So why hasn't the Imperium replaced all of the Guard with vat-grown, genetic-engineer child soldiers yet?
>>94783389too little yeld
>>94783389what >>94783409 said plus you'd be inevitably giving your enemies vat-grown, genetic-engineer child soldiers en mass down the road
>>94783389economically more viable for units to undertake various roles and have various demands. Same reason why slaves are outmoded by broader consumer society; its a more robust economic strategy. Much like how the ability to take out house morgages frees up a lot of stagnant capital locked up in property.A planet like necromunda would produce way more fluid capital then Krieg.
>>94783389Because I told them not to.
>>947833891) Artificial wombs are banned in the Imperium; it's an open-secret that Krieg uses them2) It would take thousands of years to replicate the technology galaxy-wide3) The Admech and Ecclesiarchy would have a meltdown4) Loads of planets would probably refuse to use it5) It goes against the explicit state religion of the Imperium6) It's not even proven that anyone knows how the technology works7) The origins of the technology is unknown8) Krieg has a unique culture and religion called the "cult of sacrifice", other planets do not9) There may be unknown side effects that Krieg covers up10) Krieg only started using artificial wombs because their population was on the verge of collapse after a nuclear war, and they hate themselves for it
>>94783389Because constripts are cheaper and easier to get in large numbers.
>>94783478*conscripts. I have no idea how that typo happened.
Krieg found impossible to replicate DAoT gene tech in their bunker vaults, used it to win the war on Krieg, and are now using it to redeem Krieg's name. They aren't clones contrary to the reddit lorelet memes, just vat-grown fearless perfect Aryan soldiers with the genes for fear and doubt CRISPR'd out
>>94783492>fearless expendable Aryan soldiersFTFY
>>94783503Expendable goes without saying in 40k, even the Eldar have kamikaze tankbusters
>>94783389Same reason why SM and custodes can't be made and have to start out as human. Warrior-clones would eventually become their own subspecies in spirit if not in flesh, and will be unable to identify and empathise with civilians they're supposed to protect.
>>94783389There's a sci-fi series that makes use of this exact premise. Right down to WW1-era tactics in Space. It's rather bleak.
>>94783492We don't exactly know if they're clones or IVF babies, only that gene editing and gestation tubes are used in the process. They could have both, with particularly talented IVFs being used as templates.
>>94783564They're not clones, despite what the IG codex says. Clones in 40k always have weird biological side effects
>>94783564The Clone Wars thing has already been done and doesn't work in 40gay where you need a soul to function
>>94783389Why would they when manpower is the Imperium's most abundant resource?Also gene editing/cloning experiments tend to go really badly in 40k.
>>94783523I take your point but arguably Space Marines and Custodes are so fucking mind-fucked by the process that makes them what they are that the majority of them don't identify and empathize with the civilians they're supposed to protect. A lot of Space Marine aspirants are also explicitly taken from groups not exactly known for empathy in a deliberate choice: gangers, murderous savages, and so forth. The Lamenters, Space Wolves, Ultramarines, and Salamanders are notable for being exceptions to the indifference that the majority of the Chapters show towards humans or the outright malice that Chapters like the Marines Malevolent (who are themselves exceptional for their callousness) show. Their indoctrination and dogma includes stuff like "my craft is death" and that they're the Emperor's Angels of Death. Not guardian angels and so forth.I can't say as much about the Custodes and I don't know much of their nulore but they used to be just these shirtless weirdos who never left the Imperial Palace and did nothing except guard the Golden Throne, which I assert does not lend itself much to identification with or empathy for even the noble houses they were taken from as infants.
>>94783389Because the Imperium has no shortage of zeal or manpower.
>>94783389>vat-grown, genetic-engineer child soldiers yet?Yeah, especially girl-child soldiers... with cat ears and tails... for, uhh, special reasons.
>>94783389The Imperium of Man is actually overpopulated despite anytime GW giving a planet a hard population number it’s pretty small. Outside of niche cases like Krieg, where the troops they provide are good enough to be worth using vat-growing, they don’t need vat-grown soldiers.
>>94783389Because the Mechanicus is already doing that but they're somehow worse than the average human guardsmen.
>>94783389Too expensive to give every planet Krieg's mass Krieg making technology which is also technically illegal but the High Lords overlook it because a planet in a segmentum is being uppity and we might as well send in the guys who are good at sieging until the planet stops being uppity.If that fails just dump conscripts or penal Legionaries into the problem. Far cheaper and if its penal legionaries it solves the potential over crowding problems on prison planets
>>94783389It's expensive. A clone is in essence a child birthed and raised by the state, while a conscript has someone else foot those bills and responsibilities.
