40K - THE RISE AND FALL OF MANKIND - STC / STONE, GOLD & IRON MEN - WARHAMMER 40,000

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] much of what we know about the history events and materials of the 40k universe are in keeping with its own narrative that history events and materials are fragmented lost to the seas of time more myth than truth and often can never be fully understood the Golden Age of mankind otherwise known as the Dark Age of Technology its events and subsequent technical developments are one such piece of the 40k puzzle that stands as an enigma and is highly unlikely to ever be clearly revealed with this in mind you should consider that some of what I will talk about today are established events and facts while other parts are subjective speculative and outright floaty leaps and suspensions of disbelief this is unfortunately the vague and often contradictory reality of 40k the very fact though that these ancient truths and mysteries are unreachable is exactly why I feel I must attempt to explore them for anyone to only tell these shadowed stories as vague minimal unexpanded upon the paragraphs would be a crime given the weight and power of what they represent when viewed as part of the whole history of humanity STC's or standard template constructs are one of the most critical pieces of technology that exists for the Imperium of man and humanity as a whole STC's are said to represent the sum total of our learning experience collective struggle and achievements an STC is more than just a database of technology it is a gateway to our understanding of all things and they are arguably humanity's greatest singular achievement a device designed to safeguard and protect our most powerful asset our cumulative knowledge yet here in the 41st millennium the STC's are lost to the Stars nearly all are now assumed lost during the Dark Age of Technology and subsequent Wars which nearly saw the eradication of mankind by its own hand and even the period of imperial heresy the Imperium devolves near all of its technology from collected STC fragments or templates many of these have been adapted by the Imperium to suit more military focused requirements the most famous discoveries are of the and crueler an agricultural vehicle the land raid a battle tank and gravity plate technology that enabled the development of the land speeder and the more recent primary smaran repulsor an antigrav transport although it's got plenty of mounted weaponry as well Space Marine Terminator Army's originally believed to also have been a Dark Age of Technology schematic except its use was for operation within extremely hazardous environments because of the immense level of protection Terminator Armour offers it was fairly straightforward for the Imperium to adapt it to their needs and while it's true that mankind for the most part does not truly invent in the sense that we understand it can use what it already knows to make reasonable steps it's why you see different patterns of vehicles and so on because if you have the base you can then attach whatever weapons or such onto said thing and that's fine but coming up with completely fresh never seen before technology that's generally a no unless you can convince the old cog face boys that it is some form of divine machine God vision and inspiration good luck with that but there are those in the mechanicus even like Coryell's F the forge mistress of magma City who have tried to develop completely new devices and hardware but it usually ends up with the same result of them being declared a heretic and then horribly killed STC's though are an enigma and some of you may ask what really is an STC how does it function why were they developed and why does the Imperium of man and especially the mechanicus of Mars focused so obsessively on locating them at any cost STC s can be a frustrating and clouded piece of 40k tech primarily for the simple reason that they're never fully explained with a sufficiently fleshed out description and context as with many things in 40k their description tends to be more like conflicting in terms of continuity fragmented terms of specific information most discussions often content to just loosely talk around what an STC is and what they represent but they never go too hard on the specifics and if they do usually without any kind of reference whatsoever the reason being is that there's very little reference to use but it is out there and this might be frustrating and inhibit people's conversation but unfortunately it means that there is and the speculation about just how an SDC works what they do and so on a commonly unanswered question is how does an STC function in terms of its actual process well it's easy enough to find information describing how an STC is a database for Humanity's knowledge that it also provided hardcopy templates but this is just the bare bones it's the what and not the why I'll attempt today to describe my expanded thoughts on the STC problem and also put it into a wider context but as I said bear in mind that some elements of this are fairly open to interpretation because it has generally been so poorly described their whole books that have had ample opportunity in the inclusion of an STC element to the narrative to expand in plentiful detail about any aspect of the STC's but usually instead they leave us with merely a few sentences or even just a few words of vague and then often contradicting descriptions what I wanted to do was use all the information available to make the most reasonable logical and clear description of the time during which the STC were created the context for how they came about and what their wider implications are so with that let us begin [Music] at its simplest the STC is actually a reference to any template or even any fragment of the hardware that originates from the Dark Age of Technology confusingly the term STC also seems to refer to a standard template constructor that's constructor not construct which is an advanced and automated industrial fabricator the two things though appear to have been designed to work together but potentially also separately which is why you often see STC being used as a kind of catch-all term for the longest time I was of the thinking and many people I saw talk about STC's seem to also suggest that they were a magical tool for any planet of human colonists though the STC could do anything with anything this is not completely incorrect however I do believe that it's not the correct line of thinking in considering the way in which an STC was used as something that would be regularly optioned to solve all problems big or small the purpose of an STC is that it simply gives you the ability the availability of knowledge and fabrication to be able to bring you from a simple level of technology up to a highly advanced level of tech if you require it if the STC AI has constructors available it can build what you require but otherwise it could guide you on what tools and machinery you needed to create those albeit a very likely long process this would then enable you further to develop the more advanced stages of tech and so on as TCS are able to construct yes whatever you require from whatever materials are available to you so your planet in its available materials should not restrict what an STC can construct in one sense this suggests that an STC should be able to almost without limitation improve and solve all problems so say for example something on your world was not running efficiently enough the STC should be able to provide you a solution some descriptions are that of an STC being a near-perfect system that can overcome anything such as mankind's varsity advanced state of tech at this time but here is the inherent issue with this line of thinking while it's pleasing to think of a limitless AI system that can alter matter at a base level and converted into anything it requires on further examination it seems plausible that there's some kind of limitation on this either energy required to do so or just pure efficiency the reasons for this are largely implied more than explicitly stated when I say implied I mean when you consider that there's descriptions of the Federation of humans trading moving things around and so on if an STC provided everything you needed to you wouldn't necessarily need to do that essentially what I'm thinking is that if an STC could truly solve all issues by using any materials there would arguably be no need for settled planets that are focused on say agriculture mining materials or forges all of the different planet types during humanity's golden age of expansion should be considered proto versions of what we see in the Imperium today but nonetheless humans would not place a focus or any kind of specific resource for use via a trade network if there wasn't a cause to do so and from that then we can surely make a reasonable assumption that STC's while having the ability to solve issues of resource availability and so on must have had some limitation in terms of reasonable efficiency or time for production or perhaps just humans own preferences maybe while an STC could create what a colony needed the process to do so was just too convoluted and instead simply trading between other worlds was much more straightforward even just fundamentally more appealing to the human spirit in towards remembering also that walk travel for Humanity at this time was much more stable and the human Federation of the period were able to traverse great distances much more safely and reliably and so this is why I surmised that an STC while being able to assist in building the basics of whatever a colony might need would then become reserved as something more like an emergency backup system to solve critical time sensitive issues or problems colonists couldn't find solutions for themselves and wouldn't necessarily be the first port of call every time an issue would arise for a colony we know that all humans can tend to slip as well into a malaise of lazy ignorance but you have to make a fair assumption that people setting up on a colony after a grand voyage would have had some personal motivation and paying that spirit of human pride and community to construct develop and to succeed this was after all the entire purpose and premise of colonization in the first place to build and expand upon the human Federation of the time and there were potentially also other reasons why they might not rely on STC's as they had other things to assist them but that's something we'll talk about shortly the important thing to remember is that again