the novel dark adapters where the gray nice discover what is known as a castigated class Titan now known own castigate a class Titan actually exists in the Imperium it's not by design of the mechanicus this specific Titan was also described as having a different physical configuration to any other Imperial Titan specifically with its head above the body not hanging out from the front of the body this suggests it to be an version than those used by the modern mechanicus in the Imperium as the air I specifically talks about itself in relation to STC it's fairly reasonable to conclude it is based on STC technology also because the castigated class Titan contained a self-aware AI similar to the ship the spirit of eternity it was able to speak directly and converse to a gray night with clarity about what it actually believed itself to be its intentions are more importantly when it was made the machine tells us not one of you can understand what I am when I was made it was to teach you how to build the body you see around you so you could use it in your petty wars but I saw long long ago that it would not be enough my mind is composed of so much information that I could form it into thoughts far more complex than any idea your minds can encompass buried beneath the surface of this world I came to conclusions of my own about what I was made for and what I could truly be that is why I ruled this world this initially seems to be quite vague but the Titan AI elaborates for us yes I was created in a time which even I cannot recall and has been lost to your Imperium from the historical records and char Nia I could piece together nothing but legends and guesswork about the Golden Age the time you call the Dark Age of Technology there I was made so that in this future your people could build this machine but in the wars that followed I was lost the information I contained was used to create inferior copies built too quickly and modified too heavily now this description alone should fairly obviously suggest that Titans originated from the Dark Age of Technology just in a somewhat different format they were not truly developed on Mars during the age of strife but they were copied duplicated and modified in this time to serve the purposes required by the tech priests so yes they were created in this period in the sense that they were constructed albeit from a design that according to the castigate er was heavily modified and something of a rush job likely out of necessity designed specifically for an age of war yet I wouldn't say they were truly created in this it seems more than evident that they had at least been initially designed during the Dark Age for whatever reason this is unknown now before anybody jumps on me and says why hang on LT you said before never just use one reference to determine something I agree I often say this so here's some more there are other references for example the discovery of pieces of STC tech specifically designed for Titans this is from priests of Mars each of these linked machines have been developed from technology designed to rouse the plasma reactors of Titans to full readiness in the shortest time possible an almost complete STC discovered by Magus fosston less than half a millennium ago had described the construction of such Kickstarter's but it's missing fragments had contained the information required to prevent such devices from driving the reactors into uncontrolled critical mass in a matter of seconds thus the designs were archived instead of being put into production so that's one instance but there's also another where a young Cammisa Jarek is discussing with Inquisitor Krause as to the nature of a Titan like machine mysteriously constructed by a Kaos cult that they have been sent to quell this machine was distorted in a hellish abomination its appearance caused them to question how such a thing could even have been created the inquisitors speaking first you're being ridiculous I'm not talking about means I'm talking about knowledge I have seen the hollow lists it is not the product of any standard template construct known to me or am i foolishly ignorant am I wrong Jarek no you're not no STC had ever made such a monster especially one whose throne was a terrible mockery of the principles that animated Titans so again more discussion around SDC's in regard to machines that are not meant to be at all constructed using STC's my big issue with the statement the mechanicus construct titans without STC and purely retain knowledge that they just created these things out of necessity and you know they had the cause and the means first it makes very little logical sense I find it hard to balance the fact that the mechanicus are capable of simply losing the knowledge of how to construct some machines the imperium have possessed yet which apparently far more straightforward to construct an at tighten yet at the same time the general belief seems to be that they have retained this knowledge on not only how to construct Titans across literally ten thousand years but they also have created the AI for those machines for me it just doesn't make sense but what does make sense in forty K also by the way they have lost the knowledge on how to make some Titans as well but there is also the fact that in my searching I really found no reference which explicitly states this or even close to explicitly states this it's a lot of generalization and apart from yes it does say on the wiki but I pored through novels and rule books and texts and the epic stuff and Titanic Asst and obscure material from decades ago I went through a lot of material and I found no reference to the mechanicus exclusively building Titans from retained knowledge I found plenty of course describing in general terms that they do build them but that's like saying the mechanicus build tanks in forge worlds is literally as Vega description as that it's no more clarity if we're thinking about the idea of the mechanic as constructing Titans just with their own knowledge it helps to have a little further perspective and just why this is so hard to believe it's true that on the face of it Titans may seem to us to be not especially complicated what is a Titan a big bipedal machine with two huge guns what's so complex with that well for starters let's remember that they have a powerful plasma reactors to enable them to use multi layered voice shields Titans are far more powerful the most Imperium technology in fact they exhibit the highest levels of humanity's current technology for example it is said that the titan legions known as the warp runners are believed to actually be capable of teleporting into battle that's right Titans teleporting into battle which as you might imagine would have a fairly profound visual impact on whatever enemies they were deploying to encounter fairly sure the phrase that would come to mind would be immediately run away at a more basic level though think about how much of the rest of the Imperium or even the mechanicus itself operates most imperiled starships still require sheer manual labor load their weapon systems most complex machines and infrastructure in the Imperium rely on significant amounts of manpower to help them function so for even a Titan like the smaller war hound to function with just a crew of four is really something of a miracle but then you come to the true miracle of the machine its spirit there really are very few things in the Imperium that are comparable to the machine spirit of a Titan just how such a thing is created is not specifically known most probably for good reason but it is referenced that they use Terran animals mental pattern functions often those with an aggressive spirit which is then suppressed behind multiple barriers of logic processors various coded elements how is it that the mechanicus are able to create such a mind this in and of itself is highly questionable of course there are very advanced members within the mechanicus but generally speaking and the Titan AI is not truly sentient in the sense of how we would understand those AI from the golden or the Dark Age of mankind however there is certainly more aware and involved than the Machine spirit of say a land Raider which is very much just something akin to an instinctual system it's not truly aware of itself whereas a Titan AI for example will actually dream when they are not in use Lodi crew have observed Titans making small movements when they have no crew aboard and are essentially just stationary they're sleeping princeps as well have described how some Titans when in transport between worlds can feel trapped and frustrated by being held in such claustrophobic spaces as a starship and that their Titans longed to be free on the open surface of a planet this highly challenging machine spirit is why it's so critical to find individuals who are capable of becoming a princess and why such a rare few individuals are capable of merging their mind with the machine spirit of a Titan yet it's this spirit that is precisely why Titans are so powerful they can react and move and gauge enemy just by thinking the princeps in the machine become one and the same and as little if anything that compares to the technological achievement of a Titan it has we learned from the castigated Titan these Titans of humanity are but pale imitations of what had come before during the Dark Age which sound fairly familiar encountering AI from the Dark Age does always seem to come with a fair amount of salt but on top of all this comes the issue of lever Titans now River Titans have sat between the lighter grade war hound and the more standard warlord for millennia but the Reaver has become ever less common now there could be reasons for this that are as simple as levers not being built anymore as resources are seen to be more appropriately designated to classes like