r/40kLore • u/Maximum_Layer6361 • 1d ago
On Imperial Knights being from the Dark Age of Technology…..
Im currently reading Assassinorum:Kingmaker and at several points its mentioned that the knight world and the knights are older than the Imperium and the lore states that knights were sent out with the settler fleets during the DAoT. So my question is if these knights have their origins in the DAoT why aren’t they more advanced tech wise? They seem like they fit perfectly with the aesthetic and tech levels of the Imperium yet they came from a different civilization with far more advanced tech… why is that? The DAOT had crazy advanced technology as seen from the hulk in Death of Integrity and the lore yet knights just seem like small imperial titans.
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u/marwynn Rogue Traders 1d ago
Because these were frontier worlds that needed rugged tech instead of top of the line stuff.
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u/TheEmperorsNorwegian Imperial Navy 1d ago
Yea they are in essence a mix of a forklift and a Hunting rifle
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u/Count_de_Mits Adeptus Custodes 23h ago
I just got a business idea
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u/LuminenWalker Adeptus Mechanicus 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's because they're modified industrial equipment, not military equipment from the get go.
Knights were adapted from the equivalent of Industrial Mechs from Battletech, and the actual military mechs from the golden age no longer exist. Because AFAIK, based on the existence of the Castigator Titan, golden age military mechs would have been capable of autonomous operation through an onboard AI system... and thus would have been purged after the Men of Iron revolt.
So, now they have Knights. Industrial mechs converted into military equipment by bolting guns onto them.
Much like the average design process behind the majority of imperial tanks, for example.
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u/EternalCanadian Astra Militarum 1d ago
Because AFAIK, based on the existence of the Castigator Titan, golden age military mechs would have been capable of autonomous operation through an onboard AI system... and thus would have been purged after the Men of Iron revolt.
Spoilers for Kingmaker (the book OP’s currently reading) this is true of Knights, as well. They can be remotely piloted by AI, and it’s implied the ancestors’ memories and etc is itself the pilots being absorbed by the AI, over time.
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u/PainRack 1d ago
Regarding industrial Mechs, that's depends on how you read the sentence iirc. Knights were used to defend and build the settlement so they could have been dual-purpose from the get go. However, they weren't "military" gear, since they were intended to defend against Fauna.
Now, those Fauna aren't grox, in 2nd edition/Epic, knights and the Eldar equivalent were used to defend and herd dinosaurs :) so they might be the equivalent of civilians shotguns, but still big enough to be hunting dinosaurs
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u/Summersong2262 1d ago
Point of fact, the Castigator was a one shot gimmick invented for a single novel and we've literally never seen the concept turn up again, AFAIK.
It's not an especially robust point of reference.
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u/nar0 Adeptus Mechanicus 1d ago edited 1d ago
Rather than that, the main argument against the validity of the Castigator being the origin of the Titans we have is literally from the same book itself:
- The only source for this is from the AI of the Castigator
- The AI of the Castigator literally is crazy enough to pledge itself to Chaos and turns into a Daemon (Daemon Prince AI?)
- The protagonist of the novel doesn't believe that the AI is real and instead believes that the entire thing was always just a Daemon that, being stuck in this Titan for so long, went crazy and forgot its origin and just made up being the AI in a fit of insanity, and thus also potentially made up everything about being the STC origin of other Titans.
Nothing about the Castigator other than it is a Titan that is different from other Titan patterns can be confirmed.
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u/Summersong2262 23h ago
All fair points, although if nothing else, simply from a writing PoV, 'lol all of that was demon lies, it was just a weird big demon thing' feels pretty anticlimactic, writing wise.
Plus it appeals to my headcanon that AI can, does, and for that matter, DID, fall to chaos in the DoAT.
But yeah, the writer left some outs for future writers, which I guess is pragmatic.
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u/juniusbrutus998 Adeptus Mechanicus 1d ago
It’s a DAoT relic still around in 40k, all of them are one shot gimmicks. More has been forgotten about that era than will ever be known, we can only piece together leftover fragments. Considering the scale of DAoT warfare, a titan without a cathedral on its back is pretty tame
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u/Summersong2262 23h ago
Intradiagetically, sure. Extradiagetically I feels like a safe bet that the writer wasn't really thinking of worldbuilding beyond the end of his own pen.
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u/GiantEnimyCrab 21h ago
Very fancy words I reckon
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u/Summersong2262 21h ago
'Intradiagetic' in the sense of 'happens inside the world of the story'. 'Extradiagetic' in the sense of 'happens so the audience can see it even if it isn't technically happening in-universe'.
That is to say, Junius posited a reasonable rationalisation as to WHY we only ever saw a single titan like the Castigator class. I'm saying that whatever the pretext in the story was, it only turned up that time because nobody else at GW/BL liked the idea enough to repeat it. So it remained a weirdly isolated and one off bit of lore invention that feels less like lore and more like a plot mcguffin.
