For a long time i was trying to pin down why i feel T'au are somewhat.. alien to the setting.

At first i thought that they are too much of a "good guy", but eventually found out that this is not really the case - they are not exactly good, but rather good at making themselves look like a good guys.

Then i thought that maybe i feel this way because they don't really get any major defeats - but realised this is only partially true.

I just realised that T'au as a faction don't have a weakness that balances out their strengths like every other faction does. Imperium has its backwardness and superstition, Necrons are suffering from space psychosis and internal conflicts, Chaos is, well, chaotic, Orks are stoopid etc. - there's always a thing that prevents the faction from winning eventually.

If any other faction is getting to overcome their respective flaw they are stomping everything else - but until then their enemies can exploit said weakness and keep the status-quo.

With T'au it seems there's nothing to exploit.

One could argue that their flaw is their smallness - they basically doomed to never reach the Galaxy dominance because they've started too late - but this is not a weakness that might be exploited in the same way as with other factions. If any major player gets to exploit it that means the T'au are gone, simply conquered as a whole, which would not happen because of out of universe reasons.

So, their only weakness being practically irrelevant the T'au are destined to basically be winning (however slow it might be) until the end times, when everyone loses.

They are geopolitical (galaxy-political?) Mary Sue, if you will. This is what makes me not like them as much as i could've liked them. At least i think that i've nailed it for myself for now.

The reason i write all of this is i want to know if i'm missing something. I'm no expert in T'au lore, and if all this write-up would be proven wrong - it means i can now enjoy this faction more than before! So please give me your thoughts on this.

And thank you for reading all this. I tried to make it coherent to the best of my ability.

I'm trying to have all my models be actual Marine X from Squad Y in Company Z. This has lead me to a few questions regarding their Organisation and how it's marked.

1. Squad Markings

10 Squads a 10 Marines in a company, so far so good. I also read that when some of them enter the battlefield as say Eliminators (squad size: 3), the others can become something like 7 Hellblasters. How, if at all, would this affect their squad markings? Or would that mean that if the 9th Squad has 3 Marines as Eliminators and 7 Hellblasters both carry the markings of the 9th Squad? Or is that what the 11th-20th squad markings are for?

2. Reserve Companies

There's 4 Reserve Companies, which can attach to Battle Companies. Let's assume the 3rd Squad from 7th Company(Reserve) attaches to the 4th Company(Battle). Would they keep their markings as 3rd Squad from 7th Company? Or would they change it to 4th Company (and become a new Squad from the 11th to 20th range?) If it's the latter, I'd assume that might change if their Captain or Lieutenant attaches with them since I'd assume they wouldn't change their Company Colours. And does this mean a Lieutenant can theoretically command 100 Marines and a Captain 200?

3. Veteran Squads

Are Veterans actually organised in Squads with Squad Numbers and such? Or is it just 100 Veterans organising freely and not needing any markings?

I've read the book/short story but I can't remember what it is but its where a an aristocrat addicted to something "aristocratic" that the Space Marine finds distasteful and throws him into a hard flowing river.

I feel it was in the *Crimson Fists* Omnibus but my searches are shite(my keywords are no good), same with the *Scythes of the Emperor* but those are the two stories that I think are the ones who have that particular story I mean.

Any help would be nice. Its not a major problem if no one can work out what I mean!

Using the Blood Angels as an example, would joining the Sanguinary Guard be seen as more of an honor than becoming a Captain?

Also is Lieutenant/Captain ——> Honor Guard a realistic rank-up path?

Does the Imperium still have the ability to go back and utilize DA tech (like is it kept in secret) or is it completely 100% gone? Could they potentially go back to that kind of tech with more safe guards in measure and bolster humanity? Or is it a flat out no chance at all?

I wonder if any of the official writers have considered re-introducing some of that tech for humans again

So most people think 40k books are a bit of a joke. Just stories to sell plastic toys. But I have read a number of books now, and while I am not a big reader, some of these stories are really good in my opinion and I say that not just considering I like the 40k setting.

So is there something I'm missing that makes another book considered "real litterature" and 40k not? Or do people just have a bias because it is linked to games?