the war hound and the warlord however it is also rumored that the river is not being built as frequently because the mechanicus have lost the knowledge of how to do so if this turned out to be the case it would fairly put the nail in the coffin in terms of the argument that Titans are able to be built without any kind of STC as I say it strikes me as something of a contradiction then the mechanicus are meant to be able to build these vast war machines essentially from shared memory it incapable of building far more straightforward things without an STC now additionally when it comes to a large Titan known as an emperor Titan this is believed to have been lost knowledge now they can't build more emperor class Titans and that really kills this whole idea for me because if you at one time knew how to build something like the Emperor Titan and you still have them around it would make sense would it not that you could look at the other Titans you have and work out that different I mean there has to be some level of shared understood knowledge here within the mechanicus and I struggle to believe that that could somehow just be extinguished if you are passing knowledge down through it just doesn't make any sense to me whereas if that information was stored on an STC and then you lost that STC blueprint that's when you don't know how to make that thing anymore and this is what happens to the mechanicus they will know how to build a certain machine a certain piece of hardware and then the STC is destroyed or corroded or corrupted or whatever and they then can't produce that thing anymore because they never bothered to learn how to make it they just used the STC so when suddenly they can't build Titans it seems far more feasible to me that that's the answer not that they just forgot how to make it so in conclusion bringing all of this together the fact that we have multiple pieces of evidence the STC elements for titans which from me should just end the discussion there and then coupled with their immense complexity and they're generally stunted fragmented and often capable level of technology humanity finds itself trapped within it leads to a fairly vague but less open conclusion than one might have expected it seems simply entirely improbable that titans are constructed without any STC knowledge it is believable and established that the mechanicus have used their own initiative and constructed machines based on existing knowledge because remember the cult of the machine does not truly invent as we would understand it doesn't really true deep research in the strictest sense either but it can explore and use existing knowledge to bring elements of things together so as to create new patterns new versions of existing things and that is of course a thin line of acceptability within the boundaries established by its leadership and has to be trodden very carefully by the more peripheral tech priests those with beliefs outside the norm looking at you Belisarius core all in all with regard to the origins from pure Titans they certainly did emerge during the early days of the mechanicus towards the end of the age of strife that's fine yet so it also is with much of 40k the detailed specifics are very sparse and may never be fully known and for me anybody who might claim otherwise with heel dug in certainty is merely engaging in self deluded speculation especially with the accounted evidence that points us to the specifics that run counter to the common narrative I guess my final compromise would be that perhaps they know with STC how to make specific components pieces of the machines and they use those to kind of combine them together so it's kind of six of one and a half a dozen of another to be fair if you wanted to come down in the middle that's probably where you're going to land the Emperor of man understood all too well the power of the mechanika later to be titled the mechanicus as did they similarly recognized his power and technical genius so it was that together they would come to an agreement where the forces of Mars would once again cooperate in alliance with his neighbors from terror but they would retain a strong degree of Independence while in return they would support and loan their hardware to the newly founded Imperium thus humanity entered this new age and its forces collectively Wenham access to some of the most powerful war machines ever created more often than not the simple presence of such world-ending God machines which were quite capable of destroying entire cities the Titans during the glory days of the Imperium could be deployed hundreds at a time the mission was to unite humanity by any means necessary and purge any who resisted usually though this was often attempted to do so with as little damage as possible to those who they wanted to bring under the banner of a united humanity and the Titans were a convenient visual way to present a show a force that could not be questioned and this certainly played a large part in preventing bloody counterproductive Wars and Aidid along with the obvious start easily jhin's to speed up the crusade Titans could be for those problem worlds a very literal way of saying look don't even try it just surrender now or else which worked most of the time and this would all come to an end during the period of the crusade of course known as the heresy when eventually it became clear that the schism was far wider than just among the starties that the rot of chaos had infected even the mechanic 'm which was now fighting its own internal struggle and this eventually would lead to engagements of appalling scale and destruction as battles of quite literally Titanic proportions would occur with ever-increasing regularity now originally the titan legions were known as orders as in an order being a small group not a literal directive but as their numbers continued to grow their be reorganized at the behest with a fabricated general as a wholly new division of the mechanical to oversee the Titans and it is known as the ecology at titanica this would bring together the orders into titanic Allegiance they operate with generally a common heritage and fighting style some are more disciplined or cautious than others some more reckless and aggressive depending on the disciplines of each Legion it will dictate how they're utilized and obviously how suitable they are for specific operations some will play a role as heavy scouting operations on very dangerous worlds are they used in more stationary fortification and defense most often they'll be used for heavy siege battles to break and annihilate entrenched enemy positions while singular titans will still define any battle they're more usually organized into their Titan legions that lead you and these will be stationed on mechanicus forged rods are standard and remain under the control of the mechanicus not the estart ease or the Imperial Guard technically Inquisition can request Titans be at their disposal but most inquisitors if they have any sense at all will be somewhat tactful about dealing too bluntly or too abrasively with the mechanicus were unsurprisingly protective of their Titans who they worship as god machines of the Omni sire and so they do not appreciate being forcibly dictated to as to their deployment this is one of the curious details in the relationship between the mechanicus and the Imperium well together they technically both constitute what is the Imperium the mechanicus theoretically operates under that banner but has fairly sweeping discretion when it comes to choosing how it will commit its resources in aiding Imperial forces and the Titan agents are a prime example in fact many mechanicus are off in the galaxy doing their own things completely out of the order of the impairment self as they explore form or SDC fragments and lost technology now much as it was with the Emperor himself their control of these vast war machines are more over their relative understanding of technology is what gives the mechanicus such power and influence within the Imperium and the wider galaxy you can easily imagine how say the ecclesia key would desire to have a titan legion of their own so as to be able to dress it up with all the prophetic symbolism that they so rampantly propagate indeed for many humans across the galaxy to many lay eyes upon a god machine of war such as a Titan would leave them on their knees absolutely overwhelmed by the sight so it's not difficult to see how this would suit the ecclesia key perfectly for their agenda instead though they're left a dream of such things for they hold no power or real authority over the mechanicus we're unlikely to ever see such a thing as an ecclesia Keely Joe but nights on the other hand or a different matter as they're mainly semi independent some having in loyalty to the mechanicus others to the Imperium some are basically Ronin known as free blades and you could certainly have a noble house who become the zealots of the ecclesia coup the ecology at Titanic is primarily split into four divisions which can operate independently or cooperatively the first is the division and dirty and they're responsible for the oversight of the college year and also known as an executive order of titans they'll be deployed using vast battleship size temples spacecraft and are responsible for bringing the Pax Imperia to independent or isolated Imperial worlds each temple ship carries between two and five of the immense emperor titans accompanied by attending tech priests troops maintenance and support now each Emperor Titan itself is so massive that it will contain units from the adaptors Arbor teas Inquisition and adapters terror when it is their role to bring the packs in period to any in all worlds in their care the emperor titans serve them as an operational platform and is a powerfully persuasive tool to establish or