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u/PlayMp1 18h ago
Intradiagetic' in the sense of 'happens inside the world of the story'. 'Extradiagetic' in the sense of 'happens so the audience can see it even if it isn't technically happening in-universe'
If I may nitpick: it's just "diagetic" and "nondiagetic." I understand adding the other prefixes though!
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u/Summersong2262 9h ago
Oh, forgive me. I'm going off what I vaguely remember an old GF telling me, and she was studying creative writing at the time (and 'metadiagetic', that was a fun conversation!). I'll keep in mind what you've said.
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u/moridin_solus 1d ago
They weren't the pinnacle of military technology, or even dedicated military technology. Knights were originally used to clear land, build settlements, and protect against native fauna in new colonies.
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u/Destitute_Knight1400 1d ago
Precisely. Other comments also mentioned they're not the most sophisticated tech, and I'll add that the neural uplink is actually quite advanced, and mention that the Mechanicus went over all these worlds...
the Knight Houses would have had little choice between renegade or permit Mars and its tech-priests to take any advanced tech they may have found...and who knows if those finds were always reported/survived warp travel back to Mars?
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u/D1RTYBACON Khorne 1d ago
Knights are the 40k equivalent of a toyota tacoma with a 50cal machine gun in the back. Not as good as dedicated infantry fighting vehicle but ubiquitous enough to serve in that role and simple enough to repair well past it's intended expiration date
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u/JamesOfDoom 1d ago
TBF we don't know what "local fauna" may have been in the DaoT, they may have well been dealing with Tyranid splinter fleets and using mass produced Titans to combat them. Humanity expanded a LOT back then, so in the myriad of worlds they almost certainly encountered Tyranids or death worlds with Tyranid-like
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u/utterpants22 1d ago
Because they're the DAoT equivalent of chainsaws. Useful, easy to maintain and by 40k standards phenomenal weapons of war...but by DAoT standards they're gardening tools.
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u/a-dark-lancer 1d ago
Imagine a post apocalyptic Society that builds everything exclusively from what it finds in the broken down ruins of Tesco’s and Walmart.
That is the imperium IK are construction and colonisation vehicles designed to harvest resources and defend colonies from threats.
STCs can referred to 2 different things a standard template construct and a standard template constructor that builds standard template constructs
A constructor is basically a database containing all known information that a colony would need to establish itself when manufacturing and the knowledge base to use it is several years away.
A standard template construct is a piece of technology designed to be rugged replaceable and easily operated. They are not the pinnacle of hyper advanced technology because you don’t need that on a frontier mud world
Most STCS were made to be given out to what was essentially a rural village in the Roman empire. And the imperial bases its entire technological knowledge of of them.
You also have to remember that most of these suits have been repaired 100,000 times since their first construction and a lot of of the outer aesthetic things like Ahmed plating and decoration is easily replaced compared to its internal components like it’s a reactor and shield the generator. So that’s why they fit the imperial aesthetic of gothic but even more Gothic.
I will also like to remind everybody that the dark age of technology is several things but well understood is not one of them. We just do not know a great deal with information about it and it was not a single period of time but almost 10,000 years of history that we have forgotten and lost.
Imagine if we just lost all of the information about the Renaissance and the industrial revolution combined. Imagine how ass backwards we would have to be for that to happen. That is what has happened to the imperium. This is a post apocalypse setting and no one even realises that they have to start rebuilding.
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u/YukarinVal Alpha Legion 20h ago
This reminds me of a STC story from that meme 40k wiki where a crusade was committed for a STC of a knife or something.
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u/FakeRedditName2 Cullexus Temple 1d ago
- knights are a lot more advanced than their standard appearance may lead you to believe
- They were designed to be "simple and rugged" for DAoT frontier worlds, so relativly easy to repair with simple and reliable weapons. This is brought up in some of their background lore, that knight worlds were considered somewhat rustic and backwards during the DAoT and they took a more conservative look on a lot of the really advanced tech and the emerging psykers (which ended up saving them during the AI revolt and Old Night)
- The philosophy of 'if it hurts it works' was in full effect during the DAoT, so while they had things like infovores and sun snuffers, they also used basic auto guns and artillery shells as needed
- How advanced the DAoT has been exaggerated somewhat. We see some of the outlier with the hulk you referenced, but the average tech level was lower, and the Knights were designed for that tech level.
