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[wierd]

Rather than going THAT route trekkin, there is also the potential for "Big E's ego is so large, that he discarded the idea, in favor of his own."

Confirmation bias is totally a thing. Big E would not be immune.  Big E actively crushed competing ideas on how to handle the birth of Slannesh; His ego is powerful enough to nail a spike through the immaterium.


Faulted characters are a necessary component to stories. Especially the powerful ones.

However, making the setting purposefully unsalvageable, because "Gory is cool! Keep your sensibilities to yourself!" is how you get really bad fanfic. It's roughly equivalent to the whizzard.

[Rolan7]

The final products MAY or MAY NOT become psykers.  You really dont care.  Nonfunctioning (not psyker active) units are just an expected outcome for a certain percentage of each batch. You don't care. You make up for this statistic with more numbers.

This is about abusing statistics, with a rampant disregard for ethics.

I was hinting earlier that this is what Hive worlds are   Since as far as I know, psykers aren't generally identifiable until around adolescence, and the phenomena cannot be influenced except by massive numbers.  An entire planet devoted to making people (whether they live long or happy lives is irrelevant, as long as the planet can export guardsmen and other personnel).  Hive worlds are not purely for generating psykers, of course, but they seem like the most reliable source.

Of course spawning all these psykers might be weakening the Emperor, increasing his need for psyker-souls.  Doesn't really matter.  The Imperium can't afford to stop growing their war economy, thanks to all the conveniently apocalyptic threats, so the Black Ships just have to work harder.

[Trekkin]

Rather than going THAT route trekkin, there is also the potential for "Big E's ego is so large, that he discarded the idea, in favor of his own."

We could do that, yes, but do you remember this?

Games Workshop will never come out and say how [gene-seed] actually works though, because Woo and stuff. (So hard to backpedal later if you commit to a specific operation as cannon now, and all that.)

The assumption that what we presently happen to know is all we need to know is as dangerous as it is limiting, because it leads us do things like construct  rationales for why things that have already happened will never happen, and when we turn out to have been  wrong it leads to questions about how much our apparent confidence is to be trusted. (Or just cries of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in more direct circles.)

If we instead assume that, in a setting over thirty years old, someone among the legion of fans who have been enjoying this their whole life or the editors and other employees whose literal job it is to know these things has already considered what looks to us to be obvious and found a way to prevent it spoiling everyone's fun, we instead get to ask what that is, and learn some more fun stories -- and if it turns out that we really have stumbled on something new, well, then we can explain it much more completely. If you'd like an analogy, it's much like scientific communication, in that being able to anticipate your colleagues' questions about why nobody's ever done or seen this before is a key part of effectively communicating that you have, in simple terms, done your homework, and can be safely taken seriously.

Admittedly 40k isn't at all as serious, being after all a game, but it's still safer to make our prior that we've missed something instead of everybody else, many of whom care a lot more than we do about it and have done for far longer than we've known about it.

Maybe it is a good idea, and maybe it's just that the Imperium is too hidebound and stupid to realize it, but until that's stated, why not assume we're reading stories of heroes doing their level best rather than bumbling idiots who could solve the whole setting in seconds? They're more engaging that way anyway.

[wierd]

With that particular statement, I was referring more specifically to how fiction writers *HATE* canonicity. (Specifically, they hate how it writes them into corners.)

See for instance, why they so desperately want to reboot startrek, and get rid of the framework Roddenberry forcefully imposed. (So that they could have more intrigues, conflicts, and explosions. A utopian future is HARD to write compelling fiction in, because--- NO CONFLICT.)


They want to tell interesting stories, and not have to deal with the consequences.  40k has this problem in fucking spades. (which is why it has more retconns than you can shake a stick at.) Rather than have to backpedal later about a specific detail about how geneseed works, they are purposefully vague about it, because then they can twist it every way they want. I was being sardonic about this.


Because of this penchant of groups of fiction writers sharing a collaborative narrative space, (endless reboots and retcons, rather than actual honest attempts at narrative continuity and careful story planning, because that is no fun --FOR THEM.) they focus on the grimdark, blood, and chaos exclusively, and damn the consequences (Literally. If there's a problem, they'll just retcon it.)

I am being unabashed in saying that the real reason a solution like this was not implemented, even in passing as a failed experiment in their game world, is because it would distract from what they WANT to write, which is blood, gore, death, violence, and chaos.