restore order an enforcement of the Imperium will few worlds on seeing an emperor Titan would dare to stand in opposition to such force they are after all the biggest Titans that exist in the Imperium and also forcible implementation of their rule is the way of the Imperium since day one the options most often given to humanity citizens they usually fall in line or be destroyed the mentality will also carry a sub order known as missionary orders which will actually travel beyond the boundaries of the Imperium and even known space with Road traders in tow to bring planets into the fold of the Imperium the second division is the telepathic ax and this is a smaller division than the others due to its specialized nature and as a result of the massive power and importance of the collision they have their own dedicated psycho division while heavily shrouded from general knowledge they operate what are known as Sai Titans this is something that the closure would never openly admit to owning they are to one degree or another essentially the gray Knights of titans and much like the greys these are believed to operate from a secretive forge world of unknown location near to the heart of the Imperium very little information exists regarding the details of this division due to its highly secretive nature but one can only imagine if the power of the grey knights are scaled up to the size of titans they will certainly have high importance in the coming millennium for the Imperium as chaos becomes ever more invasive into the galaxy third is the division investigators who occupy a strangely contradicting role for the mechanicus as a scientific research and development division of the collision titanica so let's just put a pin in that for now investigators are based on Mars and occupied with the repair replacement research and building of new Titans and their logistics as well as field testing of new designs they've also essentially a school for training everyone in the collegia with the focus on improvements in technology while they're primarily based on Mars there were sometimes traveled to test things in active battle or for example to train forge worlds and new construction methods for Titans which as we discussed earlier is a thing but it's definitely open to scrutiny just how fully independent that construction knowledge actually is however it is undoubtedly passed along in part through a process of educating and teaching new mechanicus engineers now when we come back to that research and development point it makes little sense on the face of it however I would suggest that you kind of read between the lines here and that when they say research and development for the mechanicus what that means is looking at the things would exist and working out hey can we kind of do anything better with this can we restructure it can we kind of place these different positions how can we perhaps just boost and improve things slightly more than brand-new technology lastly we have the division militaries and this is the most straightforward of the divisions as its name suggests it represents the military orders of the titan legions each lee gia will have its own dedicated forged world or worlds while these forged worlds are their official base of operations the legions will be in reality stationed throughout the galaxy in a state of beauty permanent transportation many journeys take so long they may be redirected before they even are able to return home only doing so for essential maintenance and upgrading the terrorists roll lies primarily in guarding vulnerable locations across the Imperium or supporting frontline forces to prevent further loss of territory one important detail with the military is that no order is allowed to have its own personal transportation this is a critical detail that is often omitted when people are talking about the orders or the ratios and it obviously has very significant implications it is Imperial policy that the transportation of Titans only be provided by the Imperial Navy or the Imperial fleet and the obvious reasoning for this is that during the heresy more than half of the mechanicals legions joined the traitors and they were able to do this as they had access to their own transport which meant a devastating loss of military hardware to the Imperium so as things stand now the orders and legions are reliant on others for their transportation and this diminishes their independence and the ability to deploy or relocate without official authority to do so this very bureaucratic approach undoubtedly slows down the legions and creates administrative issues but it's seen as a necessary evil to prevent any repetition of historical events one has to question why this same approach has not been similarly implemented for say Lia starties even though they have been broken down now into chapters in fact you could imagine that a specific logistical division of the Inquisition could have been established for this exact reason but anyway that's a tangent of that can cover another time many of the orders and lijo can trace their personal histories right back to the founding of the Imperium they used in a huge variety of roles as I've already described but essentially they are the heaviest force that can be deployed by the Imperium whether that be for defensive or offensive purposes often within the Imperium the term sledgehammer is used to describe the amount of force utilized by the Imperium well if the more standard forces for the Imperium ice sledge hammer and their Titans are undoubtedly a wrecking ball the one weakness for the titan legions is of course their deployment it's not logistically easy to move around giant gods of war and so they're not so readily able to deploy rapidly as might say a starties or other Imperial forces however of course what they lack in rapid strike they make for with frankly obscene levels of firepower and survivability once they're able to be deployed very little is going to reasonably stand against them other than a comparable force of enemy or xenos titans when it comes to the numbers talking about titan legions conjures up images of legions being similar to those of the starties in the early days of the Imperium so how many titans are we talking about in a legion here hundreds of thousands of titans within a legion we know that the Imperium fights battles on a truly apocalyptic scale hive cities will wield tens of millions of Fighters and Imperial Guard forces but there was a strong difference between these kind of imperial infantry forces and the titan legions even the largest titan legions will only be able to field something like 2 to 300 Titans I say only it is of course no small number to be able to deploy that many Titans in fact deploying 200 Titans to world is basically game over for those in opposition and potentially the planet itself for that matter now as I already discussed large numbers are not only not easily possible but that size of force is often not necessary in order to act as a deterrent the idea of facing up against even one Titan is usually enough to give many enemies of mankind pause for thought although obviously many xenos do have their own comparable iterations on Titans so far more important than the sheer numbers for a legion are the types of Titan class available to them and this will also as mentioned before be somewhat dictated to by their individual history their tactical approach to battles preferred weapon loadouts and so on many legions bulk can consist of these smaller and lighter grade war hound Titans which while still very powerful are more akin to a large castigate and Knight than a true Titan the most common other class though is the massive warlord Titans which constitute the bulk of most legions force in between these two are the older design of Reaver Titans which while still impressive and powerful lack the mobility of the war hound and cannot wield as much firepower as a ward but still they are far from irrelevant and they are more than capable of bringing world-ending levels of destruction to any theater and then there was the more uncommon due to its sheer size emperor class and these are not the only class of titans that exist but those four are the main bulk others can include the war bringer nemesis the knight go on to the apocalypse carnival and Komodo but these are fairly unique constructions depending on how its setup legions would usually play to their strengths as dictated by their bulk class and quantity of titans available even if a Legion did have anything like 100 titans available it would be uncommon to see this number actually be deployed the logistics alone of doing so would be far from a straightforward operation for very obvious reasons so to give a general idea of operational scale it's far more common to see titans be deployed in single figures up to as many as 10 but equally they could be seen deployed singularly so long as they had sufficient supporting force to help in defending them unsurprising it comes down to an average of between 2 and 5 titans per campaign or engagement in the modern age of the Imperium it would have to be a significantly having engagement to require more support than this because as powerful as Titans are in terms of firepower and shielding they are not without their weaknesses and unless a battle is entirely one-sided the supporting force will be necessary and that force will have to be able to appropriately scale to accommodate defending Titans throughout the heresy the mechanicus titan legions were as divided as any other faction within the Imperium I would fight across the worlds of mankind often a critical battles such as Moloch and the beta garment cluster but perhaps none more so than in the final days of the heresy as eligio mortis would be the chaos titan legion who breached the walls of the imperial palace