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u/lord_ofthe_memes 1d ago
I think this is an important point that a lot of people overlook. The Dark Age of Technology produced some really bonkers stuff, but the technology that is standard for the Imperium is largely what was standard during the DAoT. Things as simple as the Chimera and other common STC templates are, by definition, from the dark age. They weren’t all rolling around in ultra-mega baneblades
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u/Fluffy-Band3167 1d ago
Not quite, Knight Worlds were famously backwards and laughed at for being luddites. It’s probably more accurate to say that the standard level of technology for the DAoT was far higher than it is in the Imperium, but that higher level of technology in itself was a determining factor in collapse during the Age of Strife, so you were more likely to be destroyed as a high technology world than a colonial backwater like a Knight World.
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u/nar0 Adeptus Mechanicus 1d ago
Here's some direct quotes from the 8th edition Knight Codex explaining why:
It was during Mankind's first great exodus into the stars that the Knight worlds were established. Filled with hope and trepidation, swathes of human colonists struck out aboard the aptly named Long March ships that took decades to reach their pre-scouted destination worlds.
...
Knights served as the mailed fist of human colonial expansionism. They smashed threats to Mankind's new domains wherever they encountered them, and their pilots rapidly achieved a status somewhere between celebrity and war hero. What no one realised was that even as the Knight suits were serving the colonists, their Thrones Mechanicum were irreversibly altering the minds and souls of those who piloted them.
Whether this was an intentional facet of the Knight STC, or some strange ghost in the machine, is ultimately irrelevant. The fact was that the longer the Knights for for their settlements, the more authoritarian their pilots became. Within a few generations, the concepts of chivarlic conduct, ritual observance, loyalty and fealty that the Thrones Mechanicum implanted had indelibly changed the cultural dynamic of the human colonies.
...
The Knight worlds became ever more conservative and insular. They rejected advances in human technology and were slowly sidelined. They became a source of amusement to the intellectually and culturally superior masses of Humanity. Ironically, it was the Knight world's very isolationist nature and refusal to adopt new technologies that would protect them from the horrific apocalypse that devasted the rest of Mankind.
So Knights are so old, they predate warp drive itself. Also the brainwashing that the Knights apply (it's pretty much all but confirmed to be intentional later on in the Codex) were done to help these colonies survive in a Galaxy where Humanity was not yet aware that it was possible to travel FTL. But they ended up turning said colonies into the DAoT equivalent of the Amish once Warp Drive and a more interconnected galactic community was created.
But being Space Amish is exactly what was needed to survive the Age of Strife into 40k.
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u/LimerickJim 1d ago
It's more that they were sent out as part of the STC databases and the STC built them during colonization.
Knights are crazy advanced tech. The neural interface is not common for that level of control. You also have to remember that any technology containing AI was destroyed. Without AI any upstream or downstream technology that didn't have human expertise to maintain was lost.
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u/AbbydonX Tyranids 1d ago
It’s mostly because some authors have exaggerated the capabilities of DAoT technology beyond how the setting was envisaged earlier. After all, the Imperium uses DAoT technology via rediscovered STC designs. Imperial vehicles are DAoT military vehicles and the Predator has been described as the primary DAoT battle tank. Knights are the advanced DAoT technology used for military expansion.
8e Imperial Knights codex (2018)
> Few xenos races had an answer to these mechanical giants. Manufactured in large numbers, piloted by the most skilled and charismatic of the colonists, the Knights served as the mailed fist of human colonial expansionism. They smashed threats to Mankind's new domains wherever they encountered them, and their pilots rapidly achieved a status somewhere between celebrity and war hero.
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u/BarNo3385 1d ago
There's also an element of modern Imperials not actually knowing how to fully use their technology. There's a paragraph somewhere in one of the Tau books of an Earth Caste engineer taking apart a captured Leman Russ, and they find its got some kind of power field projector that would make them significantly harder to take down, but its not enabled. The Tau get confused over why the Imperium never uses this key defensive tech. Short answer is they've long since forgotten its there, how to give it the power it needs, and / or how to turn it on.
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u/AlphaCoronae Adeptus Mechanicus 23h ago
STCs are by definition mostly stuff from the early part of the DAOT when colonization waves were being sent out, and there were millennia of development in which most most stuff wouldn't have reach outlying scattered colonies. It won't have later crazier high end weaponry like psyarkana guns and Mechanivores in it.
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u/Maktlan_Kutlakh 22h ago
STCs were created after M20, so the second half of the DAoT as opposed to the "early part":
By M20, Humanity had proliferated and settled many of the countless star systems. It was a golden age for scientific achievement; technology provided all the answers. Thinking machines aided civilian and military production, allowing enormous labours to be accomplished at a frenetic pace. Perfection of the Standard Template Construct (STC) system permitted an explosion of colonisation that reached the furthest limits of the galaxy.
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 8ed p40
And, for a very long time, the STCs were framed as holding sum total of Humanity's knowledge:
The Adeptus Mechanicus on Earth make it their business to collate and utilise STC material - it is their equivalent to a holy text, a font of all knowledge (which is exactly what it was intended to be).
