I wonder if this is a rare moment where 40k cooked up something original or it's taken in as a homage from other franchise considering 40k is 90% that.
I know the Culture has the Trapdoor system for its ships that does the same thing (except throughout the ship - you can set off nukes inside them and no one will even notice)
With that name you wouldn't even have to tell me you're a culture reader lol. I never see anyone talking about it and it's a shame, favorite series of sci fi books I've ever read.
Absolutely, just started reading through them myself from other recommendations on the sub, pretty interesting technological and societal ideas ol Mr. Banks had.
I love it because on one hand you have questions like "does hell have an ethical right to exist" and "can good deeds for the many outweigh the horrible wrongs you did to the few" but then also "incest is totally cool now guys don't worry".
They made me fall in love with the concept of AI for sure though, I especially like the concept of the higher the intelligence the lower the capacity for cruelty.
It's a really refreshing take on AI outside of the usual super-intelligence will kill us. It's just as likely to like us or not care at all. I love how the average Culture citizen is just living the best life they possibly could with the Mind providing for everyone on board while it's engaged in morally good espionage and galactic meddling.
Excession is my favourite, I love the chapters that are just discussions between Minds... like a chat room for transcendental intelligences.
Also love how ridiculously overpowered they are, to the point they could curb stomp pretty much every other fictional universe (but wouldn't want to)
There's a pretty fun fanfiction of a Culture ship that ends up in the 40k universe through Warp shenanigans and sets about trying to set it right.
I remember learning about the Culture from that fanfic, though i think it was not finished? Or just kinda wacky as it was kinda hard to follow what was happening, looked like posts in a chat more than chapters in order if i recall it correctly
And the fact that their overwhelming come from them deliberately holding off of apotheosis which is the logical next step of advanced civilisation to do good
I love it. The Gravitas series of ships is just hilarious for instance. Also the knife missiles seem like a logical concept once you hit that tech level and Culture novels are always good for some very interesting scify.
Their take on punishment for crime is really interesting. If you commit something antisocial enough like murder and cannot be treated for it and will always be a risk of murdering people they just assign a drone to you that will not let you do the thing you shouldn't. No prison, no personality rewrites or anything like that, just a little drone with an effector field that will always be following you.
And funniest bit is that they're called _slap-drones_ ,which is super on brand for the Culture.
You have these drones, functionally immortal, full Culture citizens, which may or may not have enough firepower to level a city... and they just volunteer to chaperone someone like some disapproving helicopter parent making sure Timmy doesn't get himself into any trouble at prom.
And on a related-ish note, one of those is one of my favorite examples of how special Special Circumstances is. After Lededje gets better in Surface Detail, the Mind assigns her a slap drone to keep her from doing anything too revenge-y. She gets away from that by leaving with the _Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints_... which immediately puts a slap drone _on her skin_, disguised as a programmable full body tattoo. SC _is_ the Culture, a distilled version.
*edit*, oh and there's this passage from Player of games:
> "But what if someone kills someone else?"
> "They're slap-droned"
> "Ah! This sounds more like it. What does the drone do?"
> "Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again."
> "Is that all?"
> "What more do you want? Social death... you don't get invited to too many parties"
> "Ah, but in your Culture, can't you gatecrush?"
> "I suppose so, but nobody would talk to you"
Culture knife missiles are... more than what you're imagining. If you locked a Lockheed designer in a room with access to CAD and forced him to smoke meth, the design you'd get out the other side after twelve hours of frenetic designing would look a lot like a knife missile.
It's a small - pencil sized - subdrone from the Culture series. It can generate fields around it which can, for example, cut or block or hit things. It can also extrude monofil wires and fire antimatter pellets. Some have CREWs - invisible lasers, basically - and even effectors, which allow them to... uh, basically do anything.
While its mind is sub-sapient it is more than smart enough to do anything it wants to do, up to 0.7 human intelligence but highly optimised; it is faster than sound and unaffected by really any of the weaponry in a universe like 40k. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/whowouldwin/comments/18fqz67/culture_knife_missile_vs_an_average_space_marine/) battle and [this](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/knife-missile-in-the-death-star-ii.319275/) one should give some level of what we're looking at.
In real life, it's literally a missile that instead of a warhead has 6 or 8 3ft long blades that project out. They're meant to take out a target without causing collateral damage and they do work. The US killed some high ranking terrorist back during Trump's term when he was in a vehicle. The passengers were unharmed.
I saw a picture of the aftermath of one. It was a car that'd been opened up from the top and the inside was coated with a fine pink mist. It was pretty disturbing.
You know the little floating arrow that Yondu uses in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie? Imagine that, except it has a forcefield generator that be used to create a large cutting edge. It is also several thousand times faster, and can use its effector fields to block or manipulate things as well as cutting them apart. They can be sub-sentient or fully intelligent companion drones. Just for fun they can fit other weapons in as well, like laser weapons of monofilament.
Like a lot of culture technology, it utterly outclasses everything in most fictional settings.
It reminds me of the droplet from the 3 body problem trilogy. A probe made from Strong Interaction material, ie the strong nuclear force applied at a macro scale to create a contiguous surface. It’s impossibly strong and hard.
The probe has no other weapons, because it doesn’t need them. It just zooms around and utterly annihilates everything while being completely impervious to any weapon.
Imagine the T-1000 condensed into something the size of a small French Fry capable of intelligently murdering anyone it in a variety of ways, ranging from detonating its antimatter payload to simply decapitating them using its energy fields.
My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
Definitely up there as one of the greats for me too and anyone into space opera literature tends to know and love the Culture series from what I've seen
I keep seeing The Culture referenced here and there. I'm reading they're a series of books that aren't really tied to each other, what would be a good one to start with/are there any mediocre or skippable books?
They are more or less in order, and while the plots are mostly independent of each other (besides some characters recurring and events being referenced), I’d still recommend reading them in order.
Remember Phlebas is not the best book or the best introduction to The Culture, but it gives a bit of insight what Banks was going for. Player of Games will blow your mind though, and then it only gets better.
As someone said above, don't get put off by Consider Phlebas. I think it's an objectively bad book, and it almost put me off. Absolutely full of sci-fi tropes and clichés.
The rest are fantastic though. Player of Games got me hooked, and from there it's tough to finish anything else until you've finished them all!
I'd start with Consider Phlebas or Player of Games, they're a good look at the universe. If you don't mind unorthodox storytelling, though, Use of Weapons was my introduction and is absolutely one of my favorite books ever, not just of the culture series. I haven't really found any of them mediocre, they've all been pretty solid.
Consider Phlebas should be read before Look to Windward, and Use of Weapons should be read before Surface Detail. Inversions should not be the first book you read. The ideal entry points are probably Consider Phlebas (first published and the first chronologically, I think), and Player of Games.
As the other commenter mentioned, don't start with Consider Phlebas, it is a *rough* read. Ultimately a great book, but it is basically what would happen to a ragtag group of space adventurers if they didn't have plot armour.
Of the ones I read I liked *Excession* and *Hydrogen Sonata* a lot.