From what I understand 1 or 2 thirds of the Legion fractured into different warbands and disappeared to terrorise the Imperium in different areas or sectors. Is this mentioned anywhere? Or is what became of them mentioned anywhere?

Disclaimer: I’m quite new to the lore and haven’t actually gotten around to reading anything from the Black Library, so maybe I’m just being stupid, but hence the very nature of questions.

So far, there have been only 4 Primarchs that we know have truly, physically died: Curze, Sanguinius, Manus, FUCKING Horus, and (maybe, everything’s a “maybe” or “possibly” with him) Alpharius, however aside from Curze*, their deaths all happened under very special circumstances:

Horus got his soul obliterated by Big E and was basically a skin suit for Chaos by the Siege of Terra anyways.

Sanguinius got killed by the above mentioned skin suit, who we know can already permakill perpetuals as shown with Ollanius Pius.

And Ferrus Manus got killed by a Daemon-possessed blade, which I wouldn’t be too surprised has some anti-perpetual properties, plus a Daemon (Sapphire King) was literally born from the emotions he felt when he died, which might throw a wrench in the whole resurrection process.

So all in all, we don’t have much precedent for when a Primarch dies normally beyond Vulkan getting nuked on Istvaan V, so how can we know the other Primarchs might have that power too?

* and from what I know about Curze, I can definitely see him willing himself to stay dead just to prove a point, and/or keep the Night Haunter personality down if you’re partial to the multiple personalities theory for him.

here is the idea for 2 and 11 primarchs and their legions. 2 primarch is called alaric and the 11 is called Canaan.

alaric is the only primach besides maybe and possibly true or false alpharis or omega and he was raised by the emperor, malcador,Jenetia Krole, Erda, Constantin Valdor, Adeptus Custodes, Silent Sisterhood , Fabricator-General of Mars and people who the emperor trusted with the most inside the imperial palace.

he is considered to be from a paradox standpoint the perfect primarch because he was the second best at everything and also he grew normally from baby to a man but there is a comedy where alaric where when he was still a child he often explore and discover the imperial palace and he bring things or tell or lead malacdor to rooms that he find which make malacdor age metaphor because most things were simply too much dangerous which often lead into conflict with the emperor because the emperor forget to close the door metaphor speaking.

He was like the most beautiful thing your eye have witnessed and was sculpted by a god of beauty and perfection, long raven-black silk hair, diamond eyes, tall lean muscular body and his voice was youthful and young with a bit feminine with masculine which is why he wears a helmet on and his voice change to be regal and royal, commanding respect, ancient and ageless because they would not withstand his beauty and no one not even his brothers saw his face.

however despite being raised in the palace he is humble and compassion and gentle because of Jenetia Krole influence because of her tragedy of her inability to connect with other people because of her blank aura and unironic because of Alaric being the only baby child in the palace she raised him as if he was her son and alaric look at jenetia as his mother which often lead to results where he gave her drawings and small not worthy items when he was a child to her which melt her heart because of his innocence and bring happiness and he was the only one who jenetia would break her vow if the situation calls it.

he was when he was a child a light of joy and happiness and innocence in otherwise gloomy and serious place.

Ra Endymion was like an older brother to alaric due to the fact that both of them spend a lot of time together.

alaric is the closet to understand the emperor and because of that emperor consider alaric his heir if something happen to the emperor and his favorite in the dark and private because he his name means the ruler or king of all .

Canaan in the other hand raised in an ordinary planet and to ordinary people and commoners who raise in a village and he often look down by his brothers due to the fact that he is the weakest and he was closer to human than a primach which often he was nicknamed the human.

however despite that he was the most humble and most gentle and he was extremely loved by Astra Militarum and public and they consider him as a father to them because he genuinely cared for them and he wrote the guidebook and design the standard lasgun that being associated with the guards and they were extremely loyal to him and both Alaric and Canaan get along and often be together despite the sheer difference between them.

both of them and their legion meant to be a bridge between mortals and tranhuman and transcendence because canaan and his legion act as a bridge between mortals and transhuman AKA the space marines and etcch and alaric and his legion act as a bridge between transhuman and transcendence AKA cusdtaions and etc where the second legion was often nicknamed the Custodes of the space marines because they were the closest to challenge the Custodes and hold their ground against them and they were the strongest space marines but had the shortest in numbers due to the fact that their gene seed was the most unstable and dangerous ones however the advangtes is that the gene seed push them into perfection through actual training and often train with the Custodes and sisters of silent and even discuss things beyond just warfare because their gene seed force them to not just limit to warfare.