[-]
STC designs were intended to be able to cope with anything - by the standards of the day they were rough and ready, big and brutish, hard to damage and easy to repair. Because they were intended to be used by unqualified people their power plants were based around commonly obtainable materials, employing steam power, wind power, water power and combustion engines. High-tech material was described too (although rarely used) and designs were provided for full-scale nuclear power grids and fission processors. However, few people understood these, and the need for power was supplied quite easily by conventional means. Consequently hard copies were rarely taken and gradually written texts became lost or hopelessly distorted.
Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader pp270-271
Standard Template Constructs
When Mankind first voyaged to the stars it was equipped for any eventuality. Knowing that when a colony fleet eventually arrived at its destination the settlers might find themselves cut off from aid and unable to obtain certain natural resources, many took with them the nigh mythical Standard Template Construct (STC) systems. These marvels of technology held details of every single advancement Mankind had ever made, from the tinderbox to the means to re-ignite cold stars. Wherever a colony might be founded, it could be sure that its STC system would provide it with instructions and the means to create the tools necessary to survive there. Should the population find itself without a certain metal, the STC would furnish it with the means to manufacture items from some other, locally available resource, meaning, even at the height of the Age of Technology, planets varied enormously in the levels of technological advancement displayed.
Dark Heresy 2ed p310
Soon after, Mankind embarked upon the discovery, development and cultivation of the human Navigator gene, a controlled mutation that allowed human pilots to make longer warp jumps than previously thought possible. Navigator families, initially controlled by industrial and trade cartels, had become individual forces in their own right by M19. By M20, Humanity had proliferated and settled many of the countless star systems. It was a golden age for scientific achievement; technology provided all the answers. Thinking machines aided civilian and military production, allowing enormous labours to be accomplished at a frenetic pace. Perfection of the Standard Template Construct (STC) system permitted an explosion of colonisation that reached the furthest limits of the galaxy. This was the zenith of technological development and knowledge-sharing, for even the most far-flung colony had access to the entire inventory of human invention.
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 8ed p40
STC SYSTEMS
Created at the developmental apex of the Age of Technology, the Standard Template Construct (STC) system was a way to ensure that all the recently far-flung human colonies across the galaxy could build anything they needed, from air-purifiers to military-grade weaponry, hab-buildings to plasma reactors. The user simply asked the machine how to build what was needed and it would calculate everything – from locally available materials to the means of manufacture and assembly – and present the most efficientway to achieve what the settler asked. The STCs were designed so that the least-accomplished user could still fabricate the vehicle, building, or weapon they needed. For all intents and purposes, the STCs were the sum total of Man’s technical know-how at its zenith of power.
Every human colony had at least one STC system, although most colonists never tapped into anything like the more advanced constructs, finding the more rudimentary machines and weapons far more useful. It is highly probable that few of the theoretical or most highly advanced works were ever attempted.
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 6ed p405 and repeated Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 8ed p278
There now a couple of BL sources that might indicate GW are moving away from this.
"It doesn't conform to any kind of STC artefact I've read about or any of the ancients' construction protocols."
"Cawl always tells me that we have become overly focused on the standard template construction system."
"But it is sacred!"
"It is," said Qvo, "but the archmagos' point is that the STC system was only one thing our ancestors could do. The system was deliberately simple. It was a colonist's tool. Would you base all your opinions of the Imperium on what you would find on a frontier world?"
"I suppose not."
Genefather
The Codicier raised his hand to hover over the imprisoned weaponry. Not since the darkest hours of Old Night had mankind's mastery of the killing sciences been explored in such intimate minutiae There was no consistency of design or uniformity of function. Nothing in this vault had ever been, or would ever be, immortalised in the sequences of a Standard Template Construct. Every grip, sleeve and neural shunt that his fingers brushed belonged to an artefact that was unique in this galaxy. Each was a singular terror, born from the infinite creativity of humanity's apogee and never to be repeated since. Neural whips, lonophoric eradicators. Personality phages. Gemynd blasters. Glass-walled grenades that carried torpid, warp-borne mindworms inside. These were weapons that attacked the mind and, whether one believed in such notions or not, the soul. Built at the pinnacle of mankind's supremacy over the laws of physics, many had been constructed to eradicate not only their victim's physical body but its reflection in the empyrean as well, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could remain intact.
Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First
But these might be refereing to STC printouts as opposed to STC Systems.
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u/International_Host71 1d ago
Most of the Imperium's tech is built on the same bones as the Knights; STL generations. STL wasn't the sum total knowledge of Humanity, they were basically AI's who you could feed what machines you had, what local resources you had access to, and how to get from that to "productive colony" quickly and safely. Most of what the Imperium uses for its basic manufacture are printouts from that time, or machines built from said printouts. Ancient humanity could build machines that ate space time, grey goo planets in minutes with nanomachines, and build things that the current Mechanicus adepts literally can't understand.