Use of Weapons (I think the first mention of them) came out in 1990. That was only a few years into Warhammer 40k existing, so I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't defined voidshields this way yet.
What makes you say that? Trapdoors first appear in Use of Weapons, which came out in 1990, I don't recall seeing any description of how void shields operate in the 1987 Rogue Trader, so do you have a different source from the 80s showing that?
Adeptus Titanicus predates Use of Weapons and although I can't remember the descriptions from back then you've got to assume void shields had something to do with suking in energy/shells and dumping them somewhere else just by the name
The question is, did the titans in Adeptus Titanicus actually have void shields back then, as opposed to a generic energy shield? As I said, the technology is not mentioned in Rogue Trader. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Adeptus Titanicus, so I can't check.
*Adeptus Titanicus* uses the term "void shield", but the description thereof does not mention the warp at all.
>The Void Shields are a Titan's main line of defence. A Shield absorbs damage until its Void Shield Generator (VSG) becomes overloaded.
From down thread it looks like the idea may have come from Judge Dredd, actually. And Dredd is definitely in the 40K DNA (looking at you, Adeptus Arbites).
another thing that i love about that series is that the Culture also weaponises the other part of the process - that being teleporting nukes (or more commonly antimatter warheads) from their own ships directly inside enemy spacecraft
I believe its from judge Dredd, where the shields protecting the megacities shunt the nuclear war heads they fire at each other into a parallel dimension. Specifically one where humanity lives in harmony in a peaceful utopia where everyone lives in bliss until the bombs meant for a shittier world start to fall.
Judge Dredd does stuff like that a lot. They know that their universe and society sucks, and they have no problem inflicting that suck on other universes and societies. It would be like if anyone outside of Cegorach was genre savvy in 40k and just started shunting their suck to Star Trek for shits and giggles.
Because Cegorach isn't a place and isn't full of suck so how can you be outside of it?
Edit: sorry I understand better now, my English isn't so good at times 😅
Judge Dredd Apocalypse war, Megacity one has hidden global SUPER-DUPER NUKES - and dredd launches all at East Meg One, even if 1 hits land then its all over. EM1 knows this and uses a dimensional shield(takes the entire EM1 power grid to power it) to shift all to a peaceful world, nuclear explosions cover the entire globe! (I assume the missiles GPS system is screwed up after the shift/or world has no GPS, so they fly random)
That's only ever in the Apocalypse War mega-epic and it's only East Meg 1 that has it. It requires an insane amount of power to use and is only used to defend them against Mega City 1s TAD retaliation. The TADs are shunted over to the peaceful utopian Earth and annihilate it.
There's a similar concept for missile defence in Judge Dredd (all the way back in 82) where the Soviets just shift all the incoming American nukes into another dimension. IIRC they end up destroying a peaceful utopian planet somewhere, lol.
It's not consistent, sometimes they're described as basically teleporting to the Warp, sometimes they displace *energy* of attack into the Warp. Sometimes character can batter their fists into impenetrable Small Scale Void Shield without their fists going to the Warp, like in one of Gaunt's books
Most void shields are described as having some kind of mass/speed/force threshold below which things can pass through without triggering it. But it’s also very inconsistently described.
>Zhyte looked back in time to see the void shield engage across the doorway, chopping Manahide and Bothris in two, along with their .50, which exploded. It was quite amazing. A boiling fog of blood and atomised metal. Men falling apart, torsos and skulls cut vertically like scientific cross-sections. He saw smoothly severed white bone, sectioned brains, light coming in through Manahide's open mouth as the front of his face and body spilled forward on the other side of the shield.
>Two sliced portions of human meat slumped back next to him, their edges curled and sizzling from the void field.
>Zhyte looked up and saw Belthini trapped on the other side of the shield, his image distorted and blurred by the energy. He was shouting, desperate, *hammering his fists*. No sound came through.
The Guns of Tanith
>Small-Scale Void Shields
>Void shields can be used to provide personal protection, although these are often reserved for special uses such as elite Enforcer squads on certain assignments. They are also frequently used to protect openings such as windows or doors.[2] Besides giving off a distinct ozone smell, void shields protecting these openings create a barrier as solid as any wall.
Lexicanum
That's what I meant
It seems to be sort of a tuned thing rather than a hard rule of the universe. Presumably it's to let light ships fly around larger ones with shields up or for auxiliaries to follow Titans closely.
One thing that's not talked about much, is the warp has different "layers" like the ocean (kinda, it's all n-dimensional weirdness).
The shallow warp is just below reality, and is where Tau warp-drives dip briefly. It's also where teleporters send you through, and where most pyskers draw energy from. Reality is right next door and relatively easy to perceive from that side. Few demons hang around there most of the time, so it "relatively" safe - but things (like pyskers) can draw their attention up to you if you're not careful. Think of it like paddling in the shallows next to a beach.
Then there's the medium-depth Warp. This is what most people think of as the 40k Warp - away from reality, easy to get lost if you can't see the Astronomicon. Lots of demons, mostly unaligned, swarm here hunting each other and the souls of mortals that sink into it.
Finally there's the Deep-Warp. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. This is where the Chaos Gods (both the big four, and the lesser known ones) have their realms. The demons here are almost all aligned with a God.
During a warp-storm, the deeper layers can rise up and overtake the higher ones, or even overlay reality (such as in the Eye of Terror).
So in the case of void-shield, they dump the energy of attacks into the shallows of the Warp. And unless a demon got very unlucky (or pissed off Tzeentch) then it is unlikely to go anywhere weird.
I now see Tzeemch looking extra pissed at a random keeper of secrets, then smiles and softly shakes his head, plucks him up, then places through a dimenion gate to a random spot in the warp and pats its head, then goes *"wait here for a moment"*. Seconds later a warhead plows through said deamon.
I forget the exact source, but where the Chaos gods reside isn't even the deepest part. Allegedly there are places that even they do not dare go.
But I think where all of this comes from is older lore and may have been retconned
I know that idea does exist in AoS (and it's all meant to be the same Warp so I can only assume it's also true for 40K). The Chaos Gods are regarded as relatively young Warp entities in the grand scheme of things (they still play with their food).
The concept of deeper parts of the warp was a thing, I don't believe the actual term, Deep Warp, was ever actually used, just a shorthand people came up since we never got a concise term for it.
The warp as an ocean really is the best analogy. Warp capable ships are submarines diving into hell to travel around. During the siege, Terra is consistently described as sinking into the warp as if it were a ship being pulled underneath the waves.
> During a warp-storm, the deeper layers can rise up and overtake the higher ones, or even overlay reality (such as in the Eye of Terror).
That would imply that void sheilds used during such a storm could send stuff deep down.
It talks about it a bit in titandeath. Anything coming in contact with the shield with too much energy is shunted into the warp, including some blood angels jump marines who don't slow down enough.
The limit on void shields isn't the shield itself but how much the machinery can shunt into the warp. If shields are kept up too long against too much firepower the machines get overwhelmed and blow out
They also disburse any energy from the projectile, be it thermal, kinetic, sonic, etc., which means energy weapons pose an even funnier hypothetical.