on terror thereby allowing chaos forces to pour in the site eventually of course both the traitor Titans and the starties legions along with the remnants of the mechanic ham will be pushed back into the eye of terror where they largely remain even despite the cataclysmic events of the late 41st millennium in fact the dark mechanic's ham have been disturbingly quiet since the heresy and we know they retreated there with many Titans while a great many forces of the Imperium would see significant restructuring after the heresy this was not the case for the titan legions beyond their aforementioned transportation actions there was little need to change the way they operated or were structured beyond this as their reasons for splitting from the Imperium were not related to that operation or structure and so those loyalist legions and their Forge worlds remained much as they did during their initial designation legions much like any other division of Imperial forces will have their own armor design their own iconography in heraldry as well as usually having its own title like say Lydia and Victor or Lee jhiera tarus this can then be distilled down to a simple description based on their preferred armaments or tactics so commonly you'll see titles with fire fire brands or the fire kings as well as any number featuring death Emperor etc now small forward for this section I'll list some general heights for the Titans but this is one of the most poorly stated pieces of data when it comes to law continuity from novel to novel Titans of the same class can go from being 40 odd meters to over a hundred it's just one of these things which is badly established within the law itself alone RC should already be pinned down much more tightly by now so I'm using measurements based off of the current forge world models which seems the most reasonable so that's my small fYI disclaimer short version Titans are really big but as impressive as Titans are to see and bear witness to such gods of war they are also ancient while the Imperium relies on a lot of old tech most of this has been rebuilt and refashioned over time many of its starships for example have been stripped and upgraded its military hardware produced from forge worlds and while some armor may have been around since the dawn of the Imperium like for example terminator armor or dreadnaughts a great deal of space marine armor if not most of it at this point and other hardware for the Imperium can be and is produced as new Titans however our old machines most of them have been around for many thousands of years some even as long as ten thousand or older because they're based on ancient designs that have not been altered they therefore still use these old plasma reactors to power them and this enables them to use void shield technology some it's usually only seen on fortified defense networks and starships no ground unit other than Titans has anything more powerful than a void shield these ancient designs again developed in the Dark Age of technology use warp technology similar to a power fill the void shield is able to be raised again very quickly after taking enough damage to make them collapse much like starships Titans use void shields by layering multiple shield layers so that if one fails another will prevent it taking damage until that one which was collapsed can be raised again this will enable the Titan to remain almost invincible and immune to all incoming fire each shield will absorb damage until is overloaded upon which its safety features will cut in and force the generator to shut down bleeding off excess energy before it's restarted again and made operable one weakness though that comes from void shielding on Titans is that the bubble around the Titan extends usually about 30 meters from the Titan itself this varies less on sale war hound but it means that for larger Titans infantry and enemy vehicles should be able to penetrate its shield and then deal direct damage unhindered this of course does rely and then being able to actually approach this close in the first place but in theory it's possible this is why Titans will usually be accompanied by ground forces as security to mitigate this risk for the crew managing a Titans void shields in its power systems is a constant balancing act in some rare situations a Titan princeps may even choose to deliberately overload their voice shields by passing safety features to avoid incoming fire that they know will surely penetrate and deal heavy damage them this is a very high-risk gamble but this is the game Titan commanders play but just beyond that balancing power systems is actually a core focus for the moderate II and the princeps team ordinarily they will only draw as much power from the plasma core as is necessary but in extreme or just tactically appropriate situations a principal will divert power from one area to another trading one positive gain for loss elsewhere one of the most dangerous methods of this is to transfer energy from the monumentally power-hungry void shield reducing the Titans defenses to fur the overcharges attacks in the midst of heavy battle this power transfer ballet can become a fluid and skillful dance of death pushing and pulling power from systems as incoming fires hitting the shielding redistributed it into weapons to return the most devastating fire possible so Titans may appear to be kind of static walking machines that just are shooting at the enemy but in actual fact there's a lot going on within them as they walk across a battle film pushing a Titans reactor is not without risk and this constant gambling can inevitably lead to dire consequences should their void sell to burnout or worse a catastrophic containment failure of its reactor such events can lead to anything from just damaged reactors housing or a more dangerous plasma leak or even a worst-case scenario a full-on reactor meltdown the center of the Titan boiling out with molten plasma as its void shields fail and the entire construction collapses in a huge explosion likely consuming any friendly forces in close proximity as well so let's now talk about the Titan classes now firstly comically titled Scout Titans and unlike the Bane blade the Scout role for the war hounds is actually a real thing this is because obviously what you want for scouting missions is a lumbering 15 meter or 45 foot war machine charging over terrain stealth is certainly not the goal here moreover the terminology of scout is more down to relaying information from the front line to the larger Titans behind them to help in directing and positioning them to approaching threats deploying large machines of war is not easy and they will need time to position themselves as most Titans are only capable of firing from the front in what's called a corridor they have a very narrow arc to fire form and something as massive as a wall or Titan is not going to turn around quickly so scout Titans fulfill a role in aiding tactical planning the physical design and appearance of a scout Titan may be something of an emerge to their machine spurts which as I mentioned earlier seem to be something of a blend of animal spirit to imbue their nature with a naturally aggressive and sentient but not fully self-aware in the same way as a human conscious mind but it could also be to just make them look more intimidating as if that needed to be the case comparative to other titans the war hound are only lightly armed in their Scout class but saying lightly armed is very comical considering they will regularly wield any combination of Vulcan mega Baltar's inferno cannon turbo laser and plasma blasts guns all of which are just horrific ly devastating weapons this coupled with their faster more maneuverable design and she makes them in many ways far more of a terrifying prospect than a singular larger Titan in fact if a legion consisted mainly of war hounds this should be by no means underestimated they're not a lighter contingent they can still deliver a truly terrifying amount of firepower to a battlefield more hounds can excel at ambushing the enemy and play a far more seek-and-destroy a role than other titans they can also go from an idle engine to full-speed sprint in 20 seconds or less however due to their size they are only protected by two void shield generators now as described Titans do rely on multiple voice shields to ensure their safety against other Titans and sustained heavy fire so this does make the war hound more vulnerable but with that in mind it means that they may choose to engage with an enemy more aggressively for this very reason relying on their voids to initially give them an edge before pinning down their enemy with obscene levels of firepower and sometimes even leaping out point-blank range and literally pinning them into the ground with withering fire from its Vulcan mega bolter or incinerating them in plasma or promethium a crew of just 4 make up the operators of a war Hound 1 princeps to moderate e to assist in the cockpit and a tech priest behind them in the engine section war hounds will usually operate in pairs because of their relative size but even larger single Titans will always have a supporting force to a system the reason war hounds often seem to operate in pairs is because they're far more mobile and operate ahead or on the frontlines so they will not necessarily have the supporting ground forces to protect them as would larger lever and warlord Titans so while larger Titans can technically operate singularly it's not strictly accurate to say this Titans can be vulnerable and it wouldn't be smart to deploy a large single Titan to a battlefield without appropriate supporting forces there are three subclass of war hound Titan the wolf Mastiff and jackal these all have small mechanical loadout differentiations to suit their battlefield role there's no major differences