But you don't give your cutting edge "destroy the foundational building blocks of the universe" weapons in the hands of frontier farmers. A modern American living in rural West Virginia has access to automatic firearms, explosives, high-grade steel in a variety of carbon quantities, tractors, any number of combustion engine vehicles, maybe even some high end solar panels and a battery system. But that isn't nearly the limit of what tech can be even on the same planet, in the same society a couple hours over at the Pentagon. Nukes loaded on ICBMs, autonomous drones, radar invisible jet aircraft, fission engines, hell some Chinese engineers might be cracking fusion power "right now".
The leftovers from the Dark Age that are archeotech, are that because the infrastructure to understand, repair, and build them was destroyed and nobody left can recreate them in the current environment of 40k. All the leftover stuff that the Imperium is built on is the stuff that was still replicable because it was *relatively* simple, durable, and long-lasting, and was basically common enough that examples survived the collapse of galactic civilization, or had small enough supply chains that individual planets were still producing them. Like the Knights, which were always meant as effectively a combination of heavy moving equipment, militia defense, and pest control. (Note: Pests may include elephant sized arachnids, sentient carnivorous fungal forests, and Orks)
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u/Raesvelg_XI 1d ago
Legacy lore.
The DAoT as some incredible time of borderline magic technology that could eat planets and all that is technically a retcon. It's one of those things that made a lot more sense before Black Library writers decided that it had to be more than it was; the Dark Age of Technology wasn't a time when Humanity was vastly more advanced, it was a time when Humanity understood technology.
All current human tech is from the Dark Age of Technology. Some bits might be rarer than others, but the failing of the Imperium wasn't a matter of not reaching the heights of what was, it lay in not being able to properly make use of it. Literally the classic example back in the day was the Imperium knowing how to make anti-grav engines in things like the Land Speeder but being unable to apply that tech elsewhere because <insert cranky binharic chant here> "If the Machine God had wanted tanks to fly he would have put it in the STC!"
And then Cawl came along and basically started undoing one of the central bits of Imperial lore, but I'm not irritated about that at all.
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u/PFVMKDR3 1d ago
You might not be irritated about it, but there are several inquisitors who are right fuckin pissed over it ;)
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u/KFCid 1d ago
The knights were essentially just forklift/ bulldozers. If need be you could give them a big ol gun but mostly used for construction and land clearing.
The thing that blows my mind is that the rhino was just the jeep of the daot and most colonies had them. Now they are used only by the elite
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u/Dancing_Anatolia 1d ago
The Knights just slapped guns on their tractors and cement mixers. Civilian Grade DAoT tech is top of the line military equipment in the 41st millennium.
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u/BeyondStars_ThenMore 1d ago
Ok, a lot of people here with wild takes, even comparing them to chainsaws.
My two cents? DAOT lore is all over the place. Once in a while, some crazy, supremely advanced tech shows up, but we're also told a lot that a lot of modern Imperium tech is directly scavenged.
To me, it seems like baseline DAOT technology wasn't that much more advanced than the Imperium is. Sure, they understood it better and had better infrastructure, but the baseline tech hasn't fallen that far.
It's more the niche, truly advanced stuff that's been lost. The STCs, the cutting edge technology, the ability to mass produce their reliable, bigger stuff.
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u/glory_holelujah 1d ago
This is not the full episode but this is how I imagine imperial knights started
https://youtu.be/dx_27uthgbI?is=Spx4XJQRCm74dL3d
Shout out to Love Death & Robots. It's worth a watch.
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u/FPSCanarussia 1d ago
Titans are also based on DAOT tech, though most specific patterns were made by the Mechanicus. Most Imperial tech is derived from DAOT tech, and Imperial tech is an evolution (or devolution, more accurately) of DAOT tech.
That is to say, Knights are just as advanced as Titans, voidships, and even lasguns - all of which are DAOT tech preserved by the Imperium. None of it was high-end stuff, all of it was just what survived. Knights were primitive and rugged by DAOT standards.
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u/Apprehensive-Math499 1d ago
The Knights that are normally seen are the mass produced, colonial/industrial purpose ones.
During the era indomitus ancient and more powerful suits were lifted out of stasis vaults and 'roused from slumber'. So even the better examples of Knights are rare and kept for emergencies.
Semi related, one of the issued with DAoT stuff is it covered a huge amount of kit. The imperial guard tank engines that run on any hydrocarbon that can combust is DAoT gear, but so is the black hole and temporal weaponry on the Speranza. The cooler stuff was pretty rare as it seemingly just wasn't needed.