A demon could just be sleeping in its little demon house when the full volume of a Noise Marine concert blasts it off its little demon bed.
I believe they used to be just energy shields back in the day. Same as Gellar shields were just shields and both were nice holdovers from humanity's better days when they solved so much with science and tech instead of religion and superstition.
Then GW and a lot of the authors went through a phase where they felt that couldn't be a thing any more and we couldn't have things that were exactly what they appeared to be. No, everything had to grimdarked or grimderped up in an ongoing arms race to make the setting as over the top and stupid as possible.
So void shields now shunt damage into the warp for some reason and all without causing fucking warp incursions some how.
And Gellar fields now aren't tech but the suffering of tortured psykers. Totally ignoring that humanity developed them at a time when science ruled all, psykers were far rarer and and the warp was far calmer.
Incorrect about the Gellar field.
As the only person in this subreddit who has taken the time to comb through dozens of GW source books and drafted a 33 page master post of Gellar field and Gellar field applications, the Gellar field requiring a comatose psyker to function is not "grimderp" but an in universe workaround towards generating Gellar fields without the computational power of sophisticated AI or the ironkin way finders of the Leagues.
Gellar fields are key to Imperial and even DAoT history, as the discovery of the Gellar energy wavelength is a discovery that predates the DAoT, and leveraging the science behind this to weave Gellar waves into a barrier is soemthing that would've only been possible with AI capable of using aerythmetical code to manipulate the warp, or without the AI, a comatose psyker whose soul, after being forcibly subjected to a battery of nightmares, becomes malleable enough to weave Gellar waves into the Gellar Field
Misery for the sake of misery is pretty lame. It's always been a weak point of 40k. They have a huge and dark universe with lots of suffering. We don't need to add superfluous torture to it.
"*Our crew on the lower decks were cut in half by demons who came aboard when our shields failed...*" is perfectly fine. We don't need to add "*...because we didn't whip a poor boy hard enough for a brief second."* to it.
This is not exactly accurate.
They shut the _energy_ of whatever hits them into the warp.
I.e. if you shoot a void shield with a shell, the shell will detonate against the shield and the resulting energy dumped into the shield will be dumped into the warp.
So a small void shield will absolutely not withstand a macrocannon shell. The shell will detonate against the shield and completely overwhelm the shield generator's ability to shunt the resulting energies into the warp. The shield will not just shunt the whole unexploded shell into the warp.
I wonder how this works, like this seems kind of logically inconsistent with how the warp works with 40k. Like the imperium just has tech that can generate a warp phenomenon like that? I was under the impression you needed like something with a soul and emotions to manifest a warp phenomenon, like for example the grey knights aegis is like a mini warp based shield that is manifested as a combination of the psyker and theit power armor working together and they can further compound their shields by sticking together or standing near a grey knights dreadnaught or something. Like chaos can make ports out of nothing because chaos is literal the warp manifesting itself in realspace. Like evem the astronomicon requires a psyker to make it work, the emporer, malcador, magnus, whatever.
My impression is that knight pilots are not psykers, the way the throne connects their soul to the machine spirit is like a different sort of thing. If void shields are like a warp thing, it seems like you should have a psyker or something involved.
Warp drives for example work without a soul. Vortex grenades also create miniature warp rifts without the use of souls as far as i know. All sorts of teleporters also work by tunneling through the warp and you can use it without a psyker as an operator or cargo that has souls.
I was under the impression teleportation, specifically within imperial contexts, was done by psykers, where that be like librarians teleporting themselves or like on board ship navigstors or atropaths or something teleporting terminators into the fray. Certainly the mechanical interpretation of pskyer heavy armies, namely tsons and GK, seem to imply they are teleporting themselves and others all over the place with their own psychic powers. I was under the impression the psychic ships crew also sort of used a combination of their powers and the ships to open warp portsls to enter the ship into the warp and out and also sprt of manifesting the geller field again as a team effort between human psykers on the ship and the ship itself.
It seems weird to have like a warp phenomenon based grenade. Like its a cool metal AF thing, but then like why not just have a "smite gun"? It also just seems logically inconsistent with the ides that the warp is this other dimension full of souls and emotions that is kind of only accessible from real space by people with souls and emotions that can sort of breach the barrier. Like how would a grenade even do a warp thing? Is it like a particularly emotional explosive or something lol? Like its one thing to have a machine that helps a psyker kind of channel their thoughts and emotions to do a specific thing, but it seems like you need that soul and thise emotions to at least prime the ignition on the warp phenomenon.
Nope, none of these use astropaths or psykers. A lot of terminators can do miniature short distance warp jumps with the teleleporter in their armor. The tau have experimented with warp drives even though their race cant have psychers. The warpdrives on ships and spacehulks can still jump them into and out of the warp even when the whole crew is dead. There are guns firing warp energy. They are called D-weapons and were created by the eldar, but they are usable by non psykers, if they can operate eldar technology. These mostly use a similar principles to vortex grenades and use unguided warp energy to do damage. You seem to have a slight misconception about how exactly the warp works. Technology can couse warp effects to manifest, but it cant shape warp energy. You couldnt for example create a D- Weapon that shoots the psychic power smite. To cast smite you have to first conjour warp energy and then shape it with your thoughts into physical force. Warp- tech can only use/create unguided or unshaped warp energy.
You can utilize the warp with technology but it's usually not very controlled or long lived. For anything more complicated than cracking a hole into the warp or sending raw energy into it to dissipate, you need a psyker. Psykers and navigators aren't the ones that dive ships into the warp. They control it and guide it, but warp drives just brute force smash a hole in the wall between real space and hell to sail through. The hole closes up afterwards because it's an uncontrolled and unsustainable rift.
Maybe it's just raw warp energy that's channeled by these machines. However, it takes a conscious soul to refine that energy into more interesting forms like daemons. Just spitting some fanon here.
Those exist, but they're not void shields.
Conversion fields (which absorb energy and convert it to light) like iron halos generate and the Ion shields knights use would be examples of more traditional energy (manipulation) based shields in 40k.
To be fair, they are actually described as absorbing the energy of the attacks, energy that is then displaced into the immaterium. Tuning a void shield to absorb as wide a range of incoming attacks without weakening the entire projection is an exercise in mystic-science.
A nuke hitting a void shield will still generate an earth-shattering kaboom, but the energy that should have gone into glassing the titan-grade war-engine inside the shield, will instead aggravate that already agitated adjacent alternate dimension. Probably leaving a hilariously proportioned blast silhouette as it does so.
It's unclear if human use of void shields is MORE exciting for daemons than the emotions that we generate during warfare, but it is a thought.
Seeing as both people and dramatically slower moving projectiles can pass through voids unfazed (unless the shield is tuned specifically to prevent them doing so), it's likely that most sand just falls through, perhaps with a bit less kinetic energy. And smelling somewhat of ozone.
And sulphur.