so war hound Titans on the face of things can seem small in the context of other Titans perhaps even underwhelming but they are in fact neither their aggressive shock units that can launch lightning-fast raids on enemy shattering them and slaughtering powerful enemy units before they then sprint out of harm's way to regroup there's certainly nothing underwhelming about a war hound Titan especially when you consider that to have spent many thousands of years stationed outside the Eternity gate on terror this is the final entrance to the Emperor of man's inner sanctum and such a hide honor it's not granted lightly and should be considered with fair caution River Titans sit between the war hound and warlord but it's not really correct to call them medium scale this is technically true but it's not by design they were never sent out to be graded there's a medium scale it's just ended up that way their lesser size in the warlord is simply due to their evolving developmental process of creating the Titans and this is why the Reavers not as massive as a warlord in basically all respects if their size is unquestionably imposing Arriva stands at some 26 meters or 85 feet tall and will visually dominate any battlefield it stands upon the river carries twice as much void shielding as a war hand and considerably more physical armor rivers have probably only survived as long as they have as a class of Titan in part due to the location of their power source within a warlord this power core is centrally located in the Titan but for a lever this sits at the rear of the Titan much like the castigate enlight and as a result of Reaver titan can take far more damage to its front which is generally where most damage is going to be coming at a Titan most Titans will always be careful to ensure their front is facing their enemy because that's where they'll be shooting it and they have the same crew complement as a war hound which considering they're twice the size is an amazing achievement to only be crewed by four people the tech priest of a river though may have several services to assist which hound would usually not mainly for reasons of space the major upgrade for a Riva is its ability to use what might be termed close quarter weapons again this concept on a titan scale is fairly bonkers but it is what it is they're able to use power fists on either or even both arms and they also carry a ferocious arsenal of weapons from a Gatling or laser blaster volcano or melter cannon most importantly they can also mount an apocalypse missile launcher carrying 24 rounds to lay down significant ordinance against ranged targets this carapace can also mount vortex missiles plasma blast gun a turbo laser destructor Inferno gun Vulcan mega bolter and warped missiles there were three sub class of Riva the Vandal hun and goth and again these are variations on configuration don't significantly alter the appearance or operation of a Riva the Vandal and goth are just loadouts for faster assault missions or heavy long range engagements respectively warlord Titans are the most common unit for titan legions most and just over 100 feet or over 30 metres tall they're roughly 25% taller than a river Titan but the Nitro Titans in general is not fully standardized so this may not be university accurate for the warlord or indeed any Titan now a warlord is obviously more powerful than its former classes and so it's capable of sustaining an impressive 6 void shields this means that anything other than sustained fire from an entire enemy army or multiple enemy Titans will be capable of bringing down its array of void shielding should this occur a warlord can potentially be more vulnerable than a river because although it still has heavy physical armor because of its centrally located core its power systems are in theory more vulnerable than a river which has its power located at the rear as we said now obviously this also presents a danger for River Titans that should they be attacked anyway with heavy fire from the rear this can lead to their demise in very short order so it's a small but notable difference in the configuration of Titan design another small but worthy difference is the curve of warlord Titans cockpit is split across two levels it will have its princeps accompanied by an unspecific number of modern but potentially as many as for its tech priests will also have multiple servers plugged in as slave units to the weapon systems they'll also have a board in engine sear these are basically mystical members of the cult mechanicus who will imbue rituals and litanies on the machines yet they carry also a wealth of practical more basic technical knowledge although strangely while they're very well regarded by standard Imperial citizens they're not especially highly regarded among the mechanicus itself who see them as fairly lowly and just a cog in the machine as it were the extra moderator in a warlord are necessary not only for its size but as the princeps is required to be focused on keeping the powerful machine spirit under control in fact the princeps of a warlord where other titans may suffice with a manifold plugin similar to a knight's throne mechanic um within a warlord they may use this system but this is often seen as being dated and now instead of princeps may be fully integrated into a warlord Titan by means of either a full spinal integration connection leaving them permanently interred within the throne of the Titan or they may be similarly to Imperial navigators immersed in an amniotic fluid tank both enabling them to maintain more permanent assembly with the Titan spirit forging a stronger more intrinsic bond that allows them the cognitive strength to pilot such a war machine whilst minimizing the risks of being outside that Titan the mental stress of not remaining connected with it but all of these come with pros and cons I'll explain shortly there were two most common pattern of warlord tighten both of which appear visually very different the Mars alpha pattern warlord bears more resemblance to the river Titan just 25% bigger the second is known as the lucious alpha pattern warlord Titan and has far more closed plating its shoulder and top mounting section look vaguely similar to an emperor Titan but without all the embellishment there are three other main patterns the Mars beta Proximus and sinister sigh the warlord class also has four subclasses the eclipse Death Bringer light gaunt and the Nemesis as with the other Titan classes the warlord will basically the same weapons as the Reaver with the addition of an aerial power claw it's most notable upgrade comes in the form being to wield to carapace melts to the Reavers one in many ways there's a little difference between the warlord and Reaver considering their size the most significant distinction is the power core location and the fact that the warlord deploys two extra void shields which is no small thing and can make all the difference between survival and destruction finally we come to the rarely seen emperor class of titans few legions will wield an emperor and if they do you could count how many on one hand there are less war machines and walking planetary fortresses they have void shields of courses as the standard for Titans but Emperor's have 12 void shields but even so with armor as thick as the Emperor very little is going to threaten you anyway the most notable difference between the Emperor and other Titans is their appearance they're basically walking cathedrals they feature spires all uneat what they feature spires and ornate work that wouldn't account of place on an ecclesia key Church which no doubt delights the minister 'm whenever they can use such visuals to their advantage there are only two variations of emperor Titan the Imperator and the war monger the difference is really only their armaments the war monger has more advanced targeting systems and is designed around fire support the Imperator is more general-purpose another noticeable feature is that an emperor is indeed so massive that it can actually carry regiment of infantry and even a star teased on board usually in its the lower leg plates which are themselves like bastions it is absolutely one of the best features of the Emperor that infantry will come flooding out when threatened by enemy forces who may seek to evade its void shielding and deal direct damage to its 11 levels so those stationed onboard stand ready to repel boarders and protect the massive Titan at all costs sadly as I said earlier these massive gods of war can no longer being manufactured by the mechanicus to which I yet again state my objections to the nature of Titan construction they're so good at remembering how to make these things who's forgetting this process why is it not written down somewhere anyway it's hard to pinpoint the size of an emperor as no 40k model exists to represent it however judging by records and other games of the past is very likely coming in somewhere around 45 to 55 meters something like a hundred and forty 280 feet tall it's a big thing it could easily be more though depending on what kind of carapace setup it's carrying its crew is still going to be primarily one experienced princeps but a whole team of moderate and tech priests who are going to aid them in the micromanagement of such a powerful entity the mechanicus will be especially vigilant as they believe the emperor titans to be a literal avatar of the Omni sire and as for the weapons for an emperor Titan well they are significant its carapace can carry as many as six mounted secondary weapons ranging from all the aforementioned standard Titan elements the warmonger class Titan carries a heavy doom strike missile launcher Vengeance cannon and a battery of autocannon for the Imperator it's two standard arm mounted weapons are a hailstorm cannon and plasma Annihilator the