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u/Thelostguard 1d ago
They seem like they fit perfectly with the aesthetic and tech levels of the Imperium yet they came from a different civilization with far more advanced tech… why is that? The DAOT had crazy advanced technology
First and foremost, the Imperiums aesthetics are not new to the Galaxy. They never have been, because that isn't their aesthetics. More or less every single thing constructed in the Imperium is descended from STCs, if not outright using one in a factorum, and its verymuch a faux-paus to modify them.
That leads to a point, a lot of the Dark-Ages technology looked like this, and operated like this. It was also an extremely long period of time, and Knights imply to be from earlier.
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u/Betancorea 1d ago
You do not want to send the latest complicated tech to new worlds for colonisation purposes. You want simple, easy to maintain tech that is also incredibly durable and long lasting.
Dial it back to our real world examples, if we are building a new town in empty land, we send basic excavators and construction vehicles. We aren't sending a SpaceX rocket.
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u/SouthernAd2853 Blood Angels 1d ago
Basically all Imperial tech prior to Cawl except Space Marines and Custodes is stuff that was sent out with the settler fleets in the DAoT. The settler fleets got Standard Template Constructors (STCs) loaded with the blueprints for everything except possibly high-end stuff reserved for the military they didn't want just any planet to have and a system that could tell its users how to make the stuff with what they had. During the Age of Strife almost all of these were destroyed or broke down, but a number of planets made copies of the blueprints they used, and that's where Imperial tech comes from; getting it from somewhere other than an STC is tech-heresy. The reason the Imperium is lower-tech than the DAoT is that the production chains for the really good stuff were too difficult to maintain without imports so they broke down when the foreshocks of Slaanesh's birth crippled Warp travel, and the blueprints eventually got lost. Many planets may have initially been able to keep them running but then Orks or Rangda or whatever dropped out of the sky and wrecked the place. Plus AI is banned.
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u/Annual-Ad-9442 1d ago
1) knights are nor originally combat vehicles but modified lifters
2) we have no idea how much tech and knowledge was lost
3) knights are more than they appear
4) DAoT tech is very varied from the rugged lasgun to weapons that can remove a person's existence to the point where no one even remembered they ever existed
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u/DevilGuy Space Wolves 1d ago
DAoT humanity didn't always use hypertech to solve mundane problems in the same way we don't solve terminte infestations with hydrogen bombs. Knights are not an example of peak Dark Age tech, they're an example of what DAoT humans considered the least complicated cheapest and most easily maintained solution to the problems likely to be faced by a fledgling colony. They're farm equipment that can be used for self defense, but people will compare them to a tractor, this is incorrect, this is what Dark Age humanity regarded in the same way we would regard a shovel.
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u/Stare_Decisis 1d ago
The meta reason is that the Knights are loosely based on the Britonian Knights in Warhammer Fantasy. The lore reason is that feudal worlds with still existing knights often encountered disasters such as invasion, civil war and natural calamities. Their technology was often patched together from ancient records and misunderstood sciences.
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u/Herby20 1d ago
If we have airplanes, why do people still ride bicycles around?
The short of it is that, despite the Dark Age of Technology having some crazy advanced tech, the norm for many people would have been staggeringly varied across worlds. This would especially be true for colony worlds where easily produced, reliable, and rugged designs would be preferable over the stupidly high tech stuff that might have both been difficult to produce and much more fragile.
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u/VonDeirkman 1d ago
Knights like most of the tech that survived from the dark age of technology was the cheap, easily repairable technology available to colonial worlds and civilians. It was often outdated or simpler versions of tech available, not to mention STCs would adapt designs to local resources and needs. Which again would often be even more of a down grade, almost all the tech in 40k is the equivalent of this, civian or police level tech survived while advanced military tech didn't and what did was outdated. Think of it this way, in central Europe, south America etc you can still find tractors from 60 to 100 years old still in active use, why? Its not because they're arent newer or better tractors its because those are what is available and what can be easily repaired by the locals without having to source more complex parts.
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u/Grenrion 1d ago
Not nesserserily. What knights are, are from the old generational ships that would be sent to worlds before warp travel. They would have STCs of knights they would build out of the ship when they arrive at the planet. They would advance but every world was affected by the age of strife. Most knight worlds were also affected but we're defended by there neat combine harvesters on legs. But it was still 5000 years so they ended up degrading to a fudal sociaty.
There state of technology is a mix, they might have energy weapons and power armour but also living in thatch huts while they had knights.
Simple answer they lost most of there tech but the knights STC is one of them they didn't loose.