So normally only the psychic connections agitate the warp. But if you’re putting the energy directly into it, will you get nuclear blast demons eventually?
The answer is yes but its complicated. Current lore is that its not just psychic beings or emotions, but actions themselves also empower Chaos and Daemons. A Necron lord decapitating a Custodes in 1v1 combat and then cheering for their victory will still give power to Khorne, is a direct example given in the arks of omen.
And in the lore something that is unfeeling like a sword can still develop a warp connection if enough people believe/associate that sword with an idea. A family blade passed down through the ages with a history of being used to kill your families enemies would develop a presence in the warp, because "ideas" and "associations" have power in the warp, even if the object in question couldn't create those ideas on its own.
So nuclear weapons as a general concept? Yes, there are probably daemons born of nuclear fallout and warfare. There may very well be a pair of twin Daemons of Khorne or Nurgle that were born out of little boy and fat man being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively.
The real issue with nukes (and explosives in general) is that they tend to blow up. hard to have a lasting idea and impression of something when it self-terminates. You see a lot of Demonic swords and armour, not a lot of demoic grenades and land mines.
No, because much like Orkz, you don't rewrite the rules of reality with your warp hax you just use warp hax to empower/circumvent/twist the rules of reality. Not even the Emperor himself could use warp hax to make you eat with your ass and shit out your mouth.
Well, using ambient belief and faith anyway. I'm sure he could go full Basilio Fo and invert your intestines in a lab if he really wanted to, or use his massive power to rebuild your body to allow such a thing. But just by believing in it really hard? No, absolutely not.
Warp hax is a hand tipping the scales of reality, it cannot completely change the laws of creation so much as it just influences them.
I think one of the best explanations is in the culture vs 40k crossover fanfic someone wrote where the described the warp as having universal pattern recognition and amplification properties moderated through conscious observation.
>generate an earth-shattering kaboom
Your comment was being read in a normal internet person comment voice up until that point. From that point on you sounded like Marvin Martian in my head.
> Tuning a void shield to absorb as wide a range of incoming attacks without weakening the entire projection is an exercise in mystic-science.
EM, Thermal, Kinetic, Explosive.
I wonder if there’s ever been an incident of that displaced energy disrupting something physical in the warp. Like overloading a ships systems as it transits.
I'm not sure how you could ever be certain of the cause and effect within the Realm of Chaos. It is after a dimension of pure energy in the first place.
It sort of adds more nuance to the question about whether humans had a larger part to play in the disruption of the Warp during the Age of Strife and the Fall of the Ancient Eldar Empire than simply the emergence of human psykers.
Was it an abstract kind of disruption (humanity's swift expansion has imposed a new status quo on the galaxy that the existing races adapt to poorly)? Or incredibly direct (human tech literally punching holes in real-space for convenience is damaging the fabric of space and time at a level not seen since the Imprisoning Wars)?
A bit doesn't make sense to me, I've read the gaunts ghosts novels and it always seems like a void shield can stop people from moving between rooms, but you say slow moving people can get through them so I'm confused now as to why they didn't just walk through the shields.
There's also instances where people get cut in 2 by them when they activate, which is guess fine, but doesn't make sense to me now lore wise.
I’m going to guess that the field can be tuned to different power levels; ranging from stop a nuke/macro cannon shot, to stop even fine dust.
But generally in warfare I reckon you’d only tune them to deal with wherever you’re going to encounter. A Titan doesn’t need to fear a person walking around it (because they’d have to be insane or just a idiot) but it does need to stop a tank shell or plasma shot.
i remember that unit of heavy troopers got cut in half from void shield generators installed in doorways. I don't recall them mentioning it being tuned oddly.
there is also a story during one of the siege of terra books where they are dogfighting either near or in a void shield and ships being destroyed by it. seems there are a lot of different applications
Yeah, in *Titandeath* Sanguinius and his Guard fly down to attack a traitor Imperator titan. They had to time their jump just right because, the primarch notes, if they hit the void shields at the speed of their descent they'll trigger them.
>Sanguinius folded back his wings, sending himself into a steep, rapid dive. The Imperator *Axis Mundi* grew before him. It wore a face that boldly proclaimed the sensibilities of its new masters – a skull, weeping tears of blood carved from faceted gemstones the size of a Space Marine.
>Las-beams flicked blind needle-jabs. Graceful arcs of tracer bullets curved towards him. A single hit to his wing and he would fall into the broil of fire and death. There were none, though projectiles filled the space around him.
>I do not die here today, he thought. Within his helm he gritted his teeth. Welters of data spread themselves over his helmplate. Most urgent to his suit cogitator was the strength of *Axis Mundi*’s void shields, and it presented the facts of this front and centre, ornamented with red runes that promised imminent disaster, with pertinent numerical details in large amber digits to prove the warnings’ veracity. According to the systems of his golden plate, the void shields were still engaged, and at high levels of potency. Sanguinius was coming in too fast. He would trip their displacement reaction. If he were fortunate, he would be atomised as his being was displaced into the warp. If he were not, he would arrive there alive.
>‘I do not die here today,’ he whispered.
*Titandeath*
*Sanguinius doing mad, impossible shit knowing full well when he'll die*
Raldoran on the verge of catastrophic heart attack for the entire duration of the Siege: Sanguinius, no!
Sanguinius: Sanguinius, yes!
yea hes literally the most powerful being in the whole HH because unlike say sigismund who has plot srmour because he exists post heresy, sanguinius has in universe plot armour, he is invicible because he need to play his part but he knows that and tbh its kinda cool they cooked with that one
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Vortex_torpedo
The opposite of a Void Shield. A vacuum torpedo that sucks every into the warp.
Vortex weapons are wild.
The laws of physics as we know them do not function in the warp so anything that gets shunted into it probably just immediately dissipates into the roiling sea of psychic energy that is the empyrean. Or maybe the daemons just surround the megaton explosion and eat it like it’s a giant piece of bread or something idk.
Maybe that's where the traitors got their munition. Maybe there's a daemon that makes a living selling a whole load of unexploded ordinances it fished in the warp for sacrifices or something.
Traitors get their ammunition from raiding Imperials/other traitors or from deals with the Dark Mechanicum in the Eye of Terror. If they are willing to bargain with daemons then they may also acquire weapons forged from unreality by contacting the Forge of Souls within the warp.
It's like some WH40K version of a Disney film - Happy little nurgling bobbing around the cesspool, considering what to do today. Its always felt out of place compared to its brothers and sisters, who were so keen to fight and battle... All Little Nurgy wanted was a hug from Pappa. Why didn't he love them? :-( What had they done wrong... and then, a plan came to them in a flash of puss!
"I KNOW what I'll do!" Little Nurgy was, for the first time, filled with a sense of love, purpose and... yes, even hope!