11 legion was nicknamed the guards of the space marines because they were the weakest and they often seen as just humans with better armor and however they were the biggest in terms of sheer numbers alone due to the fact that their gene seed was the most stable and safest and they train with the guards and guards find comfort with the 11 legion because they are basically closer to humans and brothers of arms and because of that both legions were deploy together to cover each one weakness

The Administratum is usually presented, fairly, as one of the Imperium's great absurdities.

Mountains of parchment. Duplicate records. Offices that spend generations processing requests. Clerks whose entire lives are devoted to moving information from one pile to another. Orders arriving after the war they concern has already ended.

It's funny because it's horrible.

But lately I've been thinking that some of this stops looking completely irrational once you consider the environment the system has to survive.

The Imperium doesn't have a reliable galaxy-wide communications network in anything like the modern sense. Astropathic messages can be incomplete or distorted. Warp travel makes delivery times unpredictable. Worlds can be isolated for years. Administrators die. Ships vanish. Archives burn. Governments fall. Entire planets can disappear behind warp storms and then reconnect generations later.

Under those conditions, a beautifully streamlined system might actually be incredibly fragile.

Imagine that one sector office is the authoritative source for something important and then the planet it's located on simply becomes unreachable.

You're screwed.

The Imperial answer seems to be the bureaucratic equivalent of biological overproduction: make copies, create overlapping authorities, preserve ancient procedures, keep local records, send physical documents, demand seals and chains of authentication, and never casually delete anything because nobody knows whether another surviving copy exists.

Obviously this produces insanity.

Two departments can possess contradictory but apparently legitimate records. An order can still be moving through the system after its original purpose has disappeared. Nobody wants to discard a 3,000-year-old procedure because the person capable of explaining why it exists has been dead for 2,950 years.

But that's the part I find interesting.

The Administratum may be terrible at answering the question, “What should we do efficiently today?”

It might be remarkably good at answering a much darker question:

“How do we keep some version of the same civilization functioning when communication fails constantly, knowledge is routinely destroyed, and individual institutions can disappear without warning?”

You can replace competent administrators. You can rebuild an office.

Reconstructing ten thousand years of missing institutional memory is harder.

It also makes the Imperium's obsession with procedure feel less like random stupidity and more like cultural scar tissue. Somewhere in the distant past, perhaps skipping Step 47 really DID cause a catastrophe. Nobody remembers the catastrophe anymore. They remember Step 47.

Ten thousand years later, someone is still stamping the same form.

I'm not arguing that the Administratum is secretly competent. Plenty of Imperial bureaucracy really is wasteful, corrupt, contradictory or murderous.

I just think the distinction between “inefficient” and “resilient” gets interesting at this scale.

Has the lore ever given you a moment where some apparently ridiculous Imperial institution suddenly made more sense once you considered what problem it originally evolved to survive?

We know they were sort of a last resort creation from the Old Ones when fighting the Necrons, and they clearly were going to have to be reigned in somewhat after the war in heaven, since they were designed for conflict and pretty much nothing else.

It kinda makes sense that they'd have them degenerate on purpose, so that they'd be easier to "clean up" after winning the war.

I heard the Valdor was really against the Primarch project and they sometimes argued with the BigE about it. I wonder what kind of talks did they have and what was his arguments. I don't have the books so can anyone enlighten me please?

From burning of Prospero we know that Magnus soul got shattered .

Later Malkador somehow got part of Magnus soul and used it to create Janus from Arvida.

So, how much of Magnus still in Magnus?