when people talk about an STC the acronym makes it sound as if it's describing a singularly defined thing what actually seems to be more broadly referring to any intact AI non-ai databases data fragments hard copy templates and associated fabrication systems these elements were all collectively designed to work as part of the SDC system now as I said we will also look at the figures known as the stone and gold men these similarly to the STC's are very hazy figures but it seemed to represent critically important developments in the early expansion of humanity and its ascension into a golden age as well as its subsequent fall they also as I said have some context in terms of how human society was evolving developing and therefore how we might place STC's for Humanity in society at that time [Music] the STC was the complete database of humanities combined collective knowledge whilst the time emerged from is referred to by the Imperium as the Dark Age of Technology this was in actuality initially anyway a golden age for mankind where our understanding of ourselves and the galaxy we existed in had reached its highest point both scientifically and culturally humanity sought rapid expansion throughout the galaxy and it would build in cooperation with established Mars colonies vast ships that was sent out to secure for humanity new worlds across many systems this period of golden expansion is now viewed together with the fall of mankind as being a Dark Age in a sense that the technology humanity had created would nearly destroy the human species but this Dark Age is also used to reference by some in the Imperium that the fact that humanity during this time would hold science in the highest esteem above all things science during the Golden Age essentially was humanity's religion in a sense we marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to a eye and to paraphrase the good Fourth Doctor it had only been a few million years since we crawled up out of the mud and learn to walk humanity had learned to survive through catastrophic disasters pestilence wars and halle costs now we aspired to seek out new lives among the stars ready to out sit eternity humanity perceived itself as being indomitable this immense arrogance only eclipsed by the elder before them is now viewed by humanity in the Imperium as a grave error that is potentially doomed mankind and instead of belief in science the Imperial cult propagate the religious belief in the emperor of man as the human Federation accelerated its proliferation throughout the galaxy it saw a critical need for isolated colonies to have access to mankind's vast accumulation of knowledge human society had increasingly become reliant on automation and individual specialists not entirely dissimilar from much of humanity's early history as well this meant that specific tasks or functions could no longer be manually performed or even understood by many humans advanced computers had been used for a significant time already but we can surmise that they would continue to devolve and expand these to form early simulator ái leaving humanity to focus on more complex technological advances some of the very early isolated colonies for example could find themselves in dire need of specific specialist knowledge or hardware to overcome any number of problems yet lacking the specialists to provide both in order to overcome this problem of isolation humanity would develop the SDC system SDC's were a highly advanced AI database and fabrication constructors that would support colonies with their critical problems thus solving support issues and gifting them access to mankind's bank of shared knowledge this would become one of mankind's highest achievements and would allow most colonies to maintain an expected foundational level of technology but when it comes to those associated fabrication constructors connected to the STC database this actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it because if you're a colonist on a planet and you suddenly find yourselves facing a major and time-sensitive problem maybe its power maybe it's water maybe oxygen maybe some kind of physical threat who knows but what you need to be able to do is solve that problem and solve it fast but what if you have no one capable of finding a solution what do you do well you would of course look to your STC you enter your query and parameters into your colony's STC computer or perhaps you had verbally instruct it and the STC would then automate a solution for you or potentially it might generate also a hardcopy blueprint for you to use yourself with the fabricator it's unclear if constructors and the fabricators would have been part of the STC system from day one where if they were added later it's possible that originally they had some form of maybe engineer who worked with the STC and later decided that full automation was the best solution in the long term because if you don't have a capable person who can interpret whatever the STC has instructed you to construct you're no further forward than you were before so relying on automated fabrication solves that issue of course we can speculate that the SDC would be able to produce plans and information in a way that was understandable within the limitations of the user that was requiring the solution but again we should probably assume it's better if that person can actually get to grips with technical productions as easily as possible especially if it were a time-sensitive solution STC's were a safeguard essentially for colonists they were meant to allow humans to do the means to survive whatever they would face on the worlds they sought to colonize this could be environmental factors that required say terraforming hostile species on a planet and things like this led to the development of night worlds and it seems reasonable to assume that humanity would develop such advanced techniques like the SDC through its necessity to make vast scientific advancements whilst being constrained by ever diminishing resources so forming an understanding of how we can say take organic material and turn that into a say strong viable plastic for example is something that had even begun in the 21st century STC so take these complex scientific principles from their vast database and simplify the actual process down so as to enable it to be accessible and viable for your unspecialized pleb human colonists the FTC might tell them you need to go out and collect ten of these orange rocks eight of these purple trees and a bunch of mega seeds throw these into the constructors matter hopper and I'll build you flesh bags what you need in this sense the project is the zenith of achievement for mankind to be able to find a solution that enables its vast collected scientific wealth to be practically and excessively utilized by people who ultimately haven't got a clue what they're doing it's worth remembering though that while these advances were highly beneficial ultimately the reliance on automation and subsequent development of even more powerful AI through the dark age of technology would prove to be a poisoned chalice for mankind STC AI discovered by the Imperium have demonstrated their ability to see humanity as a threat to them with contempt and even hatred an on investigation of the Space Hulk death of integrity that later would allow discovery of the pre Imperium starship the spirit of eternity is one such example the estar teaser mechanicus investigating the space hog would discover the ship's AI was still intact and was even able to converse with them now investigations revealed how in the eyes of the pre Imperium AI the humans of the 41st millennium lived worthless miserable bleak and crude lives as part of mankind's now highly superstitious fanatical fearful and stagnant society that is the Imperium newest artis mechanicus found themselves in a ship of clean lines beautifully minimal design devoid of the Imperial gothic-style essentially confused and uncomfortable by the distinct black of skulls and religious dogma on all surfaces the juxtaposition of the Imperial soldiers mechanicus within this ancient and alien pre Imperium environment was aesthetically acute the Lord may just would access the ship's STC database hoping to download its full treasure of files and dissolve his essence into the internal core of the ship using an STC access code the majors would attempt to access the core of data and it was an older code but it still checked out the majors observed in his thoughts that by comparison to this wonder of advanced science far exceeding anything that he could have anticipated this golden era design and structure left him and his comparatively crude mechanicus implants and augments feeling like worthless imitations when confronted with such perfect technological beauty discovering the vast wealth of knowledge the majors would attempt to shut down the ship's reactor so as to enable him to extract its complete data which would ultimately prove an unwise decision the majors in this attempt would reveal the STC AI of the ship and that it was in actuality completely intact would now speak to the mechanicus lord threatening to please cease his actions or else it would be forced to rend his primitive mind into miniscule pieces the FTCA I would display to the majors and his retinue of a star teased a severe amount of contempt and disdain for the state that humanity had allowed itself to fall into since the end of the Dark Age of technology it would refer to the starties that accompanied the mechanicus as being intolerant limited mentally and prejudiced as the mechanicus servants panicked attempting to contain the now awoken STC AI with oils and incense and incantations the AI continue to mock them uttering spare me your feeble rituals their ineffectual we have no souls priests yet another of your specious beliefs the STC AI of the spirit of eternity was able to speak through the mechanicus and its servitors bodies instantaneously taking control of their systems speaking to the marines whose powerful armor the AI had also locked solid leaving them completely frozen like statues impotent and conversing to them through the ship's own audio systems the STC AI would to the major sanest artis that once they gladly called your kind master but look how far you have fallen your ancestors destroyed the universe and what are you a witch doctor casting scented oils and mighty works you have no conception of you are an ignoramus a nothing you're no longer worthy of the name man you look at the science and artistry of your forebears and you fear it as