Again, this is the same problem as the Whizzard.  Just substitute bloodbath for golden shower.

[Kot]

The thing is though, there is no mechanism for the copier to develop or sustain a soul; It is comprised of an arrangement of raw materials, like the air is, or a glass of water is.  It behaves the way it does due to the physics of the materials it is constructed from.

Yeah, but as I said, warp is make-believe. The photocopier would be only an "anchor", while the actual soul and the thinking parts would more or less reside in Warp.

A computer could arguably be considered to be complex enough to develop a kind of mind in it, given the right circumstances, but just like your brain stops having a soul in it when it gets plastered across a bulkhead, a computer should stop being physically capable of sustaining or housing a soul once its state changes sufficiently.  Since the state that would enable a mind to be inside a computer is the state of its electrical signals, and stored data patterns, a good solid wipe job would be the functional equivalent of plastering it's brains on the bulkhead.

Well, yes, sure, but that's implying that you're still actually capable of wiping it. Provided you can, then the problem is not that the computer is still somehow possessed, it's that the previous possession has weakened the... existence's grasp on reality, so to say. If something defies the laws of physics, then it sets a precedent for defying them again in future.

The most sensible (to me at least) explanation is that a "soul" is the energy in the immaterium interacting with (or within) such a complex system. Once the system stops being complex enough, or having the right requirements for continued interaction (EG, a brain was plastered across a bulkhead), that connection is terminated, and that action and agency ceases. (EG, the soul inside the human stops being in the materium, and returns to the immaterium)  You souldnt get to have it both ways, that leads to nonsensical conclusions, like animate air.

You can kill possessed people, yes. It's a bit hard since they tend to fight back, but it's not like they're immortal (unless there is some other special case and they are, but that's not related to Chaos really). You can also kill a computer, yes, and it will not be possessed anymore. The same applies to just regular souls, sure.

The Warp can alter physical reality as it sees fit, it just can't do it all the time. Or to be more precise, the gods who could do it anywhere at will can't be bothered and the lesser warp entities need to weaken the veil and be the strongest one around to do it. Soil, air and water can be infected with the taint of corruption, breathing the air of some worlds causes those who aren't faithful to chaos to become sick as chaos starts to take root in their body. If you take seeds from plants from a chaos world and plant them elsewhere they will spread corruption into the ecosystem.

Gods can't interact wherever they want, when they want, for very similar reason as why daemons don't just appear willy-nilly - it's hard and it's costly.

which is why it would lead to case 1-- Since all methods employable by order rely on..  Order... (eg, a stable and consistent set of rules by which interactions may occur), which is clearly not the true state of the universe (as evidenced by the existence of such things as man eating copiers), there is no method to combat this.  Even quarantine is not sufficient, since light is itself a physical thing, that interacts with these worlds, and gets spread through the galaxy.

There would be no stopping the spread of the taint. Given enough time, 100% of the galaxy will be chaotic, and given sufficient time, that taint would spread to other galaxies.  The entire universe would fall.

The natural state of Galaxy is Order. Chaotic nature of warp is an unnatural state created by War in Heaven and other stupid forms of fuckery that succeeded it, like Fall of Eldar. Materium feels pretty great without Immaterium, and Immaterium has to be consciously spread to other places, because, at the core, it's the consciousness and "soul" that constitutes the Warp. This is also why taint wouldn't spread to other galaxies through light - after passing the boundaries of Galaxy, the taint simply wouldn't be there because there is no longer a psychic field of sentient creatures to sustain the belief in Warp (not to mention Chaotically corrupting something like photons would certainly be one of most energy-intensive tasks that can be done by a psyker).

Not even then.


The use of magic as a tool requires that magic follow reliable and predictable patterns and rules. (EG, order.)

The magical thing about Warp is that it is what people believe it is. This is why Emperor is Anathema, the polar opposite to Chaos, the embodiment of Order in the Galaxy. Chaos Gods are scared of Emperor, because if he gets his way, the Warp might very well become a very orderly place. Warp does follow predictable patterns and rules, when people believe it does. This is why Psykers can be taught stuff. Warp is, again, literally, make-believe of entire consciousness and subconsciousness of every thinking thing in whole Galaxy.