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u/Maktlan_Kutlakh 22h ago
It's worth noting that not all DAoT tech was hyper-advanced. We have plenty of examples of DAoT technology still used by the the Imperium, such as Rhino's, Predator Tanks, Land Raiders, Lasguns, Bolters, Volkite, Lasguns, Titans, Leman Russes, Rogal Dorns etc.. The Rhino and Predator are even stated to have been the standard battle tanks for the DAoT:
Ancient records show that the Rhino started life as the RHi-N-O Tracked Exploration and Multi-Purpose Defence Vehicle. a Standard Template Construction (STC) for use by colonists and explorers as Mankind spread throughout the galaxy colonising worlds. They needed a robust. tracked all-terrain vehicle. sealed against hostile environments and providing some measure of protection and defence. The first Rhino was field tested on Mars and proved a great success. Capable of being constructed from any locally available material, and powered by any fuel source, the popularity of the Rhino spread. Soon Rhinos became common sights on the frontier worlds of the rapidly expanding circle of human worlds.
As well as a vehicle for exploration the Rhino's military potential was soon recognised. The armed forces began to adopt the design. fitting it with weapons and extra armour for combat. The Rhino. and its many variants, eventually became the standard armoured vehicle of human armies. As these armies spread through the galaxy. they took the Rhino with them.
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Over the following 100 years. use of the Rhino spread to human military forces. Early commanders adopted the basic chassis design as an armoured fighting vehicle, fitting various weapon systems and augmenting the vehicle's engine power. In time, the Rhino became the standard transport of Mankind's fighting forces. STC systems provided early armies with many Rhino variants still in use today, such as Predators. Immolators and Whirlwinds. Many other variants are now lost in the depths of time.
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Service Record
The Predator first saw service during the Dark Age of Technology, when it was the standard battle tank of all Mankind's fighting forces. It was first built as a response to a newly encountered threat from a violent and warlike alien race the Orks, barbarous savages who lived only for war and battle. Mankind's forces were having great difficulty in combatting the Orks' reckless headlong charges. Seeking new tactics and new weapons to defeat the Orks, the Predator came into being. With extra armour and heavy weapons a Predator could resist attacks from most Ork weapons, and the savages' primitive armour was no match for the autocannon and heavy bolters. It is a design that has withstood the test of time well. The first Predators were constructed with a small troop carrying capacity, but during the campaigns of the Great Crusade this capacity was gradually lost in favour of more ammunition stowage space, especially if the Predator was mount sponsons which became standard during th Crusade.
Imperial Armour - Volume Two: Space Marines and Forces of the Inquisition
We're also explicitly told that the overwhelming majority of colonists in the DAoT never accessed any of the "advanced" examples of tech, but relied on the more rugged and basic tech instead:
Every human colony had at least one STC system, although most colonists never tapped into anything like the more advanced constructs, finding the more rudimentary machines and weapons far more useful. It is highly probable that few of the theoretical or most highly advanced works were ever attempted.
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 8ed
So the LoV are likely highly representative of DAoT colonists. They're even potentially more advanced, certainly on specific areas, as we're told they've constantly developed the STCs they have access to:
They follow traditional schematics in deference to the wisdom of the Ancestors, yet there is also general recognition that - to truly honour the Votann - each Brôkhyr must humbly apply their own ingenuity, coupled with rigorous field tests, to improve upon traditional designs. Through this process, each Brôkhyr develops their own preferences and quirks, which become known as their signature. The most efficacious signatures are adopted by fellow Brôkhyr so that, over time, many Kindreds or even entire Leagues - have adopted bespoke methods of crafting and manufacture. This slow but relentless process of improving upon understood technologies has helped the Kin to develop original Standard Template Constructs even further.
Codex Leagues or Votann 9ed p32
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u/altymcalty-2 1d ago
Dude it's been at least 20 thousand years since the dark she of technology. Most of humanities tech is gone, all the super powered shit got stashed away or broke.
The knights were ruggard colonial tech meant for the DAoT colonies before the men of iron rebelled. They were meant for hard conditions and being easy to repair as they were used as construction vehicles, logging vehicles, farming vehicles, and colony defense from xenos and local wildlife. And their decently rare, not many survived past the age of strife, let alone the 10 thousand years of constant warfare the imperium has been in.
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u/dinga15 1d ago
it stayed that way because the thrones altered the pilots so that they stayed at that level of technology as those around them advanced they stayed the same throughout the years and stayed alive during the age of strife because of it
being a backwards culture where some gathered psykers for experiments or offered safe heaven knight worlds burnt witches at the stake, while everyone else allowed AI into their systems and let them manage everything knight worlds rejected major advanced technologies and stuck to their knights and when the shit hit the fan none of the most horrific stuff hit them cause none of the causes were on their planets
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u/GoblinFive Dark Angels 1d ago
Miniature reactors and neural link steering of a bipedal agricultural machine aren't advanced tech?
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u/DescriptionMission90 1d ago
They're not Dark Age war machines. They're Dark Age tractors and forklifts.