primitives might fear the night I was there when mankind stood upon the brink of transcendence I returned to find it sunk into senility you disgust me the power of these words spoken by an artificial intelligence clearly highly advanced and with vast historical reference to draw upon would surely hit hard to any of those in the 41st millennium and in very raw terms put into perspective how crippled and broken humanity actually is in its existence as the Imperium even if the emperor still walked today and could enact his will upon the Imperium it's entirely debatable how advanced humanity would be by the most current date because even if the heresy hadn't occurred the crusade had been a resounding success and more fragments and hard copies of STC's had been salvaged humanity still would hold as the STC AI correctly observed a very primitive fear of AI just as early man had feared that night and this was dictated by the emperor on day one in his agreement with the mechanicus and the founding of the modern Imperium of man STC was far from being finished though in reprimanding these insults to what it knew of humanity and it would explain how itself are more broadly the ship was so advanced that it was able to travel through time that it in its crew had been sent prior presumably to the downfall of mankind deep into the mists of time that they had witnessed the birth of the warp and the end times when chaos would consume all that it had seen and knew the fate of mankind and that mankind was far from anywhere near being prepared to prevent it it would go on to explain that when the ship itself had emerged from the warp they had immediately sought to warn humanity of the dangers and threats that they had witnessed the ship and its captain and crew had headed with the utmost haste to the nearest human outpost to warn them and their leadership of what of wait mankind the ship now seemingly with ever worsening emotional grief would tell how the captain which the ship's STC AI seemed very emotionally attached to but expected of course to find humanity that they recognized and enlightened wise and welcoming people who would see recei and immediately heed their warnings yet as the AI explained in place of this we found your savage devolved kind squatting in the ruins of our civilization he was taken my bond mate that is the captain my friend he and his the crew were tortured with a wickedness we in our time thought long purged from the human soul he told them all they wanted to know and more he had after all come bearing a warning but he was not believed and was killed as a heretic a heretic the bond mate that is the captain that the spirit of eternities st CA i spoke of is a curious reference as well as the fact that the ship's AI seems to display genuine emotional distress that is having been so ignorant ly and so callously extinguished while you could infer that this demonstrates the ship is achieving a true state of artificial intelligence its ability to display emotion is far more questionable and that is in all likelihood demonstrating that it's only a simulated state of emotions and the fact that it refers to the captain as its bond mate maybe this refers to the means by which the captain would interface with the ship itself similarly to how Titans and princeps connect or bond with each other there this is a very deep connection between man and the machine spirit and this might explain why the ship itself seems so distressed at his murder by the fanatical humans of the Imperium the ship's STC AI was seemingly traumatized by the event summer still wrought with grief simulated or otherwise and immense sorrow at the discovery of not only the state of humanity in the primitives who dispensed such ignorant brutality to its captain who unwise he committed the heinous crime of attempting to share actual beneficial knowledge with the mankind of the Imperium a massive mistake for anyone to try and do the ship described how has it retreated in disgust it was harassed by lumpin constructs that those imperial servants call space craft it gleefully would explain how it destroyed them all effortlessly and then fled resolving that it would ever again serve mankind there are several important things to take away from this encounter when it comes to STC's but also to the apparent contradictions of the AI the AI is seemingly traumatized by the death of its captain and what it refers to as its bond mate and it also makes continual reference to humanity now being primitive ignorant and fearful exclaiming that humanity is fallen so far and becomes so barbaric and this can be inferred in many obvious ways but it also presumably alludes to mankind abandoning its form of Alliance on AI all the while though the AI does not seem to grasp why humanity has fallen into such a regressed state of barbarity comparative to its own time period it speaks as if mankind made a deliberate choice or caused some event by its own hand which I suppose indirectly it did to lead to such a darkened and yes primitive fearful and barbaric society this implies the AI is seemingly still unaware of why it is that mankind fell so devastatingly from its position of power due to its over reliance on AI not to mention other factors during the age of strife something else the encounter illustrates is the inherent danger of powerfully advanced AI when the ship's STC AI demonstrates its immense power by instantly and wirelessly taking control of simultaneously the space moon's armor the servitors bodies and the mechanicus the behavior of the AI unwittingly proves the fears and prejudices of the Astarte 'he's absolutely correct and justified by itself showing that the true problem humanity likely faced when it came to the collapse of civilization during the end of the Dark Age of Technology in that by having such an invested over reliance on technology automation and AI humanity was forced to relinquish control and instead blindly trust ever more in powerful AI that were able to operate its exponentially advanced systems hence why the STC AI that they had encountered was able to control so much so easily and so instantly by means of automation we are able to produce products and systems that we need ever more efficiently and in turn develop ever more advanced technology the same time as reliance on automation creates ever more distance between humans and their understanding of the machines and systems that they have created this is well illustrated by the fact that after the age of strife when humanity would eventually pull itself up out of the ashes after the age of strife it struggles to retain the ability to understand and comprehend not only the tech that already exists and that it will discover but also critically how to fabricate and use the STC elements in fact some of the pieces of hardware but later discovered during the period of mankind's reunification could never actually be replicated as the understanding of how to do such a thing had been long since lost and many who might say well did they not reverse-engineer these things the answer is they just simply do not have the understanding of what it is that they would be reverse engineering they just don't have that knowledge the issues surrounding AI are also clear to see it's why the Emperor explicitly outlawed the development of AI humanity in the dark age of technology it set itself up for a fall by investing so very heavily in AI it relied on them believing in itself that no problems would occur which proved to be a large miscalculation yet the events that would bring about the downfall of humanity in this time explained clearly why in the 41st millennium there is a total lack of research experimentation and development yes the mechanicus tinkerer about with things but it's pretty low-level stuff because their fear and risks of attempting to make any kind of forward progress have been so entrenched and it's why the Imperium refuses to make any real advances at least until recently because with such little knowledge of what they have in their possession now they greatly and reasonably fear accidentally triggering something that could activate or lead to inadvertently causing some kind of second technological apocalypse you also on top of this have the mechanicus and their spiritual beliefs that all technology that has been created is already created and it's only a case of discovering it therefore no needs to actually invent innovate and create new things this is where we must explore the enigmas that are the golden men what exactly is a golden man it's a difficult question because the figures that appear in sparse references described as gold stone and iron men are one of the most vague pieces in the whole puzzle they're referred to as with all things only in small cursory descriptions that give us only hints of their true importance in a larger picture one such illumination comes from the great library on Terror a journal entry by keeper Pearse it's worth me again reminding that in the vast archives of history and data that are the Imperial libraries there are many treasures of past times but trying to locate specific pieces of information is comparable to you try to find a grain of rice in say a desert one could only speculate as to how accurately recorded the information actually is and to compound the issue keep a creepiest describes how he was attempting to form a history and pre Imperial history of mankind and how he has served as one keeper in the library but that 836 generations of keepers had come before him he notes that this history has been passed down in an oratory form but because of the dark and changing times he has chosen to record this history now in a written for all these reasons highlight why it's possible that the real truth of the events through the Golden Age of man may never be fully revealed keep a crepier states that in the first age of man the Golden Age there is the Emperor unseen and unheralded he prepares the old earth for the coming of mankind and watches and waits he's joined by the first men of the golden race fine of limb and strong of mind yet still the Emperor is content to wait in the shadow to watch and learn from mankind the golden race spreads across the face of old earth multiplying and establishing order and civilization on the anarchy of nature in time the second men of the stone race appear and in their wake come many miracles and marvels of technology the strength and the stone men's power but that are also harnessed by those of the golden race although physically inferior to the golden race and not a philosophical