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[LordPorkins]

Certainly, not every question needs an answer in fiction.  Often times, the possible answers are much more fun or otherwise better than the actual answer.

Like the silent king!

[Andres]

The Eldar were at their height at the time, I think. It would've been a piece of cake if they could spare time from all the hedonism and debauchery.

Where's this lore from, anyway? Would like to read for myself.

Apparently it's in one of the War of the Beast novels. Here's the quote I found on the subject.

Goes millions of years with the Eldar as the top life form--and some of the more recent lore has it suggested that the Eldar at their height sort of made a point of culling other races that rose above a certain height and forcing them into a convienent little nature preserve so they could enslave or otherwise abuse for their own edification (The method they used against the humans being the Men of Iron Rebellion, as is all but admitted to during one of the War of the Beast novels)

[LordBaal]

Sometimes I get the impression humanity at its height on the Dark Age of Technology was on par or above Eldar (as they shoud) and even Necrons on some areas.

But then the comparison is made against current Eldar wich are a just a sliver of the power, technology and numbers back then. And taking the most top of the line tech humans had. Current Eldars are what you would get if you put all those "the end is near" people that use tinfoil hats, believe in the CIA earquakes machines and the like on a boat and they build a civilization out of whatever thet can bring with them. Only this time they are rigth.

[Telgin]

I always assumed that humans had similar or better tech than the eldar, minus things like the webway and psychic powers.  I'm actually kind of curious what humans thought about that at the time, since they had to know about psychic powers even if few or no humans had them.

Actually, do we even know how human ships traveled between stars during the dark age?  Navigators didn't exist yet, right?  Did humans even know about the warp and how to travel through it?

[Trekkin]

Actually, do we even know how human ships traveled between stars during the dark age?  Navigators didn't exist yet, right?  Did humans even know about the warp and how to travel through it?

Apparently pre-Navigator Warp-travel computers did all the jump calculations in real space prior to the actual (short) jump, so they didn't actually need to perceive the warp directly. It was like a faster version of the Tau shallow-warp drive.

So they were kind of like the U-boats to 30/40K's submarines.

[Kot]

Sometimes I get the impression humanity at its height on the Dark Age of Technology was on par or above Eldar (as they shoud) and even Necrons on some areas.

But then the comparison is made against current Eldar wich are a just a sliver of the power, technology and numbers back then. And taking the most top of the line tech humans had. Current Eldars are what you would get if you put all those "the end is near" people that use tinfoil hats, believe in the CIA earquakes machines and the like on a boat and they build a civilization out of whatever thet can bring with them. Only this time they are rigth.

Yes, humanity, and by extension, Men of Iron were apparently slugging around such power that Speranza's time-travelling black holes are a peashooter. Think casually destroying star-systems, consuming entire planets for materials, combat nanobots and such. It's very much Necron-tier.
At the same time Eldar were also incredibly powerful, and current Eldar have lost almost all of that technology due to rejecting pre-Fall lifestyle and/or simply losing it, while Dark Eldar are simply incapable of interfacing with most of it, since most of it required being a psyker. My main issue with Eldar doing it is that they'd be essentially starting a small War in Heaven, even if the timeline checked out (since Fall of Eldar is one of more mobile events in terms on when it happened), although I guess it would be very much in their style to do something like that and then come by and help stop the Men of Iron, since it is implicated more races than humans got involved.

Actually, do we even know how human ships traveled between stars during the dark age?  Navigators didn't exist yet, right?  Did humans even know about the warp and how to travel through it?

Navigators. They got... "invented" quite early on, and while there was no giant-ass light-bulb of Astronomican to show them the way, there might have been other points of reference or they could have just winged it. That and mentioned computers and AI-s, which were pretty decent at warp travel - however after Men of Iron rebellion understandably pretty much everyone switched to just Navigators. And even earlier than that they just used colony ships travelling at or under light speed.

[Trekkin]

And even earlier than that they just used colony ships travelling at or under light speed.

I'd forgotten about the Ohnyl Colonies from Flight of the Eisenstein, which look to be mirrorless O'Neill Cylinders and were -- according to Lexicanum without citation -- apparently used for the habitable section of plasma-driven generation ships.

If that's true, it suggests that the Age of Terra, at least, may not have been as stable a golden age as has classically been assumed. Interstellar travel is always a balance between trip time and fuel cost; the slower you go, the less engine you need, but the longer the ship has to work in the middle of literal nowhere without breaking. One of the most commonly hypothesized ways to cheat this is to offload the reaction mass for either or both ends of the trip onto external sources; if you put a magnetic sail on your colony ship, you can let Earth direct a mass beam toward it for the boost phase and flip it on again to decelerate against stellar wind on the deceleration phase, and the whole trip doesn't need much more than reaction control fuel modulo any concerns about drag losses in cruise phase.