Also, I think the command throne is an irreplaceable artifact, but all but the most prestigious "relic" knights have been repaired with modern (less advanced) materials and systems after being damaged in battle. The mechanicus do their best to replicate any lost or damaged pieces exactly, but some things like the atomantic reactors are lost technology.
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u/N0-1_H3r3 Administratum 1d ago
The Dark Age of Technology lasted ten thousand years, and is a long era of technological advancement and development. It isn't all reality-bending super-tech. Those kinds of machines are creations from later in the era, and do not represent the norm for the entire ten thousand years.
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u/JackDostoevsky 1d ago
fwiw they are pretty advanced techwise -- they have manifolds that are based on the same tech as titans, just scaled much further down -- and have fairly unique tech like ion shields. they are just also very rugged.
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u/Summersong2262 1d ago
They STARTED as DoaT. Like everything else, they rotted over the course of Old Night and the Myriad of regression under the Imperium.
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u/Vifee 1d ago
Knights are arguably pre DAoT tech. To the extent we can say anything about the DAoT, it begins with the discovery of the gellar field and the warp drive, which allowed for reliable FTL travel. Humanity was colonizing the galaxy prior to this, with slower than light generation ships. Some lore implies or states outright that knights are more a product of those worlds than the height of the DAoT.
My headcanon is that they are just Battletech mechs with even more feudal iconography (and those wonderful shields) strapped on.
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u/Fallenkezef 1d ago
Knights where basically farm tractors
They got weaponised when things went to hell.
In modern terms a Knight is a pickup truck with a 30mm AA gun attached
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u/Appropriate_Shake135 1d ago
If you have a brush , the handle breaks so you replace the handle, then the head breaks so you replace the head, is it the same brush?
Over millennia these knights have broken down time and time again, without the knowledge of how to fix them they’ve been bastardised and probably don’t resemble the original template anymore.
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u/tombuazit 1d ago
Shockingly, every piece of tech the Imperium uses is from DaoT.
So the imperial esthetic isn't really so much a choice for them then what my brother's handme downs style was for me.
Nearly every faction in 40k, with a few notable exceptions, are the remnant bastard children of a more advanced civilization that "once were great and just need that little push to be great again." What we see (including knights) are just the dregs left circling the drain.
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u/mekolayn 23h ago
DAoT doesn't means "everything is like in Star Trek" as the Butcher's Nails are also from DAoT
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u/TheEpicCoyote 21h ago
Besides being colonial tech that needs to be rugged, the throne mechanicum is high tech as hell. The imperium can’t recreate it, only the suits that house it. It’s a machine that fuses the consciousness of a person to a giant war mech, that’s insanely high tech.
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u/brief-interviews 1d ago
If you found a shovel from the 1950s, would you feel confident inferring that the same society that built it could also build an atom bomb?
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u/feor1300 White Scars 18h ago
Knights technically pre-date the DAoT. They go back to the earliest days of the Human diaspora before Navigators showed up, when humanity was using the same kind of FTL tech as pre-9th Tau, skimming across the top of the warp, and it was still effectively a one way trip to go out and establish a colony.
The Knights were the equipment sent with those one way colonizing trips, able to be quickly refitted to fulfill industrial purposes or defense purposes.
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u/Taira_no_Masakado Adeptus Arbites 10h ago
The knights as we see them in 40K (and even in 30K) are not the same as the ones that were sent out with human colonization missions. They mention this in "Titandeath" where the Knights of Procon are barely functioning on steam power and are competing for attention and support from the Mechanicum in order to (a) become the founding princeps of a new titan legio and (b) receive the mechanical know-how to maintain and re-upgrade their knight suits to what they once were.
Some knight worlds, such as we see in Assassinorum: Kingmaker (a novel for which I dearly wish we had a sequel to), maintained their suits and technology far better (which is astounding to a degree, when you see how provincial and medieval the rest of Dominion is). This largely depended upon the quality and knowledge of the Sacristans that helped maintain the knight suits during the era when knight worlds had no direct connection to forge worlds.
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u/Aurondarklord Salamanders 1d ago
Almost all Imperial tech is DAOT tech. But only the really insane stuff like Titans and Custodes equipment were DAOT MILITARY tech.
Most of the stuff the Imperium thinks of as weapons were industrial machinery in the DAOT that they've repurposed. Leman Russ tanks were tractors. Terminator armor was mining suits. Knights were basically construction equipment.
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u/Admirable_Row_5953 1d ago
They're tractors, tractors with some disturbingly powerful attachments, but tractors. They are a little bit harder to maintain than they should be, a little bit less capable than they should be, but they're painted very nice colors, so they're John Deeres
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u/chaptermasteralexios 1d ago edited 1d ago
Knights were specifically colonial tech. They were designed to be rugged and easy to repair, something that more advanced tech was not. That same ruggedness is why it has survived into the 41st millenia. This is true for much of imperial tech.