Yes, such is basically part of the setting, the material is doomed to fail but still valiantly holds back the end for as long as it can.

No. Also, heresy.

The masses are unaware of the magnitude of what they face and the enlightened few walk a tightrope of corruption in hopes of finding ways to hold back the darkness longer, or possibly even find a glimmer of hope for victory.

The glimmer is always there, in more ways than one.

But it's not just chaos that's portrayed as an inevitable doom. 40k has a few dozen apocalypse scale events just around the corner, none of which can be stopped. It's just how it's always been written. The Empire teeters on the brink of collapse, the long legacy of men is faded and all it will take is the final assault of Chaos/the unification of the Orkz/the full arrival of the Tyranids/the birth of Ynnead and restoration of the Eldar and so on to see the sun finally set forever on humanity.

Yeah that's the fucking point, but you're also missing a very important part of it - return/rebirth/whatever of Emperor (and there are multiple theories on how it could happen), finding an full STC, etc. are also very much apocalypse scale events, just for everyone other than Imperium. Everyone (except Tau, fuck Tau) has a shot and "winning" the war, it's just that some of those chances are more obvious than others.

The Imperium has been written into a losing position on the brink of the new millennium and stuck holding there for about 7 editions, there's always been little glimmers of hope scattered about, but it's largely a setting about human insignificance, the inevitable victory of an uncaring galaxy over mankind. 8th reels it back a bit, but generally speaking humanity is still pretty boned.

It's a setting about human significance, standing fast in face of unthinkable odds, the power of sheer "fuck you" that human race can deliver in the face of laughing Gods. It's a setting about sacrifice, about struggle, about *survival*. It's a setting about doing what has to be done, and even if the end, somehow, we are not successful, we can at least say we had a good run.

The imperium is going about it all wrong.   If order can be "Imposed" by strong minds in the materium, upon the immaterium, then the obvious answer is to mass produce psyker brains in self-sufficient tanks, with just the right physical constraints to prevent those damned polyps from getting them, (Not enough room inside the container! Abuse the FUCK out of rules as written!) combined with monitoring systems to terminate the subject (with prejudice) if they become corrupt, with some kind of conditioning to make them strongly adhere to the doctrines of order, while not engaging in outright dominion or aggression (which lead to the creation of chaos gods), and just set them loose into the uncorrupted areas of space.

Psykers are the users of Immaterium in Materium, which would be rather counter-intuitive if you wanted to curtail Immaterium. As for cloning psykers, well no. Cloning in first place is finnicky in WH40k, primarily because of Warp fuckery, and cloning psykers is basically just asking for trouble. Imperium doesn't really have good enough cloning technology to succesfuly clone full people without side-effects, and Immaterium tends to fuck up any tries anyway. Also, being a psyker is only tangentially related to genetics - it's essentially a random chance, some form of person's soul being tuned in with the Warp (which is why you can actually get psyker powers later on in your life, but it's incredibly rare).

A very aggressive campaign of this would cause there to be so many of these beings in the universe, that it would overwhelm the chaos in the immaterium.  At which point, they could be switched off (eg, killed.)

Worked well with Thunder Warriors, worked well with Space Marines, would work well with Cloned Psyk- oh wait.

It would be like recreating the conditions that created slannesh, without all that nasty hedonism that made her manifest, and instead imposing lots and lots of ordered thoughts. These minds could exist entirely in a solipsist imaginary world created from their own imaginations (being brains in jars), as long as they held-fast to conceptions and beliefs that promote order, their very existence would be sufficient, given enough numbers.

But no.

The imperium uses SPECE MAREENS, and big guns.  Because somehow, fear and oppression promote ordered thoughts.

The big problem is that Immaterium is already fucked due to ayys. Old Ones, Fall of Eldar, so on - it's not very easy to turn back something like that, not to mention that again, it's not psykers who would make Immaterium more orderly, it'd be people with well, true faith, presumably in Emperor, but faith in reality being, well, real, would presumably work if Horus (by extension, Lorgar, by extension, Erebus, so on, so on) didn't fuck things up.

Then do the Imperial thing(tm), and just mass produce zygotes, test them for the right properties, and destroy 99+% of them.

Same problem as with cloning - discovering psyker capabilities could only happen very much later into development, heck, not sure if you could actually detect it until the kids were already, well, kids. And for all it's worth, Imperium in general ain't Fabius Bile level of fucked up, some very specific cases non-withstanding.