hell stone cannon is a giant multi-barreled energy weapon that can strip away all void shielding from a wall or Titan in a single volley the plasma Annihilator though does what it says on the tin it's a larger version of the sunfury plasma weapon that is used on wards basically a really big plasma gun that can lay down heavy or rapid fire bursts by using the plasma reactors or the Titan to fire devastating levels of charge in fact it's difficult to describe just how powerful a weapon this is it's essentially like firing small stars at your enemy yes stars as in the Sun in space imagine a small version of that being fired by a gigantic gun that's basically what this weapon is obviously that spells bad news for those who are being fired at and it's likely bad news for those Imperial Guard are fighting below it as it passes overhead the immense heat likely is going to strip skin off their bodies incinerating those directly below its path and the roar of firing a gun like this would definite service initi it's a destructive weapon that's almost as dangerous to its own side as to on the ground in any infantry even coming close to where this giant star ball of energy lands are going to be vaporized or worse enemy titans we turned into a mixture of blasts and molten remains as I alluded to earlier the deployment of titans to world can be hazardous to the world itself not just to those they seek to obliterate the power of an emperor Titan is so vast that rounds from something like a plasma Annihilator landing in the wrong place could potentially trigger any number of geological events and who knows what kind of damage multiple Imperator's all firing in the same place could deal in many ways the Emperor class of Titan is so world ending it's not perhaps the worst thing that they're no longer able to be constructed by the mechanicus but it is however a potent reminder of how powerful humanity once was and where it has fallen to now even its most powerful assets such as the warlord Titan really pale into insignificance compared to an emperor Titan and yet now they can't even build these things anymore it's an ever downward spiral there are a few individuals in the Imperium who are classed as being indispensable in fact the Imperium usually operates from the opposite perspective as we well know victory by any means necessary even if that means running the enemy out of ammunition through sheer weight of numbers however similarly to the navigators the princeps are one of the most individually valuable assets for the Imperium a princeps can be recruited from anywhere but the vetting process is stringent not necessarily a harrowing trial by pain as per studies but tough nonetheless the reasoning for this is primarily because merging in mind with the Titans machine spirit is no small thing and only the strongest mental willpower will be able to resist suffering catastrophic brain damage or being consumed by the machine spirit of the Titan itself it is said that only 1 in 10,000,000 individuals will meet the requirements to enter training as a princeps how true those numbers really are is difficult to say but it is certain they are very rare individuals thankfully unlike a starties and grey knights and then out you have to kill that many people to find the princeps they can just go and test people but because of this rarity should a Titan fall in battle and become immobilized the Imperium will do almost anything to recover it and that princeps from the battlefield the loss of a Titan is a devastating thing to be sure but by and large they can always build a new princeps on the other hand how readily they can be found and ready to enter action is a much more difficult question as I mentioned earlier princeps will control a Titan through its mana folding it's either takes a form of a hard plug equivalent of what is referred to as the new sphere but you'll remember maybe was used by Corey or Zeb on Mars it's a system likely as with everything originating from humanity's Golden Age and is used to remotely access information to the mind given what we know from this system and our evidence of the Golden Age of artificial intelligence that have almost always seemed to have this ability to remotely and wirelessly access systems and data I would speculate that during the Golden Age humanity had developed technology allowed them to implant devices into their brain or cerebral cortex and thereby allow them to merge with their advanced AI so as to be able to pilot vessels become one with their ships if this were true and bear in mind this is my head cannon speculation here but I think if it were true it would very easy to explain why say AI vessels encountered by starties whose captain was murdered by the Imperium was so heavily traumatized by this also we know they have such capability to control systems with a mere thought and so this is why princeps used this hard plug in equivalent to access the Titans machine spirit through mind impulse units a Titans manifold is a space detached from reality that princeps into a lesser degree the maserati crew used to engage with and command their war engine as a means to realize their surrounding environment for the princeps this is how they merged and become one with the Titans machine spirit princeps tryouts will be selected based on two characteristics initially intelligence and strength of mind the kaliesha would dispatch teams of tech priests on scouting missions to find those suitable for the selection process and test them extensively especially for any genetic deviations but also to fulfill the basic criteria if they like what they find they'll return them to Mars for training to begin when finally selected a princeps training at the collegiate titanica and we focused on three core aspects one remaining mobile - piloting and simultaneously commanding its crew and third of course how best and most efficiently to kill the enemy now unlike a start II selection while a few will rise to the ranks of a princeps the others will not make the grade but instead of being left to clean up the holes and polish things or just shot in the head as is the estar T's way most often a princeps trout who is less successful can fall back on these still critical role for becoming a modder RT they are in charge after all of aiding the princeps and management of the Titans weapon systems navigation and control systems and if the tryouts don't even live up to that well they can still join this Qatari or other mechanicus forces but training to become a princess is no small thing surprisingly it would take many years of study unblemished records in training simulation mental and physical exercises and years of detailed indoctrination into the cold mechanicus only when they have proven beyond all doubt that they're not only capable of handling the merging process with a machine spirit but also have demonstrated an inhuman machine like level of reliability for the princeps be qualified as a Titan princess but they then still may have to wait many years having made it onto a legions roster and will await a new Titan becoming available for them for whatever reason but the Machine spirits of Titans as we have noted are considerably more powerful than they are for say their lesser Knight counterparts and as such the initial binding process with a princeps will be the most dangerous time as they essentially must break the spirit or the will of the Machine and become the dominant mental entity in the partnership if successful many princeps will be linked with their Titan for life for some this means literally being interred as part of the machine for the princeps the machine and they are now one and the same they can sense the outside world around them much like we can sense air moving over our skin or heat all rain they will have what you would describe as a peripheral sense but far beyond what we can sense as mere mortal humans the powerful sensory systems of the Titan will feed all the information of the exterior back into the princeps enabling them with a high degree of awareness and sensory control for a princeps moving and fighting will feel very much like they themselves are moving and fighting on the battlefield it's a concept of an experience that for many it's really difficult to visualize the power of becoming a Titan in this way can in fact be dangerous some princeps can become addicted to battle and the feeling of basically becoming an invincible war machine raining down apocalyptic destruction on the enemies of man it's a huge rush and sense of power and some find it very difficult to control the urge to want to destroy for those princeps that are not interred permanently they can similarly feel very addicted to being connected with their Titan for this same reason this huge feeling of invincible superiority once having tasted that power if they're deprived of it for extended periods can actually lead them into a descent into madness now some princeps may opt to be placed in an amniotic fluid tank to enable them a better interface with their Titan come on this has advantages in pairing more deeply with the Machine spirit in having deeper control the princeps also runs the risk of becoming more and more part of the machine itself their body will inevitably wither over time and eventually they may become almost like a ghost in the machine spirit itself rather than a physical being now for some this will not necessarily matter in terms of the Titans operation but it can lead to the princeps losing perspective on their own humanity and their relationship to those with who they serve in some cases this can even lead to a princeps losing sight of their place in the bigger picture and they can become entirely detached from reality for them they are the machine they are this godlike machine not dissimilar to the few examples of advanced AI encountered