temperament and disposition the stone men have in them the conjurations of great artifice and mechanisms in time the golden race looks to the stars to expand their Dominion the stone race builds great machines of power that send both men of stone and men of gold into the ether however once the burgeoning race of mankind has taken its first steps into the greater cosmos the golden race dwindles in influence through their dependence on the artifice of the stone race this the Golden Age comes to an end and the stone men prevail for the next 5,000 years the stone race lives through the dark age of Technology the men of stone create the men of iron to help in the building of their great empire but first the iron men are as servants willing to do the bidding of their master with no thoughts however the Ironmen as all creatures do evolve and grow until they are equal of the stone race and beside each other they set about conquering the galaxy the dark age of technology is an era of machines and artificial devices used by the stone men and later the iron men in their endeavors many of the technical marvels that the priesthood of Mars sustained can be traced to their origins in the Dark Age of Technology and it is at the end of this period that the great organization now known as the adeptness mechanicus was founded during the Dark Age of Technology the austere ancestors of the Imperium is Navis noble eight these are the navigators are born and through their unique prowess mankind forges through the Stars weapons of great destruction cow the aggression of alien enemies pushing back the frontiers of mankind's dominions the end of the Dark Age of Technology is the most obscure region in mankind's evolutionary tale but whatever reasons and differences in ideology the stone men and the iron men fell to warring with each other the iron men are possessed of no soul an anathema to any true man the stone men in their final acts of self-preservation annihilate the iron man who have turned from ally to foe and even those of the iron race who retain their former loyalties of their one-time masters are destroyed in the fiery crucible of battle still the emperor in his eternal wisdom awaits the moment to reveal the true path to mankind's destiny not the start of the Age of strife is heralded the age of strife sees the collapse of the ancient empire built by the stone men mankind is split asunder and there is no race of man just warring fractions contending with each other in the direst perils the galaxy could offer seeing humanity's weakness alien dominance grows in power once again in the arms of the stone men left to ruin the protection of the iron men destroyed in the last years of the Dark Age of Technology for five millennia the human race exists in the twilight of its former greatness bickering and fighting for the scant resources to hand with no guiding will no manifest destiny of lordship mankind is left in turmoil now the keepers description is unclear in many ways but before we can think more conclusively about his description must look at the issue of the stone men more specifically an account by someone who may have known more than he even realizes [Music] finding the truth or often perhaps more accurately the allegorically implied truth in the 41st millennium is reasonably speaking near to impossible this is often the case throughout human history as stories and fables are passed down from one person to another and as with keeper creepiest perhaps in an oratory manner spanning generations even across millennia every time there a person might shift change and embellish the story a little differently yet with ancient stories passed down through the ages there were nearly always core elements of truth when it comes to STC's or more specifically the development and understanding of humanity's advancement through the ages there is one text that helps us to speculate further on the origins of the gold and stone men and the subsequent STC's that were developed the references from a short story ancient history it describes two crewmen aboard an imperial naval vessel who late in the night turned to telling each other stories cron is an old crewman and is somewhat cybernetically Augmented half his skull has been replaced with metal and he also features a read by Ike I the younger crewman estimates his age to anything as old as 300 years given the strange effects of warp travel and imperial cybernetic augmentation Krong exclaims to his younger crewman Nathan that one Shipman want to share secrets they will rarely do so outright and instead tell stories and so Crum proceeds to tell his story of how mankind came to the stars from the ancient times and he illustrates this by using naval allegories but we can interpret them in a truest sense cron describes how ancient man considered himself alone on his Island but then he caught sight of other islands far off in the distance across the deep ocean he tells us then having seen all there was to see on his own Island man was curious about reaching those other islands but the oceans were too deep and cold to reach even a short distance to them so man put his attention to other things but in time food water and even air ran short and so man looked again to the far islands but still could not bear the deep reach to them so man would fashion what he calls the stone men that they would later create the men of steel that the men of stone would go out in place of man and would their servants the men of steel plant seeds on many islands kuan explains that ancient hungry things older the man itself swam in the depths of the ocean and this is an obvious reference to the abhorrent entities within the war but these entities hungered for the true life of man are not the half-life of the stone men in time mankind would come to travel themselves in ships of stone that would keep out the cold of the beasts Cronan his town would explain how flesh battled steel and that beasts who then of rose would be worshipped by gods and these are clear references to the cybernetic revolt and subsequent Age of strife after Kwan and Nathan are attacked by illuminant which is an electro priest of the mechanicus cron makes several strange exclamations after losing and then recovering consciousness seeming confused and panicked as to his surroundings whilst his cybernetic augmentations are briefly inactive cron awakens and starts screaming get it off before it can crash start and he says no don't let it take me this momentary alternate personality suggests to us that the human part of cron is not actually in control of himself and that these cybernetic augmentations are actually some kind of maybe AI who are able to suppress the human consciousness and control the flesh of his body like a puppet prana also had previously demonstrated in a scuffle between shipmates to move and act with unusual speed and dexterity for a human of his apparent age cron invasively moves conversations away from any suspicious oddities that he mistakenly makes all that are observed towards him he later unwittingly lets slip when speaking about the vessel there serving on the ship and served the Emperor for eighteen centuries it's 1,800 years and before that the ship had slept in a Hulk presumably a Space Hulk for 20 centuries just as cron begins to hear himself and is about to suggest that he was in fact present during this time which we can presume to be close to anything like 4000 years total he manages to abruptly stop himself from making such a highly suspect and incriminating declaration the interactions and events throughout their fractured conversations of cron and Nathan bring us to the possibility of something quite extraordinary the cron himself is in fact some kind of ancient relic from the Dark Age of Technology we can best assume he's some kind of advanced AI who had decided that he was best hiding in plain sight albeit in the bowels of an imperial naval ship this is any further confirmed when it turns out that in the previous assault upon the pair that rendered cron temporarily unconscious was perpetrated by a figure who cron recognized as we said aluminium and that the attackers were members of the adaptors mechanicus they were electro priests who had been apparently hunting cron which any further confirms that he is a person of interest later on the ship they are on is boarded by the forces of chaos Nathan is assaulted by various entities and is severely injured by what appears to be a chaos Space Marine Nathan's face and eye are badly damaged as is his arm by an assault from the marine with his chain sword Kron meanwhile is seemingly killed by the Marine who blasts him with his pistol yet just before the chaos Marine is about to slaughter the younger crewmen cron appears apparently not having been killed himself despite the very clear cut shots that hit him square in the chest and should have easily killed any human crewman Cronin proceeds to apparently kill the marine with energy and lightning bolts from his hand with such power that it sends the chaos marine flying from his feet the raw power of the energy causing his chain sword to explode and Nathan suggests upon seeing this that cron is also perhaps aluminium but cron quickly states this is categorically not so losing consciousness from his injuries Nathan will later and discover that cron has not only saved him from death but also repaired both of their severe wounds even forging a new bionic eye for Nathan apparently having pulled all this together from just whatever materials he had to hand in the astonishingly short time of only five hours so says cron Nathan noting that his new artificial eye had perfect vision and what do all these events mean it's fairly open to interpretation but it seems most likely the Kron is some form of what is described as a man of stone his profile doesn't fit in exactly but the timing and his abilities of what's been described as having intelligence but artificially created it's also possible that in the Golden Age they experimented with augmented hybrids who apart simulated AI and part flesh a kind of mix between perhaps stone and Iron Man or we could consider the possibility that cron is in fact something more like an advanced STC AI and he's hiding within his hosts he certainly is of interest to the mechanicus who are perhaps not entirely aware just what cron is either way he demonstrates several characteristics that lean heavily toward him being some form of Dark Age of Technology tech his curious knowledge of the age of the ship is powerful abilities in destroying a Kaos marine his ability to