Aren't servitors, servo-skulls, and cherubs made (mostly) of cloned humans/human parts?>>94784264I don't remember the Skitarii being clones, but that makes sense. Magos Biologis and all that would sensibly produce the templates for augmentation.
>>94783574Yeah clones aren't the best soldiers. They always seem to come out a little short!
>>94783389Well you see it's mostly because they wouldn't even know how to do that.
>>94783389In 40K, cloning never, ever works. This is because clones don't have souls. Even Kriegers are created not by cloning, but by using women as incubators (so it's really factory-farming.)There's a story (Red Tide), where a guy finds a way to clone Space Marines. It seems to go well, until Dante says "This is pretty amazing, but what about the Black Rage?"The Apothecary thinks about this, then goes "Oh shit, I FORGOT ABOUT THE BLACK RAG-" and it turns out that the clones (lacking souls) have no ability to resist the Red Thirst. This ends with a horde of them nearly overwhelming the Chapter-Monastery, and multiple chapters coming together as one to fight them off.
>>94786019Wasn't like Fabius bile also fucking with it?
>>94786038Yes, but Fabius Bile also wanted the project to work so he could produce viable Chaos Space Marine clones.
>>94785229>Aren't servitors, servo-skulls, and cherubs made (mostly) of cloned humans/human parts?Lame attempt at a retcon to de-grimark all the useful living corpses around. Cherubs I can kind of understand walking back a little because dead babies lol, but servitors? That's pure panicked retreat from the imperium doing anything nasty.
>>94785229>Aren't servitors, servo-skulls, and cherubs made (mostly) of cloned humans/human parts?No.
>>94783389You missed the general, bet they know/care
>>94786243This is a 40k containment board, newfriend
>>94786049Darktide sure as fuck didn't back away from Servitor conversion being a punishment method. A side character gets servitorized as punishment for being a heretic infiltrator, and it's clear that the medicae servitors you encounter on missions are in various states of awareness of their situation (indicating callous or intentionally incomplete conversion)The techpriests like to prod the rejects by mentioning how servitor-compatible they are to "motivate" them as well.
>>94786049>>94785229Cherubs were never actual dead babies outside of a single article of Inquisitor called, "On Angel's Wings" and the article has a giant warning at the top stating, THIS IS A FAN SUBMISSION AND SHOULDN'T BE CONSIDERED OFFICIAL.Servitors are a mix of both people and vat-grown. But only the simplest functions, like door locks, are vat-grown. Everything else are people, and even then there's different levels of lobotomy depending on the complexity of the task required. It's like if there were 10 different servitor types and only one of them was vat-grown, but there's a thousand of that one type for every one of each the others.
>>94785229read Flesh and Steel, the chapter they visit the servitor factory is absolute cinema
>>94787001Cherubs were just a thing that was there, then they decided they wanted them clarified. Servitors are people. Flat out, they're people, and any clone garbage is not only lame and boring, it's worse for the setting. If all you want is a big empire that only does sorta not so nice things, go get into star wars. The cruelty is the fun part and diminishing that will always make warhammer worse and more like generic scifi.