Who says they need to be sensory deprived?  I just said that they COULD be, not that they MUST be.  Giving them a highly ordered simulated universe would strongly encourage ordered thinking. The idea is not to cut them off from the universe; that would be self-defeating.  You WANT them to interact with the warp.  You want them to bleed so much order into the warp that the chaos gods get very bad belly aches, and die from leaky bowel syndrome.

Even if significant numbers of them dont function correctly, the mechanism to terminate them, combined with releasing them ONLY in already highly ordered areas (making possesions VERY VERY unlikely to begin with!), will ensure that functional ones do what they are intended to; Reinforce reality with their own perceptions of order, that "Just so happen" (ahem) to correspond with the physics of the normal universe, thanks to the imposed conditioning.

There's a lot of problems here, major one of them is just logistics. Also, Imperial VR. Not to mention Chaos Gods, while not being omnipotent and omnipresent would certainly focus their efforts at stopping or even making the plan backfire, and high concentrations of powerful psykers can backfire in very obvious way when Chaos is concerned.

If anything, they should radiate a very strong gellar field.

Wow. At that point, why just not make a lot of strong Gellar fields and put them all around the Galaxy! It's not like that could go wron- oh wait no, fuck, Cadia.

After a certain point you have to assume the in universe actors are pursuing the most optimal strategy they can with the knowledge and resources available. The Emperor was the smartest human ever to exist, could see the future, was a master scientist, a psyker and a sorcerer and nigh invulnerable. The best he could come up with* was establishing a galactic hegemony that enforced atheism to starve the gods of worship to try and weaken them. If there's a better way to fight chaos, it's probably beyond the resources the Imperium has ever had the opportunity to use.

*based on what we see of his actions during the Great Crusade.

The Board is Set.

The Men of Iron incident was unrelated to Chaos, more a Skynet situation.

We actually don't know. Also, in terms of incorruptibility of Men of Iron, Gaunt faces the problem of corrupted Men of Iron factory once.

But in any case it wouldn't matter, because true AI is inherently malicious to Humanity in this setting.  Just one of the defining aspects, it'd be pointless to question it.

It's not. Ark Mechanicus Speranza (the one that shoots time-travelling black holes) is an true AI that still works with Imperium, although in secrecy, due to well, Imperium not taking well to true AI's. There are probably more examples.

Again, the problem is that the imperium DOES THAT-- instead of doing the science experiment.

The problem s not about not doing the science experiment. It's about someone doing a science experiment that then causes the fucking world to end because they didn't sit and consider all the possibilities. It happened more than once.

The Men of Iron were probably not Chaos-tainted. They rebelled on their own.

We don't know.

I think you're severely overestimating the Imperium's control and capability to organize large-scale projects like psyker cloning. We're talking about a fragmented and essentially feudal state where whole worlds can be lost in the bureaucracy and the only means of interstellar communication is screaming psychic dreams through the Warp.

People asking why the Imperium doesn't do this or that 'rational' thing tends to irritate me. It's not a rational place. It's a bloated, inefficient, corrupt mess of squabbling factions weighed down by millenia of superstition and fanaticism. It doesn't have the ability or will to make a true unified effort at something. Nobody has the whole picture - the High Lords and Guilliman probably have the best idea, but that doesn't mean they can effectively act on it.

I think you're underestimating Imperium. It could do a project like this, even due to the simple reason of sheer scale of Imperium, however you'd have to have a high-enough ranking person do it, presumably without opposition from other high ranking people, which would be essentially impossible because those people have enough brain cells to realize the plan of making a planet of mass-produced psykers is essentially what would be called "Creating a Daemonworld for dummies" in book form.

We are capable of producing epic fucktons of IVF zygotes right now. (In fact, it's a sticky point for the pro-life people, because there are so many produced, because of how prone to having problems the resultant embryos are. The solution is to make so many that at least a handfull are potentially viable, implant a pretty large number of them, and hope at least one makes it.)

Given that this setting can successfully cultivate tissue systems in tanks, doing a collection of reproductive materials and mass producing random zygotes is well within the capabilities of some of the noteworthy rogue scientists in the setting.