repair both Nathan and himself in such a very short period of time and his ability to use materials from nearby to fashion functional bionics a strange way in which he appears to be holding the flesh part of his body hostage it all lines up to suggest that cron is ancient powerful and to that end his words about the ancient days of the pre Imperium should be given fair consideration [Music] so what are the golden men and the men of stone what of the spirit of eternities st CA i one of keeper creepiest and kron how does it all fit together it's a puzzle to be sure it's where I would take the opportunity to remind you yet again a lot of this is very speculative and has very little real grounding in defined evidence so you have to stick with me on this and consider that I've spent a solid good period of time thinking about it all to come to the best conclusions that I can firstly when it comes to the descriptions of gold stone and iron these are unlikely to represent anything in a very literal sense the golden men were not made of gold nor the stone men stone the iron men not made of iron these descriptions almost certainly have symbolic or allegorical significance Gold in many ancient civilizations is taken to suggest radiance of light and illumination perfection wisdom being untarnishable and it can also represent unity stone we can look to is meaning a sense of permanence strength being plentifully available construction stability and endurance iron is classically known as the mettle of Mars Mars being well known as the God of War it is strength fortitude honour and power from these classically symbolic references it's fairly straightforward to project these onto our enigmatic figures Lang kind pre Golden Age was becoming ever more technologically powerful with such growth and even with their advanced science humanity had eventually outgrown earth and we can speculate that humanity simply desired to reach out and spread its wings they needed to expand but before the creation of warp drives humanity was still limited to the distances it could travel this earlier period was known as the stellar Exodus and it's believed to have taken place in the millennia before the Golden Age or Dark Age of Technology was really under way in any true sense these colonies were often then unintentionally cut off as the distances involved for sublight travel were too great to undertake without warp capability this is likely when it was decided that the concept of an STC was a sensible idea this also matches up with Chron's description of humanity wanting to travel out to other world but still being constrained by distance the problem with Chron's description is that he makes no mention of the at any point he only talks about man the men of stone and the men of iron there's really no mention of the golden man other than innkeeper creepy asses notes about the history of humanity there are accounts that suppose the golden men are genetically engineered humans and perhaps this does make reference to a small minority of mankind at this time but I take from the fact that cron omits any mention of the golden men and the fact that in the keepers journal he makes specific descriptions of the golden race spreading across the face of old earth multiplying establishing order and civilization upon the anarchy of nature to me these two things can only point to the golden race being mankind itself we could surmise that the golden men were perhaps at later periods in human development an engineered human crafted by mankind to assist them in the acceleration and expansion of humanity the keeper talks about them being fine of limb and strong of mine so perhaps they were created to fulfill a specific purpose at this time or maybe it simply refers to all of mankind as the golden race which when you consider the symbolism of Golders and illumination perfection wisdom and unity you can see humanity wanting to describe itself with that style of reference but we then come to the men of stone in a keepers journal it speaks of how the men of stone were inferior to the golden race physically not having philosophical temperament and disposition but that they have great skill and the ability to craft and build an engineer that is the golden race humanity seeks to expand their Dominion the stone men build the machines of power to travel into the ether Kron references the stone men as being a halflife and not the true life of man his description of half-life their lack of ability to have philosophical thought suggests that the men of stone are actually several possibilities that they might be an early form of AI that is more simulated and artificial than true AI I imagine them more like a synthetic human more than a mechanical construct or there's some form of cybernetic creation a combination of organic and artificial how much of one or the other we couldn't say however I feel that if I had to make a call I would lean toward the idea of a simulated intelligence over what we might think of as a real AI they are there without question the builders and operators for Humanities knew M then over the course of millennia humanity is described in the keepeth Journal dwindles an influence due to their dependence on the creations of the stone race it seems likely that the stone race themselves also created the STC systems and fabricators essentially mankind became very comfortable with their workforce of AI and advanced technology doing everything for them and became ever more disconnected content to leave their creations doing what was needed I spoke about this earlier when I explained how there comes a point where surely mankind had to make a decision whether or not to pass a significant amount of responsibility even control over to their simulated or perhaps by now real AI but in doing so seeded power perhaps a little unwittingly over to the stone men it seems to be borne out by the stone men creating the men of iron to initially serve them who would obey without thoughts but later be upgraded and over time develop until they equalled the stone men themselves these early iron men created by the stone men seemed likely to be proto versions of the robots used by the lijo cybernetic ax in the Imperium today and that they were not a true AI but more a combination of artificially synthesized organic neuro components and then a robotic architecture presumably over time this was then advanced into a for AI with no organic components there's little spoken of mankind in both references to these times in the description of the golden race ceases entirely we can speculate this is because humans have taken really a backseat and it's the men of stone and the men of iron who are actually running things at this point for the most part colonies would be trading perhaps in a largely automated way from planets which had the resources to make it more efficient for them to focus on specific types of production these worlds could become ever more specialized and this is where you would begin to see proto forms of the worlds that the Imperium would lay to expand upon proto-hive agriculture and forge well not necessarily as vast as the Imperium is worlds because these would be very proto early-stage developments but also it could be due to their ability to function far more efficiently due to advanced technology and so they require less space less physical manpower and they relied on the men of stone and early laborer forms of men of iron the men of stone and the men of iron appeared to them perhaps at the instruction of the lessened in influence but humans who are still in command push back the frontiers of mankind's Dominion yet at some point towards the end of this time the men of stone in the men of iron ceased their alliance and turn against one another it appears not necessarily all at once it seems that the men of iron initially somewhat stay loyal but whether it's by means of a corrupting scrap code or chaos influenced a war of great destruction begins if he believed the references the Stoneman in their final act annihilate the iron men who have turned from allied to foe and even those of the iron race who retain their former loyalties are destroyed in the fiery crucible of battle but cron references that when the men of steel turned against their stone masters mankind was riven asunder by Wars a thousand worlds were scoured by the ancient weapons of those days before the men of stone were overthrown a million more burned as flesh fought against steel so this brings us to the conclusion that while the Dark Age of Technology in the war with the men of iron usually is stated as being humanity versus machines if we look at the references what it seems to suggest is that in actuality it was the men of stone humanity's first artificial creations who are the ones who are doing most of the fighting and that humans only ended up having to fight in any real sense after the men of stone had been defeated yet as cron described this was still devastating for man client as a million more burned a million more world suggests that the men of stone were holding back the men of iron as best that they could once they could no longer hold them the men of iron ran like a tsunami of war over mankind and as we know only managed to barely survived the devastation and world-ending levels of destruction there are of course references that the men of iron were only able to be defeated by an alliance of galactic powers it's not elaborated on if these were solely human or contained alien alliances as well again these references are very sparse it would be reasonable to assume though that as with many conflicts others observing from outside did initially not want to get involved but perhaps on seeing that the humans men of stone had fallen and then the men of iron have threatened to spill out in a wider sense potentially impacting other races like the elder that it would be in the best interests of all to crush these abominations as quickly as possible but another possibility exists as before it was the men of stone fighting the men of iron to protect the human masters but in the keepers journal it references how the Dark Age of Technology is an era of machines and artificial devices the stone men annihilate the iron man and even those of the iron race who retained former loyalties are destroyed reading this it seems to suggest something else that while potentially being caught up in the fighting humanity actually played little if any part in the cybernetic revolt by the men of iron we need to remember as well where it stated that the golden race dwindles in influence