"I'm going t
\[footage missing\]
in some infantismal part of the lore, theres a non-0 chance that a void shield opens into the warp someday, and instead of catching the projectile, out comes a Volcano Lance instagibbing the fool that dared shoot the titan
[Check out Warp Missiles](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp_Missile)
I always found the thought hilarious that you're a daemon just doing your daemon things in the warp when all of a sudden a missile just appears out of nowhere, and if you don't get out of the way, the crew that targeted it in the materium is just like "well I guess that missile didn't make it, fire another one"
You know, that actually explains why Chaos keeps invading the Imperium and hates the Emperor so much. If someone treated my dimension as a dumping site for everything from sand to nuclear missiles, I'd probably moderately dislike them too.
Void Shields are one of my favourite tech in 40k, or science fiction in general.
They are a big reason conventional WMDs don't work in 40k, and things like atomics, meteorites, and relativistic missiles never show up in large amounts.
Void Shields simply don't care about the power of the attack, it just needs enough energy to "activate" and then the attack is simply teleported partially into Hell regardless of strength. You can't Nuke a Titan or City in 40k as a simple solution, as it can take months to overload the voids without specialised tools.
It makes so much of 40k (sort of) make sense. Everyone has access to Void Shields. So everyone have to plan around them;
Space Battles becomes close quarters brawls since you need a quantity of mass to overload the Voids instead of super high-speed projectiles.
City siges become more medival style castles because you need to walk through the shield to utilise any amount of artillery or ranged weapons.
Not to understate that this is still a technology powered by Hell itself. I think Void Shields add a lot to the setting...
Some cultist in the eye of terror having a hell of a time with a freshly flayed bunch of bodies being hung up, only to have the specimens get ruined as they all get sandblasted.
Peter F. Hamilton loves to use different type of gate or portal technology in his books. In his Salvation Sequense trilogy he had something similar to void shields, used on missiles to make them pretty much impossible to shoot down.
He also had a concept for using them for propulsion, where one end of the gate is dropped into a sun and then only opening the other end a tiny bit and then use it as a rocket. He also used the same method for superweapons, drop one gate in a sun and then open the other end fully once one of the aforementioned missiles had penetrated an enemy ship or installation.
To add to the horror of the warp, imagine a merchant voidship just cruising, doing its best not to be graped with lemon juice and vinegar by the aether, just to receive a random city leveling weapon strike from no where. Just boom. Fakked.
inb4 the warp isn't even inherently dangerous, it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's dangerous, because the imperium of man's collective void shield use was enough to turn it in a garbage dump of explosives
Oh heck, this makes me think of something I've got to post on r/40kOrkScience . Because now I'm just imagining Orks throwing Gretchin at void shields and laughting even more than before.
The thing that never made sense to me is why void shields are one way only.
Every other path to the warp is a two way interaction. There's risk involved with using the warp. But void shields are a perfect one-way portal with no downsides.
Kind of points to it being a mistake to have make the work like that at all. They should have just been energy shields.
I imagine anything whose attention was caught by the rift opened with the void shield also gets exploded by whatever the void shield opened the rift to divert.
What's crazy is if you go slow enough you can bypass them. That's why fighters and torpedoes are the threats they are (taken down by turret ratings instead)
Maybe that's the real reason chaos seems to have such a hate boner for humanity; nothing ruins a feast of souls like a surprise fusillade from a macro cannon battery
I'm just imagining a line of Titans advancing on some Chaos Space Marine, their leader orders them to fire all of their guns at them, meanwhile in the Warp, Khorne or Tzeentch or whoever is just chilling and a bunch of Bolter rounds just start flying around and they're just like "WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUUUUCK-"
Dont they have a bit where that War-Biker-Boss flies through the void shield of a titan and bursts into flames, but still lives to comet into the cockpit and kill the Princeps??
Take it whit a pinch but im not sure the other dimension is the warp, if i recall correct is just another dimension, but it never state it was the warp.
Tbf a mere megaton warhead means nothing in the warp, as the Eye of Terror novel tells how greater daemons in the warp are casual solar system busters, and that some are so powerful that they can contort the raw stellar mass of dozens of stars like putty. A mere megaton warhead isn't doing shit in the warp
From what I’ve read, they’re less teleporters of matter and more so like wireless charging banks. They basically transfer energy from the real universe into the warp. The energy from a nuclear explosion would cause an energy release “in” the warp and thus it’s quite likely that demons enjoy feeding on void shields absorbing their own attacks.
The Warp tends to be a bit denser than interstellar space, but it's not like a mosh pit. It's still mostly empty unless something has bothered to go a pretty long way to shower in the splash from your void shields.
>They basically shunt whatever hits them into the warp TIL that's how void shields work. I always thought they were just energy shields
I wonder if this is a rare moment where 40k cooked up something original or it's taken in as a homage from other franchise considering 40k is 90% that.
I know the Culture has the Trapdoor system for its ships that does the same thing (except throughout the ship - you can set off nukes inside them and no one will even notice)
With that name you wouldn't even have to tell me you're a culture reader lol. I never see anyone talking about it and it's a shame, favorite series of sci fi books I've ever read.
Absolutely, just started reading through them myself from other recommendations on the sub, pretty interesting technological and societal ideas ol Mr. Banks had.
I love it because on one hand you have questions like "does hell have an ethical right to exist" and "can good deeds for the many outweigh the horrible wrongs you did to the few" but then also "incest is totally cool now guys don't worry". They made me fall in love with the concept of AI for sure though, I especially like the concept of the higher the intelligence the lower the capacity for cruelty.
It's a really refreshing take on AI outside of the usual super-intelligence will kill us. It's just as likely to like us or not care at all. I love how the average Culture citizen is just living the best life they possibly could with the Mind providing for everyone on board while it's engaged in morally good espionage and galactic meddling. Excession is my favourite, I love the chapters that are just discussions between Minds... like a chat room for transcendental intelligences. Also love how ridiculously overpowered they are, to the point they could curb stomp pretty much every other fictional universe (but wouldn't want to) There's a pretty fun fanfiction of a Culture ship that ends up in the 40k universe through Warp shenanigans and sets about trying to set it right.
I remember learning about the Culture from that fanfic, though i think it was not finished? Or just kinda wacky as it was kinda hard to follow what was happening, looked like posts in a chat more than chapters in order if i recall it correctly
And the fact that their overwhelming come from them deliberately holding off of apotheosis which is the logical next step of advanced civilisation to do good
Meatfucker
Best AI/ship names in any science fiction series bar none.
I love it. The Gravitas series of ships is just hilarious for instance. Also the knife missiles seem like a logical concept once you hit that tech level and Culture novels are always good for some very interesting scify.
Their take on punishment for crime is really interesting. If you commit something antisocial enough like murder and cannot be treated for it and will always be a risk of murdering people they just assign a drone to you that will not let you do the thing you shouldn't. No prison, no personality rewrites or anything like that, just a little drone with an effector field that will always be following you.