>>94787179>[Servitors] are people, and any clone garbage is not only lame and boring, it's worse for the settingHere's a list of sources that disagree with you: Black Crusade: Broken Chains (RPG), pg. 31 Codex Adeptus Astartes - Space Marines (8th Edition), pp. 85, 107, 137, 155 Codex: Adeptus Mechanicus (8th Edition), pp. 41, 47, 77 Codex: Astra Militarum (8th Edition), pp. 61, 100 Codex Imperialis (1st Edition), pp. 22, 41, 45 Codex: Space Marines (5th Edition) Codex: Space Marines (4th Edition) Dark Heresy: Core Rulebook (RPG), pp. 340-341 Dark Heresy: The Inquisitor's Handbook (RPG), pp. 141, 153 Dark Heresy: The Lathe Worlds (RPG), pp. 67-68, 100, 103 Dark Heresy: Blood of Martyrs (RPG), pp. 122-124 Dark Heresy: The Book of Judgement (RPG), pg. 75 Deathwatch: First Founding (RPG), pg. 107 Deathwatch: Mark of the Xenos (RPG), pp. 90-91 Only War: No Surrender (RPG), pg. 138 Only War: Shield of Humanity (RPG), pp. 121-124 Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned, "The Cult Mechanicus" Rogue Trader: Core Rulebook (RPG), pp. 374-375 Rogue Trader: Hostile Acquisition (RPG), pg. 87 Rynn's World (Novel) by Steve Parker, Part 1, Ch. 6 Deliverance Lost (Novel) by Gav Thorpe Warhammer 40,000: Rulebook (8th Edition), pg. 50
>>94783389The Imperium started out with them in the form of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad. The were the original gene modded clone soldiers of the Imperium and even before the Imperium. In time the loss of such technology, the cheaper alternative of conscipts and greater division of power in the byzantine politic of the Imperium made such projects harder to accomplish. Some special cases are extempt but the lack of Clone Soldiers within the Imperium is more a product of the inability of the Imperium to implement galaxy-wide programs instead of greater cultural bias, though these exist as well.Krieg is the more prominent of recent applications of such tech, but the failure of the Afriel Strain program shows that clones an be afflicted with warp fuckery, though I suspect only clones of more unique people are afflicted while commonly bred soldiers have less of an issue with warp fuckery. The Imperium also experimented with adult gene modded soldiers in the form of the Gland Warriors and I believe that veteran guardsmen and imperial stormtroppers also get some gene fuckery to enhance their abilities if they get the attention of radical inquisitorial interest to do so. There are gene modded nobles and planets in which such modifications are in vogue and thus regiments with such a background wouldn't be impossible. The Skitarri and many servitors are also clones and gene modded half-humans.Even Chaos got its clone soldiers in the form of the Tetrachs, Vatborns and New Men. (though the latter are more designer babies that can breed independently of any vat and could naturally replace humanity.)
>>94783389The only resource that the Imperium has a surplus of is human life. Cloning technology is both restricted and rare, and could never match the sheer volume of troops the Imperium gets from just taking tithes.
>>94783492>>94783473>bro they can't reverse engineer this machine that has easily identified parts and doesn't rely on a bunch of mumbo jumbo magic that couldn't be replicated because...they just can't okay?!40k is the brainlet scifi setting
>>94783389Because the 40k Imperium is basically limping from disaster to disaster and the only resource it's not short on is people. There's probably entire munitorium divisions who's entire job is digging around old battlefields looking for old lasguns to refurbish and hand out to the next batch of conscripts because the lasguns are more valuable than the man using it.Seriously, 40k is a mess.
>>94783582>soul to function.Every Blank says hello!
>>94783389They lack sex-appeal. All other regiments have A LOT OF SEX. Kriegers? I don't think so.
>>94790738... but it does rely on bunch of mambo jumbo and doesn't have easily identifible parts.On top of that, following you logic, dismantling an atomic warhead gives one knowledge to build nukes.Meaning the only brainlet is (You)
>>94790614Technically speaking, the Thunder Warriors had more in common with their conception to modern Imperial Stormtroopers than they did the Space Marines which replaced them, being accomplished adults who were modded on the spot to be even better at their jobs, with a slew of nasty side effects. Stormies are modded in a more ethical way that doesn't overclock their body to death, but you got to wonder if allowing them to live a theoretically long life beats giving them a far better chance at surviving their tour of duty.Space Marines would probably frown at the idea of mere mortals being made stronger than they.
>>94790738>bro they can't reverse engineer this machineUntil 8E this was one of the core themes of the entire setting
>>94783389I can't fucking stand how often you get people acting like 40k is some kind of hard scifi setting, or even a setting with hard lore.>Le why don't they do thingNothing in the setting conforms to logic, not even internal logic, it barely even has internal logic because its so inconsistent.Yet no matter what it is, you'll see people bending themselves in pretzels, presenting headcanon and theorizing on it as if the setting is fucking LOTR or something. It isn't. Its a hodge podge of shit a bunch of history and fantasy nerds thought was cool.
>>94787179Star Wars has decraniation, which is basically the same thing as being turned into a servitor.