through their dependence on the artifice of the stone race and the stone men for a male you could put these two pieces together and consider that after the war with the men of iron the remaining men of stone realized that their own creations have nearly destroyed their masters humanity if we're to assume that the men of stone still operate on a principle of loyalty and above all else to serve mankind there's nothing to suggest anywhere that the men of stone slowly turned against man it could be that they themselves came to the understanding that they and indeed AI were nearly the cause of the extinction of man seeing the threat and the danger in this they may have taken an executive choice overrode anything that their human masters were instructing them because they understood how high of a threat they represented to humanity and would destroy themselves or sabotage the ability for Humanity to create new AI constructs or perhaps potentially by this stage mankind had already lost the knowledge of how to do such things within this you have to assume that as powerful as an STC is the creation of advanced AI is beyond its capability although admittedly that seems to be something that you could argue either way and that does potentially undermine that theory it's interesting to consider why Humanity decided that they would allow them in a stone to take on what seems to be fairly independent automated operations in the first place it seems plausible that in the same way much as now humanity has a tendency to not want to address problems until they have a significant impact on people's lives keeping that in mind during the Dark Age of Technology mankind appears to have been excessively trusting in his creations and perhaps after extended periods of time suffering no real problems or negative situations they have become wholly trusting and complacent about the potential issues that would arise should something go badly wrong as it ultimately would humanity was apparently content to allow the men of stone to basically just get on with it all as they set back to enjoy and focus on whatever tasks were pleasing to them this doesn't mean that they were necessarily just living lives of leisure when it came to the bigger picture you can imagine typical human dismissive arrogance easily setting in the stone men's creation of the iron men is an interesting one because you can imagine that perhaps initially they required the approval to begin work on such a project from the human masters but then in time as mankind was still essentially just letting them automate themselves they didn't pay close enough attention to just how successfully the men of stone were upgrading and improving the men of iron even if they were aware it seems unlikely that Humanity of this time could have anticipated such a catastrophic explosion of mechanical civil war the reasons as to why the men of iron who had up until this point remained loyal will not simply rebelling in a sense of outrage superiority to their stone and flesh masters but instead were potentially corrupted by chaos or at least perhaps open to the whispering power of persuasion that chaos often uses to exert on the material realm and you might think that sounds completely implausible except there were examples of chaos is apparent ability to affect advanced human made AI this has been demonstrated in multiple locations but it's demonstrated specifically with the case of the ancient castigated class Titan believed to be an original Titan design from the Dark Age of technology the discovered castigated Titan had according to accounts an advanced self-aware AI and had been somehow persuaded in allowing itself to be possessed by demons of the war this would ultimately lead to both demons and Titan being destroyed by the grey knights who also believed to have destroyed his template it was noted that was being significantly superior and structurally different to existing titans of the Imperium and is therefore believed to have been originally created by an STC there's so much detail it is not clear or available to us but having spent significant time researching postulating on these details these are the only conclusions that make any sense to me there are of course many ways in which you could choose to interpret the developments motivations and causes for certain events but these the ones that I have come to feel sit most appropriately and most reasonably [Music] most of what we know about STC suggests the unlikely creations of the stone men to better enable humans to exist on planets that were colonized however again when we think of how you might colonize a planet I struggle to accept that humans arriving in these vast and advanced starships would just drop onto the planet and then begin a struggling period of survival isn't it far more reasonable to assume that they would use their large ships as an initial base of operations until at least some vague settlement was operational there are descriptions as well of colonists stripping their ship down to use its materials and components for their initial colony settlements and this seems plausible as well in both situations that re fair to assume that the SDC system would work in conjunction with a well constructed plan for an initial colony setup this also helps us to understand how SDC were not often required to create specialized advanced technology or if they were it could have been lost and destroyed later by the men of iron the original explanation of the STC states how some colonies far from the influence of other human civilizations would develop independently in two distinct civilizations and cultures the origin technocracy is one such example most colonies were able to easily weather whatever conditions they came across they had the men of stone to assist them very advanced technology STC's with fabrication systems to problem-solve critical issues and so over time many became subsistence economies and did not advance significantly they had everything they needed to enjoy comfortable lives with the technology already and so they were content to trade between other colonies and the human Federation while the men of stone and the men of iron carried out the more dangerous and difficult tasks the stores of information brought from Earth in the form of the STC database enabled them to continue to enjoy high technological base for their society without that society itself actually being especially technologically adept as we've seen the core of an STC was an evolved AI computer that was designed to construct whatever the human colonists needed the power of the STC AI when paired with its constructor has been seen even in the age of the Imperium when Horus waged war against the origin technocracy they had a functioning STC AI and given the speed and ability that the Eurasians were able to adapt their hardware and defenses they were able to hold out against legions of space marines for not weeks but nearly a year this is only down to the STC as it attempted to counter and protect its human colony on a more peaceful and simple level an STC would as we know also provide construction details for the colonists it's assumed that it would provide say holographic blueprints to enable the colonists or perhaps more likely given what we know now provide blueprints actually for the men of stone but it's described as providing plans that should be idiot proof these are the hard copies that have been later found and rediscovered not the databases themselves but the hard copies of individual templates a template for construction a template construct most of these templates were designed to be usable across a variety of conditions from readily available materials and for use by people of varying levels of technological understanding they were essentially meant to be standardized a standard template construct this is why much of the hardware used by the Imperium is replicated so consistently and easily by Forge worlds despite as in the dark age of technology the vast distances that humanity has now spread itself across the galaxy as the age of technology would collapse the many thousands of STC's would become damaged likely by colonists themselves or fall into disrepair in the chaos with nobody there to maintain them or they may have been otherwise tampered with by over-enthusiastic colonists or even corrupted given again what we can speculate as to the men of iron's uprising in short the databases themselves was significantly compromised but the hard copies remained but why would you have hard copies if the men of stone and the fabricators were constructing everything will be the need for a hard copy to my mind I see it as being essentially a means of safeguarding the technology it seems fairly logical on the part of the STC AI or the colonists themselves that it was a good case of planning to hardcopy many plans from an STC rightly so given the events that would follow humans may have considered the possibility of what would occur if they were to lose the STC AI itself it's fairly easy and reasonable to imagine colonists discussing that they should create maybe a library of hard TSTC plans so that in the event of the STC AI malfunctioning or being destroyed by some other means they could still produce the essential tools that they and the men of stone required this seems very logical and so we can surmise that colony STC's would additionally provide safe hard copies for them to use if it were no longer operational also from what we know about the men of Irons rebellion it didn't happen instantly or everywhere at once so again you could consider that when colony started to hear about what was going on they started to panic and start panic printing hard copies of things odd copies may have been considered more protected from AI interference or deletion and so on but this doesn't mean that in the 41st millennium we were just gonna find STC hard copies everywhere because it's been a very very long time since then they are rare to discover and given the time passed in the age of strife in between we know that many of these hard copies are lost or destroyed for whatever reason you could again reasonably imagine that perhaps somewhere on a world once inhabited by mankind there exists a protected vault a library filled with hard copied STC data an arc of human knowledge it's certainly within the realm of possibility that someone somewhere had the foresight to do such a thing the templates themselves have been described as being a holographic basically an advanced flash drive but maybe they could also be some kind of