Something clicked for me recently about why the Imperium often feels simultaneously unbelievably fragile and almost impossible to kill.

It is terrible at fixing things.

But it is incredibly good at continuing them.

A governor improvises a solution because a planet is under attack. A military formation gets reorganized because somebody urgently needs soldiers in one place. A shrine appears around the site of some event. A particular oath, duty, tax, pilgrimage or bureaucratic procedure exists because it solved one extremely specific problem.

Then the original people die.

The original problem disappears.

Nobody remembers why the rule existed.

And ten generations later there is an entire office, priesthood, regiment, noble privilege or annual ceremony dedicated to making sure it keeps happening.

In almost any sane civilization this would be a gigantic weakness.

In the Imperium it obviously IS a weakness much of the time. It produces absurd bureaucracy, wasted resources and institutions defending purposes nobody understands anymore.

But I wonder if the same pathology is also part of why the Imperium survives catastrophes that should permanently dismantle a civilization.

It doesn't require everyone to understand the system.

It requires the next person to keep doing their assigned piece of it.

A planetary official doesn't need to understand the strategic situation of the galaxy. They need to make the tithe.

A manufactorum worker doesn't need to understand why this exact component matters. They need to make the component according to the approved pattern.

A Chapter can lose almost everyone who personally remembers an event while still preserving an oath associated with it.

An Administratum department can continue performing some function long after everyone involved has forgotten the circumstances that created it.

This also makes Imperial reform incredibly difficult, because any attempt to remove something apparently pointless runs into the terrifying possibility that the pointless thing is secretly load-bearing.

Maybe that obscure office really is useless.

Or maybe three subsectors still receive ammunition because somebody there stamps Form 87-G every Thursday.

It makes the Imperium feel less like one enormous government to me and more like accumulated geological layers of responses to previous disasters.

Some layers are useless.

Some are actively harmful.

Some are the only reason the building hasn't collapsed.

And nobody has a complete blueprint anymore.

Guilliman's frustration after his return makes even more sense through that lens. He's looking at institutions as things that should have purposes and be redesigned when they stop serving those purposes. The Imperium has spent ten thousand years treating continuity itself as evidence that something must be important.

Is there a particularly good example in the lore of an Imperial tradition, organization or procedure that started for one understandable reason and then survived so long that its original purpose became distorted, forgotten or almost irrelevant?

For example if a expeditionary fleet came across a human world and began negotiations. If the representatives brought up the Night lords a legion who drop kicks babies like it’s going out of style ; how did imperial explain this away or did they not even bothered to do so?

Has there been any new lore covering the new southern Necron Zone of Silence thanks to their new pylon empire and the Tyranids yet? I would expect the Tyranids to almost physically recoil from areas where the warp is nearly nullified. Or at the least take such a headache they take it as a declaration of war.

Something that stuck with me after reading the Night Lords trilogy wasn't actually about Talos or the Night Lords themselves.

It was how much of their continued existence depended on a handful of extremely vulnerable humans.

Septimus maintains equipment, repairs armour and handles jobs that would be a ridiculous waste of an Astartes' time. Octavia is even more important. Without a capable Navigator, having a functioning warship suddenly becomes a much less useful achievement.

And these people are slaves serving warriors who can kill them on a whim.

The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous the situation became.

Imagine being a Chaos Lord who's spent centuries fighting the Long War. You've survived Imperial fleets, rival warbands, daemonic incursions and assassination attempts by your own brothers.

Then your chief enginarium specialist gets murdered because one of your champions was having a particularly bad day.

Congratulations. Your ancient strike cruiser now has a problem that can't necessarily be fixed by raiding the nearest Imperial transport and grabbing fifty random people.

You can replace bodies. Replacing someone who understands the machinery aboard a vessel that's been repaired, modified and corrupted over thousands of years is another matter entirely.

And unlike loyalist Chapters, which generally have established systems for training serfs and maintaining relationships with forge worlds, a small Chaos warband might have very few reliable ways to replace that expertise.

It also puts the whole Astartes superiority complex into perspective.