Now, there are plenty of reasons not to do that and instead haul all of the deceleration delta-v up to cruising speed with onboard engines, but there is one dramatically useful one that is resistant to engineering solutions: If Earth decides to shut off the mass beam partway through the boost phase, the ship is effectively stranded.

It's admittedly not certain, but I kind of like the thought that perhaps one of the drivers behind pre-Imperial human space's diversity is that the people doing the colonizing couldn't rely on the cooperation of the people on Earth.

[Hanslanda]

That really sounds like the sort of conspiracy those folks over at the AGP would blunder into and set on fire, actually. I love the idea

So, no shit, there we were, holding half a Fab-Spire hostage with melta bombs and a land truck, in the middle of a nine way standoff, between the Mechanicus, the other Mechanicus, some severely irate Black Templars, a group of intensely paranoid Eldar, a regiment of confused PDF,  a goddamn Warhound titan ran by a spectacularly awesome and delusional Psyker-brain jar, what Twitch insisted were mutant zombie cyborks, some suspiciously spiky "Ultramarines", and us.

That's when there was a feces related fan collision of stupendous proportions.

[Kot]

If that's true, it suggests that the Age of Terra, at least, may not have been as stable a golden age as has classically been assumed.

Turn on the TV. Granted, it's not Grim Darkness of Far Future, but still...

Interstellar travel is always a balance between trip time and fuel cost; the slower you go, the less engine you need, but the longer the ship has to work in the middle of literal nowhere without breaking. One of the most commonly hypothesized ways to cheat this is to offload the reaction mass for either or both ends of the trip onto external sources; if you put a magnetic sail on your colony ship, you can let Earth direct a mass beam toward it for the boost phase and flip it on again to decelerate against stellar wind on the deceleration phase, and the whole trip doesn't need much more than reaction control fuel modulo any concerns about drag losses in cruise phase.

Now, there are plenty of reasons not to do that and instead haul all of the deceleration delta-v up to cruising speed with onboard engines, but there is one dramatically useful one that is resistant to engineering solutions: If Earth decides to shut off the mass beam partway through the boost phase, the ship is effectively stranded.

It's admittedly not certain, but I kind of like the thought that perhaps one of the drivers behind pre-Imperial human space's diversity is that the people doing the colonizing couldn't rely on the cooperation of the people on Earth.

Dark Ages of Technology presumably had humanity acting at least as, more or less, united front. Presumably colonies started as frontier worlds with little contact with humanity at large, but it seems so most planets were connected after a while. Pre-Imperial human space diversity comes from the fact a lot of them were cut-off from each other due to the warp storms, Men of Iron and other funny things that caused the collapse of Dark Age humanity, which is why pre-Imperial humans aren't actually THAT diverse (if there were human civilizations going at it since just after Age of Terra, presumably there would be less "standarized" stuff, instead of almost everyone using STCs you'd have vastly different technology forms), unless there is an additional force to radicalize them in some way - like, say, another alien race they work with, very specific and different planetary features (resulting in abhumans like Ogryns, Ratlings, Squats) or so on.
I swear I posted this before, huh.

So, no shit, there we were, holding half a Fab-Spire hostage with melta bombs and a land truck, in the middle of a nine way standoff, between the Mechanicus, the other Mechanicus, some severely irate Black Templars, a group of intensely paranoid Eldar, a regiment of confused PDF,  a goddamn Warhound titan ran by a spectacularly awesome and delusional Psyker-brain jar, what Twitch insisted were mutant zombie cyborks, some suspiciously spiky "Ultramarines", and us.

That's when there was a feces related fan collision of stupendous proportions.

Will not rest until there are manifestations of various Warp creatures and perhaps two Inquisitors with very different opinions on the Psyker-brain jars, bro.

[Hanslanda]

Maybe that's the shit hitting the fan. Two opposing Inquisitors show up and the titan starts hacking up Daemonic furballs and Enslavers.

[Andres]

Heard that Age of Sigmar is pretty decent now lore-wise. Any highlights?

[Kot]

Heard that Age of Sigmar is pretty decent now lore-wise. Any highlights?

incoherent screaming
convoluted explanation
biased conclusion

tl;dr
unfounded hatred

[LordBaal]

Age of sigmar will always be heresy in my book.

[Grim Portent]

Heard that Age of Sigmar is pretty decent now lore-wise. Any highlights?

I'm still only familiar with the broad strokes of the lore for it, but I quite like what they've done with the Flesheater Courts*, which are the rebranding of the crypt ghouls and Strigoi vampires. Nagash turning on the other gods because he feels Sigmar broke their deal and also being a megalomaniac fits well. The variety of chaos warbands is pretty interesting.

*It's hard not to love a faction that inspires stuff like this.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's a grotesque man eating monster pretending it's a knight by riding a kids horsie toy made from a pike and a real horse head. It's amazing.

[sprinkled chariot]

Only problem I have is sigmarines having bullshit tier plot armour, but eh
40k ultramarines have like 6 times thicker one.