This kind of project would be less costly (in terms of total man hours, raw resources, and energy investments) than the mass production of battleships, battle armor, weapons, and other systems that are hallmarks of the setting.  You just need to make a tank about the size of a small propane tank, with the necessary goodies inside it, and jettison it into interstellar space.

Oh, but Imperium already did that once. It was called Primarchs. It ended swimmingly for everyone involved, and you could only thank Emperor he decided to only make twenty of them.

The catch is that you have to do this on the scale of hundreds of billions of units.

If the infrastructure used to make all those damned marines was redirected, it would certainly be possible.

Marines, battleships, battle armor, weapons and such kill enemies of Imperium. You are essentially wanting Imperium to bet everything on a very lousy plan that doesn't really hold together it's major core aspect (which is fighting fucking Warp with psykers, you're literally pouring napalm into hell), that can easily go wrong very spectacularly, and even if it doesn't cause the end of reality and merely doesn't *do anything*, you have just redirected all of the already strained war effort towards *literally fuck-all*, AND EVEN IF it worked, then congratulations, you defeated Chaos. How you plan on defeating Tyranids, Necrons or Orks now?

Here's the deal though;  You aren't meddling with the fertilization process.  You are just producing RANDOM zygotes, similar to the non-purposeful wild breeding happening on imperial worlds.

The secret sauce is that you do nondestructive testing, looking for a handful of known markers.  The ones that have the markers, you keep. You destroy all the rest.

You then incubate the zygotes, looking for defects.  You cull again.

The final products MAY or MAY NOT become psykers.  You really dont care.  Nonfunctioning (not psyker active) units are just an expected outcome for a certain percentage of each batch. You don't care. You make up for this statistic with more numbers.

This is about abusing statistics, with a rampant disregard for ethics.

As funny as it sounds, Imperium tends to have some regard for ethics, just that people think their ethics are bad because "hurr people slave away in factories and die". Yeah, they do, because they're supporting the war effort, which is a good thing. Sacrifice for mankind is a good thing, that type of stuff. Making tons of healthy people just to kill them senselessly is not really an amazing idea, and sending them to frontlines... well that pretty much already happens at Krieg, but still Imperium is not really at the level of Fabulous Bile or Orks yet. But at that point what you're getting is Hive Worlds, so the question would be "why don't we build more Hive-Worlds" rather than "why don't we clone Psykers", and the answer is again, because not only Chaos wants to fuck Imperium in the ass.

Rather than going THAT route trekkin, there is also the potential for "Big E's ego is so large, that he discarded the idea, in favor of his own."

Confirmation bias is totally a thing. Big E would not be immune.  Big E actively crushed competing ideas on how to handle the birth of Slannesh; His ego is powerful enough to nail a spike through the immaterium.


Faulted characters are a necessary component to stories. Especially the powerful ones.

Heresy. Also, no, Emperor actually did doubt himself to some extent. That's why he kept Malcador around, amongst other things he did. He did get way more sure after sitting on the Golden Shitter for ten thousand years, but that kinda makes sense, he had a lot of time to think it over.

However, making the setting purposefully unsalvageable, because "Gory is cool! Keep your sensibilities to yourself!" is how you get really bad fanfic. It's roughly equivalent to the whizzard.

The setting is not unsalvageable, even if assorted Chaos apologists in this thread would like to tell you otherwise.

With that particular statement, I was referring more specifically to how fiction writers *HATE* canonicity. (Specifically, they hate how it writes them into corners.)

Pretty broad statement. I have found that at least some of authors actually like to try and solve the problem of being written into a corner.

See for instance, why they so desperately want to reboot startrek, and get rid of the framework Roddenberry forcefully imposed. (So that they could have more intrigues, conflicts, and explosions. A utopian future is HARD to write compelling fiction in, because--- NO CONFLICT.)

It's a TV-show that was fuck-all self-consistent in first place. Not to mention Star Trek is a dystopia.

They want to tell interesting stories, and not have to deal with the consequences. 40k has this problem in fucking spades. (which is why it has more retconns than you can shake a stick at.) Rather than have to backpedal later about a specific detail about how geneseed works, they are purposefully vague about it, because then they can twist it every way they want. I was being sardonic about this.