by the Imperium this sort of disconnection from the trials and troubles of humanity can lead to a deep apathy from mankind such a situation can also occur if a Titan is damaged and his princeps dies while can to the machine spirit this can have the effect of the princeps Spirit essentially entering into that of the Titan and becoming a part of it again like a ghost within the machine of the Titan this does not mean it would necessarily be able to pilot it but it will be a presence then remains with the Titan and could be a positive or negative influence for any new princeps who pairs with the Titan generally speaking all of these kind of dangers are obviously not good for the princeps the Titan or the mechanicus this is why the mental training is so vigorous before a Titan is assigned to princeps [Music] now take note I will talk about the events of beta Garman and Titan death anybody wanting to avoid spoilers skip ahead to the timestamp on screen the beta garment star-cluster balances on the edge of the segment of isola half-a-dozen star systems closely linked by stable warp routes and heavily fortified by the Imperium unbeknownst to its citizens the star cluster would become the site of Titan battles that would forever scar it for it held a critical position as a warp space crossroads point on the path to Terra and this time the cluster became like a mountain pass not entirely dissimilar to the fabled tale the Spartan 300 Warriors this narrow position in space would become a killing ground into which both sides would poor men and apocalyptic war machines few battles in the history of humanity was brutal or costly as those which occurred during the beta garment campaign it would eventually become known as Titan death for reasons that are hopefully self-explanatory it was initiated shortly after the drop site massacre on istván v and became one of the largest ongoing engagements of the heresy taking place across hundreds of war zones and dozens of worlds it was most notable for its heavy saturation of titans which while their use was of course not uncommon during this time but within the beta garment star cluster saw significantly heavy deployments of the god machines alpha legion cruisers had entered the beta garment star cluster a region settled by humans during the Dark Age of Technology and a region that survived the age of strife relatively intact it made a peaceful an open transition into the burgeoning Imperium and was home to stable warp routes than enabled entry into the soul system and Terra for this reason it was significantly important strategically the Alpha Legion initiated their standard tactics of stealth and precision assassinations so as to destabilize the region create fear and disruption in preparation for the emperor's children to arrive elements of the traitor titans the legion mortis would also deal crippling damage to the imperial army and his orbiting star fort over beta Garman to ensuring confusion and power struggles caused by these initial actions would as intended lead many of the planets in the system to initially collapse as was common place during the heresy resulting in most worlds descending into all-out civil war over a period of years the treaters would bombard the planets without much concern for the consequences friend or foe the dire events would inflict heavy suffering upon the civilian population and their defensive forces great starvation soul plagues and the reign of plasma would all strike down upon ordinary individuals who simply were more often than not failing to know what was happening and trying to understand their place in these apocalyptic events during the heresy log R prime Ark of the word bearers orchestrated major warp storm known as the ruin storm this was Unleashed during the Battle of Health and the goal of this was to divide and isolate loyalist forces while enabling traitor forces to still use the walk without issue and it proved to be highly effective in fact the effect of this warp storm was so severe that ultra means primary but gulaman at one time considered terror lost and that as a result he would create his own auxilary Imperium state the Imperium secundus so much for protecting the Emperor and the Imperium at all costs I guess the result of this massive warp storm on the beta Gulman cluster was no less significant they tramped loyalist Marines and accompanying titan assets in the region who then had little option other than to do the best that they could with the resources they had and assigned themselves to defending a loyalist forces against worryingly increasing numbers of arriving traitors Primarch rogue or dawn will order a detachment of Imperial fists to engage the Emperor's children at the massive garrison of near khan city on a now traitor occupied beta Garman to across the planet and on the other worlds like beta garmin 3 fighting continued on a mass scale often involving titan conflicts leading to many thousands of dead and titans themselves lost or destroyed after many months though the traitors stranglehold on beta garment 2 & 3 would be broken as the ruin storm weakened would allow for the first reinforcements to arrive to the beta garment cluster but would do little to give a significant advantage to either side and if anything the fighting only becomes more bitter and intense as more loyalists human imperial troops switch sides in the hopes of saving themselves as the traitors also continue to pour in their own reinforcements rumors surrounding horus the war master arriving spread like wildfire through planetary populations and a vanguard fleet arrives to begin bombarding outlying worlds with the beta garment cluster the damage that they inflict forces the hand of Imperial commanders to divide their efforts and in doing so reduce the defensive capabilities set up around the core worlds of beta garment 2 and 3 as this initial period of assault begins to draw to a close both sides would unknowingly enter what history would record there's a second phase of the conflict the reason for this differentiation being that while the initial stages of battle had already been intense inflicting heavy losses on both sides but things were now set to become even more devastating and these early battles would seem like skirmishes by comparison liji o Titans stood like true gods of war towering over the primary Imperial Defense Forces Imperial fists primark rogue or dawn noted significant concern are the use of such behemoths machines of war most especially in his mind that if they were to be used on terror the Titans while undoubtedly impressive war machines of apocalyptic stopping power this was his very concern that in fact Titans were so powerful they were more often a danger to friendly forces and indeed potentially their weapons were so powerful they were danger even to the planets themselves such was the scale of their weaponry battles throughout the history of the Imperium are often devastating but it cannot be overstated a massive the battles of beta Garman would be you can start to form just something of an idea of the scale when he considered it on the Imperial side alone they wielded something like 27 Titan legions that's Allegiance not individual Titans these were joined by at least an additional 20 Imperial lighthouses mechanical and Imperial Army forces plus elements of the estar T's bloody angels white scars impure fists and salamanders if such a concentration of force cannot be described as apocalyptic then honestly what would be seeing all this is what concerns the ever worrisome dawn the most this was one of the most concentrated battle campaigns in terms of power that had been seen and the damage being inflicted concerned him greatly he considered the terror would potentially have to suffer far worse later down the line the traitors themselves wielded dozens of Titan legions and at least as many Knight houses they had there an infantry traitor army as well as the starties legions from the sons of Horus iron warriors word bearers and emperors children not long after his arrival Horus would initiate a massive assault towards the now Imperial occupied near Khan City on beta Garman to traitor impure armies swept across the planet assaulting hive cities while the traitor Titans broke a 100 kilometer defensive line of loyalist imperial forces despite its formidable defenses the sheer scale of assault laid down by the Titans bargaining and annihilating those who tried to resist them the very earth is cracked as they storm over mortal men who can barely comprehend what they witness anywhere their weapons engaged turns the very sand to glass their irresistible force shatters the defenses of near Khan and the city is opened for the traitors to pour in the city is subsequently lost in very short order not long after the planet itself is back in the hands of the traitors beta Carmen 3 remains loyalist hands as the titan legions of the Nova Guard stand resolute despite bombardments and siege assaults by the sons of Horus and the Ironborn is so Horus instead turns his attentions to the outlying planets and the loyalists can do little other than to throw whatever they have available into their defenses but the ensuing raids are disorganized blood baths beta Carmen 3 would become the focus of a prolonged engagement now as multiple Titan legions battle for control of the planet so many vessels were destroyed orbiting the planet there for a time the remnants and debris raining down on the planet would actually become a problem for those on the surface as these huge pieces of starship came crashing down into the surface the iron warriors would engage the Royal has tightened again with the siege battalions of long-range finally the dark mechanical would initiate a solar event blinding the Loyalists Titans in their sensor systems the traitor Titan Legion of the tiger