>>94790738That's not even scifi, retard. That's just real life>they'd have to take apart the devices to properly analyze how they work, risking their destruction >they'd have to have an expert or team of experts on hand to meaningfully analyze the parts and schematics, something that hasn't existed in 10K years>even if by some miracle they perfectly analyze and intuit everything, you now need someone who knows how to MAKE said parts amd properly assemble them>these parts may require special manufacturing processes or alloy ratios that have since been lost to timeThere's tech from the 1950s that has already been lost to time, retard. The united states has forgotten how to manufacture the specific steel to create new naval warships and their space program has lost so much knowledge they can't even make it to the moon anymore.If anything, the admech and rampant tech-ignorance of the Imperium is irs most realistic feature.
>>94796224Have a link to the lost steel?
>>94785229>clones Vatgrown, not clones. Think less Star Wars and more Brave New World where they spool off and artificially fertilize a hundred eggs from a woman's harvested ovaries, bottle the fetuses, and then tweak it over the accelerated gestation process until it's primed for its designated task.Only you know, with more candles and chanting and gothic cybernetics. Because 40K.
>>94796180Thats a Disney Wars exclusive, and clearly someone's fetish
>>94796259Not on hand, but off the top of my head it's specifically icebreaker hulls, thought the entire commercial shipbuilding industry in tge U.S. is in an abysmal state.Boeing is another great example of knowledge loss. They've replaced all their experts with cheap, imported diversity labor qnd now they don't know how to build planes anymore. And that took less than a generation.
>>94784124gloria to Polonia!
>>94790738its almsot like the whole point is the various Imperial institutions including the admech are extremely backwards retards that gimp the imperium for short term benefits at the cost of long term degradation
>>94783389Why should they? Most planets aren't irradiated hellscapes like Krieg. Manpower has never been Imperium's problem. It's how they can keep throwing men at a problem. In the Munitorum Manual it even says a commander shouldn't be afraid of casualties if it means recovering lost equipment from the field, because that's more important than the lives of his men.>>94796224I think some old nukes used something similar to aerogel as part of the construction to turn into plasma and enhance the yield, but all documentation related to it has been lost.
>>94796396More that Admech's whole power is reliant on everyone being dumb and needing them to fix everything. And even within their structure only the people in charge are allowed to know stuff, so the lower ranks don't go around inventing stuff and making their betters look bad.
>>94795892I hate 8th ED and everything after it...
>>94783389Good idea Sir!
>>94790614the luciefer blacks are a regiment of clones and have some pretty bad warp fucker happening to themcloning in general is very bad mojothe thing seems to be that you can't do pure straight up cloning.You need to have "new material" to work with so you still need a male and female donor, you can just edit and select.Probably has to do with souls and other warp shit.As far as I remember from the old lore the virtuawombs the Kriegers are allowed to use aren't specified to be cloning tech.I always assumed it's surrogate womb machine that allows them to grow kriegers from a seed and egg donor. Both to ger rid of the baby making bottleneck and probably also to protect the fetus from the all sorts of fuck that Krieg is.
>>94787590So nothing before the sellout period. cherubim have always been servitorized babies. The idea that the imperium has an idealized idea of how you treat babies is ridiculous.
Death Korps of Krieg aren't clones, they're vat grown like Clanners from Battletech.Maybe not useful to further understand 40k, but there are many interesting tropes across many IPs
>>94796652Clanners tend to at least designer baby their vat grown dudes to be the best. Kriegers just churn out fodder. As for clones, they have their own rules in 40k. Cloning tends to be bad. Like Afriel Strain were a clone army that was tried more than once and always ended a disaster. All the Horus clones got purged. Think DE are the only ones who've managed to make cloning work and even then it's just to have spare bodies for rich people.
>>94796587>nothing before the sellout period>Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the DamnedI miss the good old days where GW hadn't sold out yet and I could shit my pants and mummy and daddy would change them for me
>>94796673Yeah, plenty have pointed out the danger of 40k clones in this thread.I just thought we need to familiarise anons with the concept of "vat grown" more, and pointing out how it's present in other sci fi franchises can help the concept stick.Answers to questions like OP's can be inspired by Clanners elitism and eugenics.I think an interesting problem or issue with Space Marines is how their recruitment process is basically 'dysgenic'. IRL the concept of warfare being dysgenic was raised at the outbreak of World War 1, because physically fit men were dying as soldiers before they could reproduce.But Astartes are even worse than this, because they're guaranteed to never reproduce regardless of their survival in battle. And then if there's a deadly recruitment process with a large number of unsuccessful candidates they'll all be dying as well.So I think it's only a matter of time until some chapter is described as using basically sperm samples to vat grow children of Space Marines, even though I think that'd be a step away from the mythological nature of 40k.