They have this amazing rule of "nothing is true, everything is canon", which actually lets authors get really specific in details. This ends up having some humorous results at times, sometimes just bad results, or authors really are vague. However, I don't think all of vagueness of 40k is due to "we have to be vague otherwise it might conflict in canon", rather that painfully explaining how every single thing works in a scientific manner tends to not make for a very compelling story.

Because of this penchant of groups of fiction writers sharing a collaborative narrative space, (endless reboots and retcons, rather than actual honest attempts at narrative continuity and careful story planning, because that is no fun --FOR THEM.) they focus on the grimdark, blood, and chaos exclusively, and damn the consequences (Literally. If there's a problem, they'll just retcon it.)

Well, not gonna say that they don't focus on well, war, because they do, but there's a lot more to worldbuilding rather than simple grimderp, and some do take some slight jabs at writing about something more than stabbing other lifeforms in the guts. As far as retcons go, this is often a positive thing in terms of worldbuilding of WH40k incidentally. Old editions tended to go really all-out in terms of what you call grimdark, blood and chaos, and were pretty absolutely retarded with that, so nowadays writers tend to change up those extremely "COOL BLOODY GUTS MURDER" elements and tone them down to a believable level.

I am being unabashed in saying that the real reason a solution like this was not implemented, even in passing as a failed experiment in their game world, is because it would distract from what they WANT to write, which is blood, gore, death, violence, and chaos.

Yeah, sure, except your solution would cause just that. Not only you have essentially planet-wide death camps where you want to murder the people who did not end up as psykers, because apparently ethics is an outdated idea, you also want the gore, death and violence of unarmed Imperium getting slaughtered by the various enemies, not to mention the high probability the experiment results in another Fall of Eldar level event, so, well, chaos. Maybe you should send that idea to GW, if you are so sure that they apparently want just that.

This was a long one. I literally forgot the start of this post. Got really tired by the end.

[wierd]

No no, you misunderstand;

Much like how abortion is not murder, unless you are pro life--- this would not be genocide.

You create zygotes, and before day 4 in gestation, you collect one of the cells inside for testing. You examine it for the genetic markers you are looking for, and if it does not have it, you drop it down the sink.

You then let it incubate for another 6 to 12 days in a suitably warm and nutrient rich container, and look for obvious signs of mutations and disease processes. The ones that do, you drop down the sink.


The rest, you incubate in tanks until they are developed enough to harvest their nervous systems.  Those nervous systems, you install into the tanks. You don't care that a good portion (probably most) wont be funcitonal units. You have done everything you know how to do to stack the odds in your favor without introducing dangerous elements.

The brains in the tanks develop "Naturally" while floating in space, tucked inside their simulated realities, which give them a constant feed of input that provides the conditioning, while allowing the mind to explore itself.  It develops while floating in space for 13 years. (It THINKS it is a normal child, after all.)


The unethical thing, is that you are putting a living being into such a condition, knowingly.  You aren't genociding a whole planet.



The complaints raised by Trekkin about the tanks being found is a statistical unliklihood that is bogglingly huge, by the way.  Space is fucking enormously expansive, and you are talking something marginally bigger than a beachball in size, floating in it.

The idea with putting them in uninhabited space (which interstellar space happens to be) (If not uninhabitable space!) is that NOBODY IS THERE.  Nobody has a reason to be there. Nobody is going to be looking there.  People dont travel through this part of space anyway-- that's what FTL is fucking for, and instead of traversing it, they are traversing the immaterium instead.

Also--  Due to the extreme distances between these objects, if one does happen to attract polyps (and they somehow manage to make the process work in a space the size of a beachball, without destroying the fragile life support unit, and killing their host before their gestation period), those things arent going to get very far. There's no other lifeforms for a VERY long distance.

Should a pod go horribly wrong, the consequences will be very very minimal.


The risk of causing another fall of eldar event is why you test the technology on a small scale before going full scale, in as wide a variety of conditions as possible.  The idea is to prove out the conditioning tech, which is used to assure the desired outcome.

[Kot]

No no, you misunderstand;

Much like how abortion is not murder, unless you are pro life--- this would not be genocide.

You create zygotes, and before day 4 in gestation, you collect one of the cells inside for testing. You examine it for the genetic markers you are looking for, and if it does not have it, you drop it down the sink.

There are none for psykers that are known. Abortion is very much killing, though I don't necessarily think it's morally bad, but I don't like lying about the things I think about.