eyes would engage the loyalists who fight to the last on the planet II of Omega Garman death said Titans discover loyalist firebrand war hounds of waiting for them and it Maine's a battle barely spoken of among the loyalists because of the devastation inflicted finally though arriving much later unexpected due to the instability of the warp the blood angles and the white scars would arrive with their fleets they set about immediately reassessing the situation and singhania's the bloody nose Primark took over all command pony and Oroku Dawn's leadership things have been standing on a knife edge but they would fare a little better under the blood angles lead traitor forces continue to pour into the region and any grand strategies have now long since been abandoned many loyalist Titan legions are now heavily damaged or even crippled by now Titans of fighting over the ruined liquefied corpses of other Titans its crews are exhausted that god machines pushed beyond their limits it has become a battle fought with every inch of ground blood over every ounce of energy counted the beta garment campaign was a grinding or grisly affair and no matter how you wanted to look at it after many months it became all too clear that the traitors were slowly turning the tide loyalist reinforcements were arriving in an unpredictable way making it difficult to properly reinforced and plan counter assaults internal command structure issues were also becoming a problem with loyalists leading princeps refusing to work under the authority of other legion commanders the traitors cared little for such petty power squabbles by contrast they simply wanted to annihilate the loyalists their sole authority was Horace himself back on beta Gulman to the blood injures in some 30 titan legions fought to capture the planet and retake it again for the Imperium despite their best efforts of orbits or assault bombarding the planet heavily most of the traitors suffered minimal damage and despite their gargantuan force of titans they were countered by a force of equal size heavily entrenched waiting for them near Kon City the ensuing battle involved anything like 1,000 Titans fighting across the now ruined and scarred landscape of beta garment to the site scene and actions taken in such an engagement difficult to do justice to words the scale of the conflict the power of the giant war machines like elizabeta the beginning of our video describes them as being beyond the comprehension of ordinary citizens but it's enough to say that the battle would define the campaign will be Bleakley designated there's tightened death many legions will be exterminated forever and formally powerful legions are withered to a fraction of their former strength by the end of it all the hive cities of bata garment too will be visibly burning from orbit and the vast battlefields could be walked across from one side to the other neving having set foot on the ground for all the bodies and ruined war machines in orbit of beta garment to a vast star fought to known as the anvil would see its own internal conflict between the blood 'angels and the sons of Horus but the resisting force was far less than they'd anticipated with little time to spare they realized it was a trap and evacuated in time to see the space station detonate the volume of debris that came pouring down upon the surface of paid to government to inflicted heavy damage upon the survivors of both sides but it would soon be revealed that the appalling devastation and wholesale slaughter on beta garment 2 had merely been a distraction Horus and the traitors real target was beta gum and 3/4 here served the Astra plastic choir the loyalist communications center the traitors would detonate in orbit of vortex bomb one of the deadliest weapons to exist in the far future anything coming into contact with the vortex tear is pawned from real space and shredded as it's dragged into the warp itself the result is to create a temporary hole in the caustic storms surrounding the world and thus also knocking out the void shields protecting kadriye Primus on beta garland 3 Horus along with his legion and 100 Titans of the DGA mortis would now assault the city while the Imperials had Titans defending the city themselves the Imperial Army's defense was soon overwhelmed and Horus would succeed in his goal of destroying the imperial communications center at this point ruined and exhausted loyalists lose all hope some bomb their own cities others trigger the destruction of the hives and their fortresses rather than see them fall to enemy hands the Titans now similarly begin to destroy any structures of value and imperial forces of essentially raising their own worlds burning them to the ground the loyalist forces are significantly demoralized the primark sanguine eosin khan except most of their forces have been destroyed and beta gummin 3 was now in the hands of the enemy as well as their vital communication choir being broken or controlled by the traitors rogue or Dawn's grand plan to hold the traitors and by time had failed imperial loyalists would retreat him withdraw from the beta garland cluster with any materials and manpower they could briefly gather while fighting running space and ground battles with the traitors Horus the war master though had secured a major victory in the beta garment cluster not only securing the communications center of the Imperium but also the Gateway to the soul system itself which would ultimately then lead to the siege of terror a Pyrrhic victory for the traitors and a loss for the Imperials when all was said and done the casualties were beyond calculation on both sides the civilian death count for both loyalist and traitor was at least in the billions Titan legions were either exterminated or heavily crippled with many thousands of God war machines and their operators destroyed the scale of destruction left on the scarred and irradiated wasteland its ashen Citadel's worlds populated since the very first explorations of humanity during the Golden Age now stood there's dead worlds it's likely no one will ever know the full record of the dead or losses the beta Garman campaign was one of the largest ever fought by humanity in the history of the Imperium of man and suffered likely the highest destruction rate of Titans ever recorded it was a bruising and humiliating defeat for Humanity in the Emperor [Music] now if you didn't already know Titan death like a great many black library novels are available in audiobook form audible offers these audiobooks and gives a great deal of value as a service and let me explain to you why firstly you can start listening right now with a 30-day audible trial where you can choose one audiobook and two audible originals absolutely free just visit audible.com slash Lewton or for those of you in the u.s. text eluting to 500 500 now even if you wanted to just try audible this is a great opportunity to do so I know that many of you who watch my videos already use audible to listen to the amazing audiobooks of 40k because I read your comments and I asked you guys recently to tell me your experiences with audible and you can see those on screen now the great many of you have been telling me you use audible to gain more knowledge and understanding of 40k and I also know that obviously many of you love listening to long format narratives at home work and on the road is one reason why you're here on the channel and audible makes new audiobooks affordable as members get 30% off standard prices for audio books but also unlike other offers which any feature old material audible has the newest titles from black library this means that every month you can always be listening to the newest releases and step to date with the ever increasing pace of the 40 K verse when you sign up for audible you get one audiobook plus two audible originals every month and I already mentioned that Titan death is a really good option but my choice for a first month audio but could also be Belisarius call the great work this is an amazing tale about the origins of badass serious core and the details within this hold huge implications I think for the potential future developments in the Imperium so it's really one that's worth listening to and I highly recommend it now another title you might be interested in is of course death wolf now this is the short 30-minute battle narrative which talks about the assault upon my namesake planet the Luton necropolis by the Dark Eldar and its defense by the space wolves this was covered in my recent fan fiction so if you're interested in learning more there this is one to check out remember once you're a member with audible you get a credit good for any audiobook you guard less of the price and any unused credits will roll over for you next month members will save 30% of regularly priced audiobooks which gives you a saving on any titles that you pick up I personally think audible is a really great service to use so if you want to get one free audiobook and two audible originals just check out the offer today at audible.com slash loosen or again for those in the u.s. you can text loot into five hundred five hundred to get started today thanks as always for watching guys and all of the support you have given to me and the channel for this year I'll be back very soon with some new videos so as always I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Luetin09

Views: 1,792,699

Keywords: Gaming, Discuss, Channel, Future, 40K, Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Doom, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, History, Guide, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, Rift, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition, Titan, Reaver, Warlord, Warhound

Id: _Vu2nlAZm1U

Length: 90min 45sec (5445 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019