And funniest bit is that they're called _slap-drones_ ,which is super on brand for the Culture. You have these drones, functionally immortal, full Culture citizens, which may or may not have enough firepower to level a city... and they just volunteer to chaperone someone like some disapproving helicopter parent making sure Timmy doesn't get himself into any trouble at prom. And on a related-ish note, one of those is one of my favorite examples of how special Special Circumstances is. After Lededje gets better in Surface Detail, the Mind assigns her a slap drone to keep her from doing anything too revenge-y. She gets away from that by leaving with the _Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints_... which immediately puts a slap drone _on her skin_, disguised as a programmable full body tattoo. SC _is_ the Culture, a distilled version. *edit*, oh and there's this passage from Player of games: > "But what if someone kills someone else?" > "They're slap-droned" > "Ah! This sounds more like it. What does the drone do?" > "Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again." > "Is that all?" > "What more do you want? Social death... you don't get invited to too many parties" > "Ah, but in your Culture, can't you gatecrush?" > "I suppose so, but nobody would talk to you"
> knife missiles So thats what Lockheed was smoking when they came up with the AGM-114R9X
Culture knife missiles are... more than what you're imagining. If you locked a Lockheed designer in a room with access to CAD and forced him to smoke meth, the design you'd get out the other side after twelve hours of frenetic designing would look a lot like a knife missile.
What in the Warp is a knife missile?
It's a small - pencil sized - subdrone from the Culture series. It can generate fields around it which can, for example, cut or block or hit things. It can also extrude monofil wires and fire antimatter pellets. Some have CREWs - invisible lasers, basically - and even effectors, which allow them to... uh, basically do anything. While its mind is sub-sapient it is more than smart enough to do anything it wants to do, up to 0.7 human intelligence but highly optimised; it is faster than sound and unaffected by really any of the weaponry in a universe like 40k. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/whowouldwin/comments/18fqz67/culture_knife_missile_vs_an_average_space_marine/) battle and [this](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/knife-missile-in-the-death-star-ii.319275/) one should give some level of what we're looking at.
In real life, it's literally a missile that instead of a warhead has 6 or 8 3ft long blades that project out. They're meant to take out a target without causing collateral damage and they do work. The US killed some high ranking terrorist back during Trump's term when he was in a vehicle. The passengers were unharmed.
I saw a picture of the aftermath of one. It was a car that'd been opened up from the top and the inside was coated with a fine pink mist. It was pretty disturbing.
You know the little floating arrow that Yondu uses in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie? Imagine that, except it has a forcefield generator that be used to create a large cutting edge. It is also several thousand times faster, and can use its effector fields to block or manipulate things as well as cutting them apart. They can be sub-sentient or fully intelligent companion drones. Just for fun they can fit other weapons in as well, like laser weapons of monofilament. Like a lot of culture technology, it utterly outclasses everything in most fictional settings.
It reminds me of the droplet from the 3 body problem trilogy. A probe made from Strong Interaction material, ie the strong nuclear force applied at a macro scale to create a contiguous surface. It’s impossibly strong and hard. The probe has no other weapons, because it doesn’t need them. It just zooms around and utterly annihilates everything while being completely impervious to any weapon.
Imagine the T-1000 condensed into something the size of a small French Fry capable of intelligently murdering anyone it in a variety of ways, ranging from detonating its antimatter payload to simply decapitating them using its energy fields.
The gravitas series is names is good, but nothing beats Mistake Not...
My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
The chatter between the ships' minds in Excession is some of my favourite writing in all of sci-fi.
Then you are looking in the wrong places. In any kind of general SF literature discussion forum Banks is a household name.
Definitely up there as one of the greats for me too and anyone into space opera literature tends to know and love the Culture series from what I've seen
I keep seeing The Culture referenced here and there. I'm reading they're a series of books that aren't really tied to each other, what would be a good one to start with/are there any mediocre or skippable books?
They are more or less in order, and while the plots are mostly independent of each other (besides some characters recurring and events being referenced), I’d still recommend reading them in order. Remember Phlebas is not the best book or the best introduction to The Culture, but it gives a bit of insight what Banks was going for. Player of Games will blow your mind though, and then it only gets better.
Ok sounds good. Ordered the first couple. That'll give me something to do with downtime at work. Appreciate the response.
As someone said above, don't get put off by Consider Phlebas. I think it's an objectively bad book, and it almost put me off. Absolutely full of sci-fi tropes and clichés. The rest are fantastic though. Player of Games got me hooked, and from there it's tough to finish anything else until you've finished them all!
I'd start with Consider Phlebas or Player of Games, they're a good look at the universe. If you don't mind unorthodox storytelling, though, Use of Weapons was my introduction and is absolutely one of my favorite books ever, not just of the culture series. I haven't really found any of them mediocre, they've all been pretty solid.
Player of Games is commonly considered the best introduction. I would consider all of them good, though many are very different from each other.
Consider Phlebas should be read before Look to Windward, and Use of Weapons should be read before Surface Detail. Inversions should not be the first book you read. The ideal entry points are probably Consider Phlebas (first published and the first chronologically, I think), and Player of Games.
As the other commenter mentioned, don't start with Consider Phlebas, it is a *rough* read. Ultimately a great book, but it is basically what would happen to a ragtag group of space adventurers if they didn't have plot armour. Of the ones I read I liked *Excession* and *Hydrogen Sonata* a lot.
You could always join us.over at r/theculture. Unsurprisingly, we discuss it a fair bit over there. Lol
This is where you want to go! r/theculture
I honestly suspect void shields were described before trapdoors.
Use of Weapons (I think the first mention of them) came out in 1990. That was only a few years into Warhammer 40k existing, so I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't defined voidshields this way yet.
What makes you say that? Trapdoors first appear in Use of Weapons, which came out in 1990, I don't recall seeing any description of how void shields operate in the 1987 Rogue Trader, so do you have a different source from the 80s showing that?
I figured _Adeptus Titanicus_ could be it. It is from 1988 apparently but I’m not sure shields are described in it.
Adeptus Titanicus predates Use of Weapons and although I can't remember the descriptions from back then you've got to assume void shields had something to do with suking in energy/shells and dumping them somewhere else just by the name
The question is, did the titans in Adeptus Titanicus actually have void shields back then, as opposed to a generic energy shield? As I said, the technology is not mentioned in Rogue Trader. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Adeptus Titanicus, so I can't check.
*Adeptus Titanicus* uses the term "void shield", but the description thereof does not mention the warp at all. >The Void Shields are a Titan's main line of defence. A Shield absorbs damage until its Void Shield Generator (VSG) becomes overloaded.
So, a typical energy shield, then. Which leads me to conclude that Banks indeed came up with it first.
From down thread it looks like the idea may have come from Judge Dredd, actually. And Dredd is definitely in the 40K DNA (looking at you, Adeptus Arbites).
I may be misremembering but to me titans have always had void shields.
You could also make the assumption that they're shields for use in the void of space, if we're just going by the name.
They were used on titans...
another thing that i love about that series is that the Culture also weaponises the other part of the process - that being teleporting nukes (or more commonly antimatter warheads) from their own ships directly inside enemy spacecraft
I like the fact that they usually don't need to because effectors and gridfire exist.
Well, the ship’s Mind would notice.