You then let it incubate for another 6 to 12 days in a suitably warm and nutrient rich container, and look for obvious signs of mutations and disease processes. The ones that do, you drop down the sink.

Due to wonderful embrace of the Warp, mutation can easily happen later on, but I digress.

The rest, you incubate in tanks until they are developed enough to harvest their nervous systems.  Those nervous systems, you install into the tanks. You don't care that a good portion (probably most) wont be funcitonal units. You have done everything you know how to do to stack the odds in your favor without introducing dangerous elements.

The brains in the tanks develop "Naturally" while floating in space, tucked inside their simulated realities, which give them a constant feed of input that provides the conditioning, while allowing the mind to explore itself.  It develops while floating in space for 13 years. (It THINKS it is a normal child, after all.)


The unethical thing, is that you are putting a living being into such a condition, knowingly.  You aren't genociding a whole planet.

So you are letting a brain develop for thirteen years and somehow due to it not having a body it's okay. Fabius would be proud. I cannot even begin to think of a way to approach this to start explaining why unguarded brains in jars floating in space for 13 years in a simulated reality with many of them possibly being psykers is a bad idea, mainly because it's like trying to explain why making nukes and leaving them in the park is a bad idea.

[wierd]

A brain has no pain receptors, no means of experiencing ANYTHING.

It only can process what it's body sends it.  You are replacing an organic body, and the sensory information it sends, with a synthetic vehicle. A properly devised one, would not impact the development of that mind at all.

[MrRoboto75]

Didn't they do this in metal gear rising?

[wierd]

Didn't they do this in metal gear rising?

More like The Matrix, just without the absurd "bio battery" bits.

[Rolan7]

Didn't they do this in metal gear rising?

Pretty sure those brains were harvested from tweens off the streets, then commenced training.  So they had ""normal"" childhoods first before the Virtual Ops started.  Presumably they still got simulated relaxation time but it's Metal Gear so who knows, maybe they got a drug instead.

[Kot]

A brain has no pain receptors, no means of experiencing ANYTHING.

It only can process what it's body sends it.  You are replacing an organic body, and the sensory information it sends, with a synthetic vehicle. A properly devised one, would not impact the development of that mind at all.

It's a psyker, and even if it's not, it has a soul. That link is something you cannot effectively sever without fucking the person up severely, since it comes form the mind itself, from the consciousness of a person. Since it's in a state of simulated reality, it presumably knows speech, so it would totally get the regular dose of Chaotic whispering in it's brain, and even if it did not know speech, it could be presumably somehow influenced. The influence could be direct, by mentioned sending of stuff into the brain, or indirect through manipulation of mentioned simulation. You could presumably set up some form of warp-nullifying field around the tank, but, well, that's what blanks emit and that's why they get shanked so often - it's extremely uncomfortable even for regular people to be in, and for psykers it's like worst imaginable torture there could be. So you'd be marinating a disconnected brain for thirteen years in what's essentially pure suffering, and then hope to use it to combat the Warp by orderly and positive emotions. At worst you'd get exploding warp-storms all around the Galaxy due to psykers suffering horribly, at best you'd get a lot of very fucked-up vegetables floating in space that have consumed way more resources than they should.

Are you falling in the same pitfall of ego you mentioned with Emperor, and just believe whatever you propose is THE best solution, because everyone else is apparently wrong?

[wierd]

The dangers of psykers on a planet are significantly higher than these pods would pose.


This is because there are other humans, IN VERY VERY CLOSE proximity.


I am not talking about dumping millions of these things in one place. I am talking about them being liberally scattered over the vast and empty expanses of space that nobody, not even tyrannids, actually traverse.

Since there are no minds making thoughts out there, the immaterium is not nearly as... thick. There's only the currents going between more inhabited areas moving through there.

It's a psyker, and even if it's not, it has a soul. That link is something you cannot effectively sever without fucking the person up severely, since it comes form the mind itself, from the consciousness of a person. Since it's in a state of simulated reality, it presumably knows speech, so it would totally get the regular dose of Chaotic whispering in it's brain, and even if it did not know speech, it could be presumably somehow influenced. The influence could be direct, by mentioned sending of stuff into the brain, or indirect through manipulation of mentioned simulation. You could presumably set up some form of warp-nullifying field around the tank, but, well, that's what blanks emit and that's why they get shanked so often - it's extremely uncomfortable even for regular people to be in, and for psykers it's like worst imaginable torture there could be. So you'd be marinating a disconnected brain for thirteen years in what's essentially pure suffering, and then hope to use it to combat the Warp by orderly and positive emotions. At worst you'd get exploding warp-storms all around the Galaxy due to psykers suffering horribly, at best you'd get a lot of very fucked-up vegetables floating in space that have consumed way more resources than they should.

