We don't seem to have a 40K thread, so why not. For all that it's ridiculous, over-the-top, cheesy, offensive and just generally Deeply Problematic, I can't help but love the setting. I'm not much of a player of the tabletop wargame, but I love the models and the setting and find its ridiculousness delightful.
I'm about a third of the way through building a deathwatch army, but I actually have about 3k points of everything but tyranids, sisters of battle (as if that was a real army), and dark eldar.
YOU TAKE THAT BACK SISTERS ARE SUCH A REAL ARMY BURN THE HERETIC actually i sold all my sisters a while back because I hadn't played in years and didn't feel like buying all new books BUT STILL but yeah, I still love the setting, and a large part of that is exactly *because* it's so over the top. I mean you've got a species that was bioengineered for war, with innate knowledge of technology and a complete lack of any ability to Not Fight, that grows from spores anywhere they've been unless eradicated with fire or the like, they not only survive and recover from horrific injuries but become bigger and stronger *by* fighting and getting hurt... and they're the setting's comic relief. and like everything about the Imperium, especially the Ecclesiarchy and the slow inefficient bureaucracy, it's like - it's funny *because* it's too horrible to not be funny. in conclusion
It's more a joke about how they just recently got nerfed, despite already being generally low-tier and ludicrously expensive to play.
ahh, kay, I'm not particularly up on recent events. I figured it was more about the way they keep not actually getting a codex for like half the editions.
Well, that too. Their "7th edition update" was just a reprint of the 6th ed reprint but now sisters cost more than space marines model for model. As such, their "cheap way to get bolters and 3+ armor on the table" niche no longer applies. Anyways on a less crunchy note, me and my partner were talking a while back about how the various races would handle various disabilities and one we came up with was big obnoxious servo-skull insulin pumps for the Imperium and "Literally suture a squig in the place of whatever passes for a pancreas" for orks.
I'm a solely fluff based WH 40k fan but holy shit I love it. It's like "What if John Waters made a scifi setting?" (maybe he should do the next Inquisitor film?) The All Guardsmen Party and 'If the Emperor got a TTS' are my reasons to not exterminatus myself. ...also I may have written a thing on what if Alternia got Tzeentch'd into the grimdarkness of the 41st millennium (actually, I wouldn't be astounded if Hussie (sub)consciously based Alternia on the Imperium, what with having an insanely powerful nigh immortal psychic as its ruler along with insane censorship and over-the-top brutality).
"should we install a port?" "nah just leave the needle sticking in. heck leave the syringe too while you're at it."
There's something delightful about a setting when you can crank the settings to eleven on everything and not be out of place, and where anachronisms are A-OK with everyone. Also, the Imperium is so vast, no matter what you think of someone's probably doing it. As far as medical science, they appear to have become pretty good at artificial replacements for missing limbs, organs, etc etc, because the better you are at those the more troops you can return to fighting. More advanced places appear to have better regrowth/repair types of medicine.
I mean >Dune Early 40k was a mishmash of ripped off-scifi by RPG nerds and most of the modern stuff is trying to put the silly early stuff in a serious light.
Fair enough, but like even like high-ranking imperial guard officers and astartes sometimes end up with silly three finger replacement limbs and whatnot.
Right now I'm devising a crossover between the Kencyrath series I love and 40K -- it works remarkably well, because the enemy of the Kencyrath is ultimately the forces of Chaos anyway, and the Kencyr basically live to fight anyway, so the Imperium would certainly be able to use them. I'm figuring that the Imperium was all "Hey, a barbarian world that creates excellent warriors, let's just leave it mostly alone but impose a troop levy!"
Yeah, Warhammer Fantasy is hugely based on Moorcock and that bunch of fantasy authors, and then 40K rammed that together with stuff like Dune. Fun fact: a lot of the artists and writers working for GW in the really early days were also doing stuff for 2000AD comics, which is why eg. the Adeptus Arbites look so much like Judge Dredd, and why Rogue Trooper could totally be an Imp Guard story, and stuff like that - they were done by a bunch of the same people.
Depends where they get fixed up, basically. And I also think that the aesthetic of visible repairs is desired, an instant indication that someone has sacrificed of themselves for the Imperial cause.
Much deeper than looks, too; the same sense of vicious over-the-top parody as social commentary is there, and the post-WW2 British cynicism yet love of heroism goes in there. The sides are not good and evil, but bad and worse. Everything is doomed to fall.