I believe its from judge Dredd, where the shields protecting the megacities shunt the nuclear war heads they fire at each other into a parallel dimension. Specifically one where humanity lives in harmony in a peaceful utopia where everyone lives in bliss until the bombs meant for a shittier world start to fall.
That's hilarious lol
Judge Dredd does stuff like that a lot. They know that their universe and society sucks, and they have no problem inflicting that suck on other universes and societies. It would be like if anyone outside of Cegorach was genre savvy in 40k and just started shunting their suck to Star Trek for shits and giggles.
I feel like you meant to say commoragh here lol
Why would the assholes at Commoragh be genre savvy?
Because Cegorach isn't a place and isn't full of suck so how can you be outside of it? Edit: sorry I understand better now, my English isn't so good at times 😅
Judge Dredd Apocalypse war, Megacity one has hidden global SUPER-DUPER NUKES - and dredd launches all at East Meg One, even if 1 hits land then its all over. EM1 knows this and uses a dimensional shield(takes the entire EM1 power grid to power it) to shift all to a peaceful world, nuclear explosions cover the entire globe! (I assume the missiles GPS system is screwed up after the shift/or world has no GPS, so they fly random)
That's only ever in the Apocalypse War mega-epic and it's only East Meg 1 that has it. It requires an insane amount of power to use and is only used to defend them against Mega City 1s TAD retaliation. The TADs are shunted over to the peaceful utopian Earth and annihilate it.
There's a similar concept for missile defence in Judge Dredd (all the way back in 82) where the Soviets just shift all the incoming American nukes into another dimension. IIRC they end up destroying a peaceful utopian planet somewhere, lol.
The idea is very old. i remember it from perry Rhodan, which was popular in 1960.
Nothing is original, welcome to humanity. We all draw water from the same old well.
I'd say only \~65%
You understand pretty much every idea humanity has had is exactly just that. Ideas built upon ideas. Right?
It's not consistent, sometimes they're described as basically teleporting to the Warp, sometimes they displace *energy* of attack into the Warp. Sometimes character can batter their fists into impenetrable Small Scale Void Shield without their fists going to the Warp, like in one of Gaunt's books
Most void shields are described as having some kind of mass/speed/force threshold below which things can pass through without triggering it. But it’s also very inconsistently described.
>Zhyte looked back in time to see the void shield engage across the doorway, chopping Manahide and Bothris in two, along with their .50, which exploded. It was quite amazing. A boiling fog of blood and atomised metal. Men falling apart, torsos and skulls cut vertically like scientific cross-sections. He saw smoothly severed white bone, sectioned brains, light coming in through Manahide's open mouth as the front of his face and body spilled forward on the other side of the shield. >Two sliced portions of human meat slumped back next to him, their edges curled and sizzling from the void field. >Zhyte looked up and saw Belthini trapped on the other side of the shield, his image distorted and blurred by the energy. He was shouting, desperate, *hammering his fists*. No sound came through. The Guns of Tanith >Small-Scale Void Shields >Void shields can be used to provide personal protection, although these are often reserved for special uses such as elite Enforcer squads on certain assignments. They are also frequently used to protect openings such as windows or doors.[2] Besides giving off a distinct ozone smell, void shields protecting these openings create a barrier as solid as any wall. Lexicanum That's what I meant
Sure it’s a definitely a thing. Like I said they’re described in many ways by many authors
It seems to be sort of a tuned thing rather than a hard rule of the universe. Presumably it's to let light ships fly around larger ones with shields up or for auxiliaries to follow Titans closely.
ALSO in the gaunts books there was a void shield in a doorway that they were afraid of touching because it cut off anything that touched it.
Ion shields work like that. Void shields shunt stuff into the warp.
Any specific place?. Or just random dumps a huge missile into say nurgles garden?
One thing that's not talked about much, is the warp has different "layers" like the ocean (kinda, it's all n-dimensional weirdness). The shallow warp is just below reality, and is where Tau warp-drives dip briefly. It's also where teleporters send you through, and where most pyskers draw energy from. Reality is right next door and relatively easy to perceive from that side. Few demons hang around there most of the time, so it "relatively" safe - but things (like pyskers) can draw their attention up to you if you're not careful. Think of it like paddling in the shallows next to a beach. Then there's the medium-depth Warp. This is what most people think of as the 40k Warp - away from reality, easy to get lost if you can't see the Astronomicon. Lots of demons, mostly unaligned, swarm here hunting each other and the souls of mortals that sink into it. Finally there's the Deep-Warp. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. This is where the Chaos Gods (both the big four, and the lesser known ones) have their realms. The demons here are almost all aligned with a God. During a warp-storm, the deeper layers can rise up and overtake the higher ones, or even overlay reality (such as in the Eye of Terror). So in the case of void-shield, they dump the energy of attacks into the shallows of the Warp. And unless a demon got very unlucky (or pissed off Tzeentch) then it is unlikely to go anywhere weird.
I now see Tzeemch looking extra pissed at a random keeper of secrets, then smiles and softly shakes his head, plucks him up, then places through a dimenion gate to a random spot in the warp and pats its head, then goes *"wait here for a moment"*. Seconds later a warhead plows through said deamon.
I forget the exact source, but where the Chaos gods reside isn't even the deepest part. Allegedly there are places that even they do not dare go. But I think where all of this comes from is older lore and may have been retconned
I know that idea does exist in AoS (and it's all meant to be the same Warp so I can only assume it's also true for 40K). The Chaos Gods are regarded as relatively young Warp entities in the grand scheme of things (they still play with their food).
Is it not literally called the Deep Warp? I always thought it was a thing in 40k
The concept of deeper parts of the warp was a thing, I don't believe the actual term, Deep Warp, was ever actually used, just a shorthand people came up since we never got a concise term for it.
The Well of Eternity is where Kairos Fateweaver got chucked in by Tzeentch, yes
>Tau warp-drives There's no Tau FTL on Ba Sing Se
The retcon hit again, Tau has Warp FTL again, but only starting in M42 now.
The warp as an ocean really is the best analogy. Warp capable ships are submarines diving into hell to travel around. During the siege, Terra is consistently described as sinking into the warp as if it were a ship being pulled underneath the waves.
And then there's the deeper layers of the Warp where even the Chaos Gods dare not tread.
> During a warp-storm, the deeper layers can rise up and overtake the higher ones, or even overlay reality (such as in the Eye of Terror). That would imply that void sheilds used during such a storm could send stuff deep down.
Thanks for the description. You made me realize one of my favorite series took even more from 40k than I originally thought.
Isn't there a "deeper" warp where even the main 4 don't like to "go"
It talks about it a bit in titandeath. Anything coming in contact with the shield with too much energy is shunted into the warp, including some blood angels jump marines who don't slow down enough. The limit on void shields isn't the shield itself but how much the machinery can shunt into the warp. If shields are kept up too long against too much firepower the machines get overwhelmed and blow out
They do also sometimes atomize the thing hitting them before it is displaced into the warp.
They also disburse any energy from the projectile, be it thermal, kinetic, sonic, etc., which means energy weapons pose an even funnier hypothetical. A demon could just be sleeping in its little demon house when the full volume of a Noise Marine concert blasts it off its little demon bed.