Are you falling in the same pitfall of ego you mentioned with Emperor, and just believe whatever you propose is THE best solution, because everyone else is apparently wrong?

You spend the 13 years literally indoctrinating the little darling, with electrodes implanted in it, directly shouting into its little neural mass.  LOONG before the whispering starts.  You prepare the little darling for that purpose. The intention is to permit that mind to then experience the warp, as its new reality, after preparing it for that existence with the training tape.

Also, I am pretty sure I mentioned the autotermination system, in the event of chaos, right?  I am quite sure I mentioned that several walls of text back.


As for the pitfall of ego thing--- You can never know, until you try.  Since it is possible to do psychic sorcery, one could pull every punch they can, and bless the fuck out of these things. 

The arguments I have been seeing revolve around false presumptions, or at least-- what appear to me to be false presumptions.

1) chaos bait
  No, a hive world would be infinitely more attractive than these pods, because there are more psykers in a smaller space, and much more food.  Since hive worlds arent all on fire all the time, and because the methods used by the black ships are effective, even when you have hundreds or more of them crammed onto them, and shoot them literally into the immaterium to ship them to Terra for processing, these lonesome, individual sparkles in the blackness of space are simply uninteresting.

2) Fall of eldar part two
 Again, you test the technology. You would not perform the large scale deployment without testing. LOTS of testing.  In as wide and diverse a set of conditions as you could find. 

3) Torture
No, no worse than acetic training in the himalayas. You are literally preparing this mind for that existence, should it be special enough to get to experience it. Also, the human brain is very effective at downregulating processing of signals it finds unnecessary or unfavorable. It is the sudden, and profound revelation when their powers turn on that is the danger; If you have simulated that experience in controlled ways with a computer, that mind will be able to endure.


The arguments really all boil down to "Do not want", rather than "wont work."

[Kot]

The dangers of psykers on a planet are significantly higher than these pods would pose.


This is because there are other humans, IN VERY VERY CLOSE proximity.


I am not talking about dumping millions of these things in one place. I am talking about them being liberally scattered over the vast and empty expanses of space that nobody, not even tyrannids, actually traverse.

Since there are no minds making thoughts out there, the immaterium is not nearly as... thick. There's only the currents going between more inhabited areas moving through there.

There are minds making thoughts out there - their own. If they're regular people, they maybe, sure, but it's psykers we're considering (although again, I am pretty sure this idea is doomed at the core premise of even using psykers in first place), and psykers make reality go fuck itself by merely existing. Not to mention they could be tracked down and you know, collected by a Chaos Space Marine vessel to then use as orbital bombardment shells. The danger they pose in interstellar space is that each one of them is an active anchor point for essentially Galaxy-wide warp storm. Imagine all of those millions of pods get sent a message by Chaos about what the fuck their actual status is (which is, a brain in a jar, everything they know is a lie, Imperium fucked them over) - sounds like a huge emotional outburst all-right for me.

You spend the 13 years literally indoctrinating the little darling, with electrodes implanted in it, directly shouting into its little neural mass.  LOONG before the whispering starts.  You prepare the little darling for that purpose.

Imperium spends a lot of time indoctrinating many of it's subjects, and it doesn't always work, and very rarely in case of direct confrontation with pure Warp. The only real defense against Chaos is true belief. Nothing about those beings existence is true.

Also, I am pretty sure I mentioned the autotermination system, in the event of chaos, right?

So we're back at the square one of mass genocide on unrivaled scale, right?

[Trekkin]

Also, I am pretty sure I mentioned the autotermination system, in the event of chaos, right?  I am quite sure I mentioned that several walls of text back.

If the Imperium could just churn out billions of reliable Chaos detectors -- not warp phenomena detectors, but specifically Chaos detectors, since you want to bolt them to psykers -- don't you think they'd already be doing that everywhere?