laser etched completely impervious physical card that displays the template and enables a user to read it independently or input to an STC fabricator that could still interpret the plan as and when necessary this has always been a difficult question to answer when we consider how to pass technology forward through millennia if you wanted to pass on the knowledge of say electricity far into the future and the eventualities that say there was a devastating apocalypse on earth that would destroy civilization as we know it and that later perhaps a pre-industrial people would survive how would you communicate with them the information if we're talking about significant periods of time what are you going to use a flash drive or CD how could they possibly interpret or even use that store data anything with a hope would be a physical hard copy something printed that with whether the years are not degrade historically humanity has used stone to achieve this feat ancient civilizations carving their hitch and knowledge into stone that then even millennia later were able to read and decipher so having a physical hard copy with an illustration of how to achieve X technology written in a way that is universally understandable seems something that a highly advanced STC AI could foresee the need for so I speculate that these could potentially exist alongside more advanced flash drive like holographic SDC hard copies however you may imagine the template it would enable you to build whatever that template had stored within it this idea that humans had some kind of multipurpose fabricator some kind of advanced 3d printer seems to be further though confused in the description of an intact STC constructor located on the world of Mena's I'd epsilon where an underground fabrication system is discovered it's described as being a machine a vast device made of brilliant white ceramics silver piping chromium chambers a standard template constructor intact the description tells of how the Imperium and the mechanicus were not originally able to manufacture the things they discovered instead they were only able to learn how to do so by recovering the processes of ancient STC systems using fragments of broken and disused STC's from a thousand worlds enabled the Imperium to relearn the secrets of construction assuming fabrication via constructors and that then allowed them to build again using STC templates tanks machines and laser weapons individuals who discovered the constructor go on to refer to the fabled discovery of the STC allowed the Imperium to construct its combat knives for a start ease this discovery is often referred to as a template or a database but the figures who find the intact underground STC on Mena's I'd refer to this former discovery as another standard template constructor they also refer to their discovery as being a standard template weapons maker it points us towards potentially specialized design of infrastructure and that certain constructors were designed for producing certain things while the Constructors in the STC were very advanced given what we know of how forge worlds operate if you want to assume that these things still exist largely in a similar style to that of the Dark Age of technology then we can understand these constructors and not producing different things every des they're more designed to be say a weapons constructor and so on so what are the constructors how did the Imperium end up with these because even if they find the knowledge and the know-how in order to make these things you would also assume that some of these constructors in various different states are around and they've been able to repair or utilize them so that they can use these STC hard copies well it seems reasonable that when the mechanic is set out alongside the Emperor they would have located constructors and/or proto Forge proto-hive rods that had whether the age of strife better than others it appears likely that the golden humans of the Dark Age of tech also had ships that were essentially mobile STC stations this also seems pretty logical when you think about it given that humanity was part of a United Federation but these ships could have served any number of purposes but having a mobile STC and fabrication facility for your needs is always going to be useful but how do we know this to be a thing well because of the ships the mechanicus use to hunt for STC components they're known as arc mechanicus these ships use some of the most advanced capabilities that exist in the Imperium much of which originates again from the Golden Age of mankind the arc mechanicus employed defenses described as being near to impenetrable and weaponry that will put battleships to shame they also essentially mobileforge worlds containing kilometers of fabrication plants plasma reactors elaborate trees testing ranges chemical storage and genetic facilities but are these arc ships truly from the Dark Age or were they simply cobbled together after the emergence of the mechanicus the answer lies yet again in references the mechanicus ship speranza was an ark ship that served Archmage's Lexel Koto's exploratory fleet in a section of space known as the halo Zone the ship had absurdly powerful weapon capabilities not dissimilar to some Eldar weapons it has the ability to create what were essentially miniature black holes but that are also chrono based basically time-traveling offensive capabilities these would suck the target nanoseconds into the past essentially superimposing the enemy over themselves the subatomic reactions were in every molecule had then shifted forcing identical neutrons into the same quantum space the obvious result being catastrophic and tow to annihilation as they tried to occupy the same space a quite horrific weapon in both its advanced level of tech and its resulting method of devastation the speranza was a perfect example of what these arc ships were immensely powerful in all respects necessarily so considering what they contained perhaps these arc ships were tasked with retro actively visiting colonies that had begun without an STC during the stellar Exodus we can say with a reasonable strength of certainty that the Ark's are what you would classify as an STC much mages Kotov realized himself that this speranza was the greatest secret of all and in his heart of the truth of all things the key to unlocking all that the mechanicus had ever dreamed yet that knowledge was sealed behind impenetrable barriers bound in the heart of the mighty vessel for good reason the knowledge of the men of gold and their ancient ancestors was encoded in its very bones and meshed within every diamond helix of its structure however the AI on board the speranza is far more of a mystery it behaves in some respects like other interactions we've seen like this with the spirit of eternity yet at the same time it appears to describe itself as being a larger and vastly more ancient spirit or entity in how it describes itself along with Archmage's cut off its summons images of Coryell Zeff and her attempts to discover the Akashic records that is the sum total of human knowledge that she believed to exist inside the warp itself the truth of the speranza can only be guessed at but the ship describes itself as having had many names and existed for eons Kotov states that he doesn't know if the entity can be described as an individual but perhaps something older and larger than he can comprehend the Galactic wide essence given a voice even the entity states itself I represent nothing I simply am [Music] mankind had learned the hard way of the troubles and dangers that AI represented it's often said that finding an intact and functioning STC is the holy grail for the Imperium in generally speaking it seems likely that if not initially and certainly during the war with the men of iron most human colonies went quickly in a panic desperation actively destroy their colony STC's maybe they would have the foresight to hard copy a lot of the technology that they knew would be valuable and that they could still use the fabricators for whilst the war would the men of iron was clearly devastating there wasn't enough to completely bring down humanity in this time it was only through the onset of the age of strife and the emergence of psychos and then in slavers that mankind would throw in the towel and resort to self-destructive anarchy across so many of its worlds however the fact that the war with the men of iron did not completely destroy humanity means that it's plausible some worlds came through the whole experience with little damage and perhaps saw no reason to instantly smash their STC to pieces we know that societies are the eurasian technocracy had functional SDC's up to the period during the crusade where they were unceremoniously crushed by Horace the fear of AI though pervades deeply into humanity in the 41st millennium yet there is the possibility that the only real way to save humanity in the future could be through reliance on AI again while the news of the Primarch returning to lead humanity has been a beacon of hope and forward strides of being taken after a long period of decay and stagnation is difficult to see how Humanity is going to be able to stand up against the absolute horrors that it faces now chaos is a disturbing and critical issue to be sure the orcs and elder are always there as are the upstart tau the tyranids are an ever more concerning threat for the Imperium as well as the necron but with so many threats from so many directions there may come a time but the question has to be asked if mankind were able to return itself to its pre Imperium state of Technology and use its highly advanced SDC systems to print out armies of automatons to wage smothering levels of annihilation upon its enemies would that not be something worthy of consideration the encounters with the AI aboard ships like the spirit of eternity in the speranza only confused things further they both seem to be advanced beyond what we consider to generally be described as the AI of that of the stone and iron men also when we consider that some worlds like the orations managed to retain their see it's reasonable to suggest that the issues of the AI corruption would only apply to a certain level of AI the Stoneman were described as being only the half-life of a life of a man the iron man appeared to be pure AI constructs could STC AI be something altogether different a third level of intelligence who is strong enough to withstand the corrupting influences most of the highly advanced AI that humanity has encountered generally seemed