>>94783389Because all that shit about vat grown soldiers or whatever has never really been anything more than a rumor. Nobody even knows what a "Vitae-womb" is even supposed to be
>>94787590Post page for 4th ed sm codex and get the fuck out with that rpg shit and 8th edition garbage.
Tithe ships may arrive once every 20ish years, for logistical reasons. Even an efficient and no-corrupt governer would find it hard to stock that many clones, rather than just kidnapping a bunch of undesirables.
... like seriously your idea requires the Imperium to be efficient, well meaning, and rational.
>>94796699cite the passage from lost and the damned
>>94795892>Until 8E this was one of the core themes of the entire settingThis sounds like someone who never read a book and listened to 4chan.>>94796587>>94796857You are trying real hard to be right on the internet, anon.
>>94795972This.Canon-fags don't understand the rule of FUN.
>>94795972This guy gets it. The Setting is just an excuse to play with your dudes against your friends dudes. That's jt.
>>94783389Cost
>>94793895The hardest part of nuke building is enriching the uranium. They already know how to build the delivery systems
>>94783389Because the administratum didn't file the correct form.Seriously though, the imperium's entire deal is that they have more than they need to conqeur the galaxy and reinstate the golden age of technology, but it's too much of a beaurocratic hellscape for them to operate effectively.
As other anons have pointed out, genetic engineering seems particularly prone to issues in 40k. The thunder warriors were all sorts of fucked up, a large percent of space marine gene seeds are fucked up in some way or another, and the imperium has tried to genetically engineer guard units with deeply mixed results. It seems likely to me that despite relying on the space marines during the great crusade, the bio-engineering component of it was a sort of necessary evil and he (The Emperor) never really liked the idea of genetically modifying humans and would be unlikely to be in favor of any sort of mass modification of regular men. Now that the emperor has been out of the picture for 10k years, the imperium has basically succeeded as I understand in genetically modifying guard regiments in the form of gland war veterans/gland warriors, but this is a relatively new development and may not stick. There has always been a fear that any sort of this genetic manipulation may create an off-shoot branch of man which really has no loyalty to humanity at all. And as already stated, you could have one supersoldier kill an orc or you could have 10 unenhanced guardsmen kill an orc, and what is really more economical for the imperium?
>>94796259He's talking about STS, which we not only know how to make (you can find the alloy content on wikipedia), derivatives of it are still in use for shipbuilding.>>94796336We're currently building new icebreakers for the Coast Guard. They use EQ-47 grade steel for the hulls. Also we still have the designs for the existing ice breakers in service.>>94796434Fogbank, which we never stopped knowing how to make. The large-scale manufacturing process wasn't properly documented following decommissioning and had to be reverse engineered, then it was discovered that an impurity being picked up on modern testing that was undetectable during original production was actually a vital component.
>>94783574Not always. The only fucked up clones I know of are attempts to clone primarchs and the Afriel Strain, in both cases there's much more at work than just replicating baseline humans.
>>94783389If there's one thing the Imperium is not in short supply of it's warm bodies to throw at their problems. Why bother trying to replicate this shady technology across the galaxy when you can just draft more guardsmen from your existing population, which is functionally infinite?
>>94783389Costs resources to set up that are being sent elsewhere, anything set up on such a large scale is going to be stolen by xenos, chaos, etc. and used against the imperium.
>>94790738>stagnant empire that is barely holding on can't easily STC themselves betterpeople don't realize how decayed the imperium is, it's been a downward spiral for the last 10,000 years since the heresy, and even then the Emperor was mostly repurposing the golden age's trash
>>94790738you're like the normie brainlets irl>why can't TSMC JUST MAKE MORE CHIPS!!!now imagine something as complex as the human reproductive system
>>94801285>a downward spiral for the last 10,000 yearsWhich is somewhat dampened by the fact that modern lore makes the 30k Imperium about as bad as 40k Imperium. So it's hard to see the decline. I'm sure if we ever got to see DAoT, it'd be some Cyberpunk Event Horizon. The authors have drank the kool-aid and cannot make anything but 40k with a different number.
>>94786275>This is a tumor containment body
>>94801561
>>94803848
>>94783389the soldier is already the cheapest part in the imperial guards man package because humanity is the one thing the imperium has in abundance
>>94783485>>94783478Happens to me too. And the biggest mindfuck is that you think you wrote it correctly.
>>94797638>missing the point this badlyI rest my case
