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40k is crazy good
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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The mechanicus is a good example of how things changed - back in the day they were an insane cult devoted to stealing and hoarding all the technology they could. Experimentation and innovation where heresies that would get you killed. They believed the machine spirits were animistic spirts that inhabited machines. When they explicitly did not know how their technology worked and could only reproduce some of it by rote using truly ancient design documents. They prized STC diagrams above everything becuase the STC stuff was complete and actually workewd - they couldn't fix anything else and would kill anyone who tried. In modern stuff all their chanting and prayers are glossed as doing actual programming and engineering but they use religious terminology. Back in the day it really was useless, unproductive, time consuming religious prayer and ritual, a direct mockery of the bigotry, ignorance, and superstitions of the church.
Modern mechanicus build all kinds of wacky sci-fi technology, they have tons of exotic weaponry, war machines, and ships, they know how to work with their tech, they research, innovate, and improve. It's a complete 180 on their previous depiction.
Yes, this saddens me the most. I really loved one snippet of flavor text I read once where a tech priest is doing a sacred annual "chant of healing" on some piece of machinery, but the canny reader might notice it's actually the phonetic pronunciation of a command to activate its self-repair systems, and the "sacred balm" he applies is just engine lubricant, and so on and so on. Then when he's done with all the steps of the 'ritual', he sticks another purity seal to this enormous mound of them where countless priests, with equally little understanding of what they were actually doing, have performed the exact same 'ritual' for thousands of years - all to keep one ancient piece of equipment of unknown, maybe useless, function, turning over deep in the bowels of a grimy, rusted-out technological hellscape. It's compelling dark science fiction!
Now as you say, they're simply (much more marketable) wacky space inventors... truly, old good, new bad ๐
I imagine the backstory was changed specifically so that the Mechanicus could have it's own armies instead of just being the weird technical class of the Imperium. It's hard to build an entire army out of fanatics who know how to make toast but think the toaster has a toast spirit inside it that only makes toast when they sing to it.