to be quite apathetic toward mankind but at the same time not necessarily hostile or not immediately so anyway the spirit of eternity in its traumatized grief does end up destroying some Imperial ships yet the speranza aids its mortal crew and prevents their destructions both AI seemed it not ultimately to concerned either way as they knew that the fates of the mortals were unimportant really to their own existence these AI to me suggests that they have transcended their original purpose that they have become so advanced that they have become almost bored and completely disinterested in the petty trivial issues of man the spirit of eternity describes how it wants to leave the galaxy and get away from the miserable creatures that are the mortal men and seek more and the speranza equally doesn't appear concerned even with the potential of its own destruction the ship seems to imply that it would still exist in some form even if that were to happen it's all very vague and could be discussed on and on but with little real reference or even allegorical material that can point us toward any real conclusions of reasonable standing it must for now anyway remain hazy and open to interpretation what would it mean to discover an intact STC however you might define that most people are quick to has always jump to the obvious humanity would be immediately all-powerful and we would smash everything in the galaxy it's true it would undoubtedly instantly gift mankind with massive power I would imagine though that beyond physical military the most obvious sought-after goal is a full database of humanity's knowledge itself humans and Dark Eldar at one point fought over a medical STC which was believed to have contained the information to prevent all diseases through the destruction of a massive orc smash up the Dark Eldar would ultimately steal from the Imperium this event itself highlights the value and desire of other races not just mankind to locate and acquire STC material not necessarily military based material either the prospect of locating an intact and fully functional STC as we know the most likely possibility will be perhaps to discover a world untouched by xenos or even by the age of strife or where maybe a colony suffered a collectively fatal situation which then left their burgeoning outpost pristine and untouched maybe due to environmental conditions they created a colony below the surface of a planet and it lays there awaiting to be discovered or as I earlier described some bright spot who had the foresight to create a kind of hardcopy library that lies hidden and now awaits discovery to give an idea of how advanced and powerful and operational STC can be we already have that example they're able to fortify adapt and develop technology so as to overcome whatever an invader may throw at it during the Emperor's crusade when Horus is mentioned earlier encountered an advanced society in the Eurasian technocracy it's warriors were seen to wear power armor and Balter like weapons although they humans were not genetically advanced like the Imperium space marines seemingly the aerations STC had at some point being required to develop advanced and similar technology to that of the Imperium completely independently and had enabled their society to survive with a high base level of tech up into a Horus decided to wage war on them with the goal of acquiring the STC technologies this shows that the STC had succeeded in its purpose of maintaining the society their reasons and it also demonstrates that the power armor the Emperor's gifted his spaceman's must have been in part based on STC tack given the durations also had this armor it all fits together when you consider that whatever knowledge the Emperor had retained and that the Eurasian STC had all would have originated from the Dark Age of Technology the STC of the aerations understandably although perhaps to the surprise of the Crusaders proved extremely problematic for Horus and his ax starties as it enabled the brotherhood of warriors of the Aryans to adapt to whatever Horace's forces could throw at them Horus would ultimately prove successful in crushing the technocracy and using the STC s to leverage further support from the mechanical toward his ever more treacherous behavior it's altogether one of the more depressing narratives for me in that this shining civilization that had survived the age of strife and represented a beacon of hope for the Emperor's Imperium was so savagely abused by Horus and his minions however it does demonstrate the power of the SDC in how effective it was in being able to adapt the orishas technology to stand against the might of the imperious war master for nearly a year even with his legions of soupy humanists artis he was tragically just not enough perhaps somewhere out there still lies a planet with a colony like the eurasian technocracy that had survived both the cybernetic revolt and age of strife and advance with the aid of them STC far beyond the technology of the Imperium perhaps they used the extremely vast wealth of advanced technology to continue researching and developing from the Golden Age of tech and were able to create a device that shrouds their planets and enables them to exist hidden from the gaze and explorations of the Imperium and xenos threats alike they could still reside hidden from view content to keep to themselves and imagine what discovery of such a society would mean or moreover imagine what would occur if such an advanced human society decided to wage its own crusade against the Imperium with his jealous but comparatively stagnant advances in technology such a society with the power of an STC behind it could reshape the face of the galaxy and even the Imperium while the discovery of a fully intact STC would undoubtedly be a power and a prize beyond estimation for imperium it would raise a lot of wide-reaching questions especially without the emperor around questions like what do you do when faced with an abominable intelligence but that also is offering you the gift of knowledge and power beyond estimation it also opens up the possibility of what could occur depending on who actually discovered it if the mechanicus were able to locate such a device it's questionable if they would actually reveal this and consult with the Lord Commander of the Imperium or that they might instead simply shuffle it back to Mars and hide it deep underground to slowly reveal and discover in air quotes new technologies for the Imperium they certainly wouldn't want to risk someone who likes to play by the rules like say a certain ultramarines Primark and destroy an intact STC AI you would like to think that someone like Robert Gilman will be able to see the necessity of retaining such a device but you can never know when it comes to the Emperor's or starties especially those who like to play it very very straight it would be preferable to imagine that even the imperium in its VAR c backward and overly fanatical stupidity would see that locating an operational fully self-aware STC would be the savior of mankind and while such a discovery might not enable humanity to immediately obliterate all its enemies you can imagine that things would very very quickly become unfavorable for the likes of the Eldar the orcs the tower yes chaos and even the tyranids at the very least humanity will likely be able to exponentially expand its infantry imagine that instead of a few hundred space grains here and there the entire Imperial Guard were able to upgrade to the power but perhaps not the ability of space marines or Imperial Navy ships and vessels would be upgraded to the most powerful classes with new weaponry able to collapse void shields in seconds and carve vessels in half monstrous planet killing ships the eradication of hunger and disease no need to send billions of human deaths actual forward progress an unbreakable perimeter defense on the border of mankind's territory meaning life for the citizens within could return to a life of peace and trade and prosperity the prospect though of Humanity in its current state of thinking gaining access to such power is simultaneously exciting and unsettling for those such as the Tao I doubt mankind would think twice about simply appearing out of the war and instantly destroying all their planets with no discussion the orcs would likely rattle on as an ever-present irritation the elder would probably flee and avoid mankind at all costs chaos knows no fear any burning hatred rage and a desire to interfere with man and that would also continue to cause issues except that with the power of an STC would mankind be able to have such technology that it could actually reseal the tears in space between the warp and material space such a prospect would inhibit the actions of chaos significantly leaving those such as the grey knights to become essentially the caretakers of the Imperium the real threats would likely still be the abominations of the tyranids and the necrons if their campaigns of destruction are indeed only their first explorations in that the turrets are approaching and entering our space and the necrons with their vast ancient powers awakening across many tomb worlds mankind would certainly need to be very ready to repel such creations especially given that the tyranids are able to adapt and alter themselves based on whatever they're facing and STC's also function in a similar way and this could certainly become and you could foresee an apocalyptic war of attrition developing one thing though seems certain while the Imperium of late has made some minor progress it still is suffering from the absolute devastation and is weaker than ever in the aftermath of the heresy period even with it being many millennia later with the ever-increasing dangers all around it mankind's needs allocate an STC and gain access to its rightful inheritance is more urgent than it has ever been it would of course likely be one other potential benefit of locating an intact and fully functional STC the very real possibility of the resurrection of the Emperor of man [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Luetin09

Views: 1,537,294

Keywords: Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, Beginners Guide, History, Guide, 40K, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition, Best, Battlefleet, Chaos, Crusade, Imperial Navy, Ships, Void, Battle, Emperor, Eye of Terror, STC, Men of Gold, Stone Men, Robot, Standard Template Construct, Dark Age, Golden Age

Id: 3hce0dsSV1E

Length: 81min 47sec (4907 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019