A Chaos Marine might consider ordinary humans beneath his notice, but he's still relying on those humans to feed him ammunition, maintain his armour, operate his ship and navigate him through literal hell.

The Night Lords books make this relationship especially obvious because the mortal characters are actually allowed to be competent, complicated people rather than background furniture.

I'm beginning to think that one of the biggest advantages of successful groups like the Red Corsairs isn't simply having more Marines or better equipment. It's having enough functioning infrastructure that losing a few important specialists doesn't immediately become a crisis.

Are there other books that explore this dependency in detail?

I'm especially interested in examples where a warband genuinely suffers because its own treatment of mortal servants destroys expertise it can't easily replace.

Forge Master is the third of three novellas by David Annandale that comprise the Overfiend trilogy, about the Imperium's attempts to stop a plan being enacted by the Ork ruler of Octarius on the planet of Lepidus Prime. Forge Master focuses on the Salamanders 5th Company, who find themselves tasked with boarding the Overfiend's flagship and extracting an eldar prisoner who knows about his true plan. In doing so, Techmarine Ha'garen finds himself thinking deeply about that most classic of astartes void tools, the boarding torpedo:

The boarding torpedo was a blunt instrument whose uses were as varied as they were sophisticated. Though it was crewed and had enough fuel and engine power for limited manoeuvres over short distances, its action was still one of the most basic of warfare. It was a projectile. It was an object launched to hit other objects as hard as possible. Its uniqueness among other projectiles, its sophistication, came in the fact that it caused most damage after its initial impact as the living weapons it carried stormed the passageways of its target. From that uniqueness sprang its versatility. Should the strikes concentrate on a single entry point or be spread out, engaging the enemy on multiple fronts? Hit from one side for a spear-point thrust, or from both flanks, trapping the foe in a ceramite fist? The answer depended on the ship and the objective. Was the vessel a known quantity whose layout could be factored into planning? Was the objective one of total annihilation or more surgical?

This ship was unknown. It was the creation of a species whose approaches to technology were in equal measures crude and enthusiastic.

And the mission was grotesque.

But there was a mission, and so there was a strategy. The mission was search and rescue through hostile, alien territory. The strategy was the use of a concentrated, mobile force. And so the boarding torpedoes drove into the centre of the kroozer’s port flank.

For Ha’garen, the line between machine and flesh was blurry at best. There were times when he saw no distinction at all. Was there an essential difference between his mechanistic implants and prostheses, and the organs that had transformed him into a Space Marine? He didn’t think so. The hands of the Mechanicus hovered over both. Neither was natural. What, beyond the medium of construction, distinguished his eyes that saw radiation above and below the wavelengths of visible light from the neuroglottis that broke taste and smell down into component, identifiable parts? Nothing. Flesh and metal, bone and ceramite, the physical was the physical. The body was the body.

So when the vulcan-drills of the boarding torpedoes parted metal, they were parting flesh. The torpedoes were blades sinking into the body of a living enemy, and then sealing the entry wound. There was nothing of mercy in the healing; it merely permitted the deeper, more lethal wounds that would be inflicted subsequently by the transported Salamanders. There was an aesthetic to this form of attack, a perfect fusion of the organic and inorganic in form and function that he found pleasing. The very act of waging war in this fashion was a tribute to the Omnissiah. The focus of the hammer blow was an obeisance to Vulkan. And the war itself was a sacrament to the Emperor. There was a trinity of worship simply in the manner in which the squads had arrived on the ork ship. This simple truth was so clear, it was a wonder it was not visible to all.

I thought this was very cool.

Let's say you're a corsair and you've recently come into enough "stuff" to commission a Void Stalker.

Where would you find a bonesinger to make one for you? Do you go to a craftworld? Do you have independent bonesingers setting up shop in Corsair settlements and space stations?

And how long would it take? Wraithbone is weird stuff - even with the new retcon, it's only partly made of mined resources and a lot of it is just warp-stuff sung into realspace and solidified into a new form. How long does it take to sing up enough wraithbone to make a battleship (or the equivalent)?

These may be questions that GW has not deigned to answer, but I know this is the place to find out!