But... why? I know they get Adamantine Will, which is nice if you're fighting psykers, which is more likely than prior editions but still far from certain, yet they have lower WS/S/T/I... And yeah, they don't really have a full army list. And I'll never get over how stupid the Exorcist Primaris is, when the normal Exorcist is perfectly good. TBH? This is the Imperium we're talking about. Unless you're a noble or high-ranking adept, the way the Imperium would handle pretty much any disability ranges from 'nothing, deal with it', to 'bullet in the head', depending on how much that person can work, and how closely the Ordo Famulous is watching. Or, if they're 'lucky', they might be servitorized. Orks, though... well, they certainly don't do accomodation, but they don't discriminate, either. They have a very stable genetic code so probably not many congenital problems, but disability and other forms of maiming acquired through fighting, pretty damn common - also, pretty clearly a mark of status, given how many Nobz/Bosses have mechanical parts. Really, it's mostly just war heroes and high-ranking people who get the artificial replacements. The Imperium has a bit of a brainbug that people are utterly expendable and essentially free, in part because of ideological reasons, and in part because... well, they don't exactly have salaries and training expenses and basic education etc itemized on their expense sheets. This leads to the idea that, because citizens are essentially considered fungible and nigh on free, it's not worth the expense of crafting and fitting replacement limbs. Sure, you could return troops to the front, but then you'd have to utilize valuable minerals and sacred machines, when you could instead just send more troops. After all, they're a renewable resource. So, basically, guardsmen, let alone random citizens... can't really expect much in the way of medical care (most guard units have medics thin on the ground, at best.) If they can be patched up quickly, sure. If not, they'll either be left to heal or die on their own, or given 'the Emperor's Mercy'. Occasional exceptions take place, especially as field officers realize particular individuals are actually useful or even through the heresy of camaraderie, but... yeah, as a general rule, Codex Imperium isn't doing a lot of cybernetic replacements for the rank and file. This attitude is pretty much wrong in several senses, but it also informs basically everything about the Imperium's general attitude. People, at least the common people, aren't seen as important, just another fungible resource to be handled, and one that is available in abundance. They design their machinery with this assumption, they design their entire system with this assumption. Even in the significantly lighter Dark Heresy books, there's an example given of a Hive City which had... something like 99% of its population drafted... and the Administratum is utterly baffled why its production has gone down, when it still has all of its valuable resources intact. Another factor of note is that even fairly rank-and-file guardsmen, especially combat veterans, may be given augmetics not so much to restore their abilities, but as an effort to enhance their ability. It's seen, basically, as upgrading a weapons system. Also worth noting the augmetics are made by the Mechanicus, who are all about that visibly-mechanical aesthetic. Relatedly, even the bionics given to high-ranking officers 'valuable' enough to be worth it are generally all about practical power rather than looking natural. So if a three-fingered grasper is stronger or easier to maintain or tougher, they'll do that. Really the only people we see with human-looking augmetics are the nobility, or non-militant adepts of high rank, who care about that kind of thing, and, also, are wealthy/powerful enough to acquire such things privately. (And even then they tend more towards 'human-like but clearly mechanical, with additional elegant (by Imperium standards) decoration', rather than 'indistinguishable from natural limb'.) In other news, I have approximately 10 billion headcanons on how various pieces of equipment actually work, an abortive diagram of a lasgun's internals, among other shenanigans... Also, lasguns are awesome and shockingly perfect, even if it's weird they're supposedly easy to produce. But then again, Imperial industry is basically a giant prank the Adeptus Mechanicus is playing on the rest of the universe, so...
This really depends on who's fluff you trust. Old 2nd-3rd edition fluff and Dan Abnett's works have augmentics fairly commonplace, even among hive residents, for example. Administratum adepts and forge world workers are pretty commonly augmented, because its comparatively cheap to give a scribe an mind linked auto-stylus or replace a forge worker's hand with some kind of lifting claw.
That's because the old editions are just bizarre, and Abnett is Lighthammer. I do imagine Hive residents might occasionally manage to construct their own sort of support structures, at least until the Imperium comes along and breaks them. Yeah, but that's to increase the effectiveness of the tool, not to support the worker. Like, I imagine it almost being thought of as 'well, we've got this lifting claw/auto-stylus, let's attach one of these meat-parts we've got lying around to it!' Especially for the Mechanicus, the actual human operator is an accessory.
I guess this is where it becomes YMMV territory, because I'd describe the two as "The last good editions" and "The only competent writer they have", respectively. Also, at least some hive planets have relatively well-developed medical infrastructures, so it's not like the Imperium shows up and forces you to close your hospitals. Well, yeah, given how number-crunchy the Mechanicus gets with human labor, it'd probably depend on the efficiency of augmenting workers vs replacing them, which might err on the side of augmenting them if the specific forge requires a substantial amount of experienced workers to function.