I believe they used to be just energy shields back in the day. Same as Gellar shields were just shields and both were nice holdovers from humanity's better days when they solved so much with science and tech instead of religion and superstition. Then GW and a lot of the authors went through a phase where they felt that couldn't be a thing any more and we couldn't have things that were exactly what they appeared to be. No, everything had to grimdarked or grimderped up in an ongoing arms race to make the setting as over the top and stupid as possible. So void shields now shunt damage into the warp for some reason and all without causing fucking warp incursions some how. And Gellar fields now aren't tech but the suffering of tortured psykers. Totally ignoring that humanity developed them at a time when science ruled all, psykers were far rarer and and the warp was far calmer.
I believe the author mentioned that the tortued psyker Geller Field isn't meant to show how all Geller Fields work, just how one variant did.
Incorrect about the Gellar field. As the only person in this subreddit who has taken the time to comb through dozens of GW source books and drafted a 33 page master post of Gellar field and Gellar field applications, the Gellar field requiring a comatose psyker to function is not "grimderp" but an in universe workaround towards generating Gellar fields without the computational power of sophisticated AI or the ironkin way finders of the Leagues. Gellar fields are key to Imperial and even DAoT history, as the discovery of the Gellar energy wavelength is a discovery that predates the DAoT, and leveraging the science behind this to weave Gellar waves into a barrier is soemthing that would've only been possible with AI capable of using aerythmetical code to manipulate the warp, or without the AI, a comatose psyker whose soul, after being forcibly subjected to a battery of nightmares, becomes malleable enough to weave Gellar waves into the Gellar Field
Yeah this is dumb and wasn’t needed
i think its cool and adds to the effect, so clearly its up to how you see it personally
Misery for the sake of misery is pretty lame. It's always been a weak point of 40k. They have a huge and dark universe with lots of suffering. We don't need to add superfluous torture to it. "*Our crew on the lower decks were cut in half by demons who came aboard when our shields failed...*" is perfectly fine. We don't need to add "*...because we didn't whip a poor boy hard enough for a brief second."* to it.
Maybe we could add some more. All plasma guns could just be warp shooters instead.
being a sarcastic and smug twat won't get you anywhere in life
How is this needlessly grimdark? It's just something cool and original to differentiate the void shields from simple boring energy shields
Literally explained in the original comment.
Yea. Classic case of grimderp, twist established IU science or canon to suit someone’s whimsy. Like that Erda nonsense.
This is not exactly accurate. They shut the _energy_ of whatever hits them into the warp. I.e. if you shoot a void shield with a shell, the shell will detonate against the shield and the resulting energy dumped into the shield will be dumped into the warp. So a small void shield will absolutely not withstand a macrocannon shell. The shell will detonate against the shield and completely overwhelm the shield generator's ability to shunt the resulting energies into the warp. The shield will not just shunt the whole unexploded shell into the warp.
I wonder how this works, like this seems kind of logically inconsistent with how the warp works with 40k. Like the imperium just has tech that can generate a warp phenomenon like that? I was under the impression you needed like something with a soul and emotions to manifest a warp phenomenon, like for example the grey knights aegis is like a mini warp based shield that is manifested as a combination of the psyker and theit power armor working together and they can further compound their shields by sticking together or standing near a grey knights dreadnaught or something. Like chaos can make ports out of nothing because chaos is literal the warp manifesting itself in realspace. Like evem the astronomicon requires a psyker to make it work, the emporer, malcador, magnus, whatever. My impression is that knight pilots are not psykers, the way the throne connects their soul to the machine spirit is like a different sort of thing. If void shields are like a warp thing, it seems like you should have a psyker or something involved.
Warp drives for example work without a soul. Vortex grenades also create miniature warp rifts without the use of souls as far as i know. All sorts of teleporters also work by tunneling through the warp and you can use it without a psyker as an operator or cargo that has souls.
I was under the impression teleportation, specifically within imperial contexts, was done by psykers, where that be like librarians teleporting themselves or like on board ship navigstors or atropaths or something teleporting terminators into the fray. Certainly the mechanical interpretation of pskyer heavy armies, namely tsons and GK, seem to imply they are teleporting themselves and others all over the place with their own psychic powers. I was under the impression the psychic ships crew also sort of used a combination of their powers and the ships to open warp portsls to enter the ship into the warp and out and also sprt of manifesting the geller field again as a team effort between human psykers on the ship and the ship itself. It seems weird to have like a warp phenomenon based grenade. Like its a cool metal AF thing, but then like why not just have a "smite gun"? It also just seems logically inconsistent with the ides that the warp is this other dimension full of souls and emotions that is kind of only accessible from real space by people with souls and emotions that can sort of breach the barrier. Like how would a grenade even do a warp thing? Is it like a particularly emotional explosive or something lol? Like its one thing to have a machine that helps a psyker kind of channel their thoughts and emotions to do a specific thing, but it seems like you need that soul and thise emotions to at least prime the ignition on the warp phenomenon.
Nope, none of these use astropaths or psykers. A lot of terminators can do miniature short distance warp jumps with the teleleporter in their armor. The tau have experimented with warp drives even though their race cant have psychers. The warpdrives on ships and spacehulks can still jump them into and out of the warp even when the whole crew is dead. There are guns firing warp energy. They are called D-weapons and were created by the eldar, but they are usable by non psykers, if they can operate eldar technology. These mostly use a similar principles to vortex grenades and use unguided warp energy to do damage. You seem to have a slight misconception about how exactly the warp works. Technology can couse warp effects to manifest, but it cant shape warp energy. You couldnt for example create a D- Weapon that shoots the psychic power smite. To cast smite you have to first conjour warp energy and then shape it with your thoughts into physical force. Warp- tech can only use/create unguided or unshaped warp energy.
You can utilize the warp with technology but it's usually not very controlled or long lived. For anything more complicated than cracking a hole into the warp or sending raw energy into it to dissipate, you need a psyker. Psykers and navigators aren't the ones that dive ships into the warp. They control it and guide it, but warp drives just brute force smash a hole in the wall between real space and hell to sail through. The hole closes up afterwards because it's an uncontrolled and unsustainable rift.
Maybe it's just raw warp energy that's channeled by these machines. However, it takes a conscious soul to refine that energy into more interesting forms like daemons. Just spitting some fanon here.
Those exist, but they're not void shields. Conversion fields (which absorb energy and convert it to light) like iron halos generate and the Ion shields knights use would be examples of more traditional energy (manipulation) based shields in 40k.
I’m picturing the fight in Thor 2.
The first time I realized that they did this was in Gaunts Ghosts where they literally say "shunt into the void"
No wonder they're always so pissed off in the warp.
To be fair, they are actually described as absorbing the energy of the attacks, energy that is then displaced into the immaterium. Tuning a void shield to absorb as wide a range of incoming attacks without weakening the entire projection is an exercise in mystic-science. A nuke hitting a void shield will still generate an earth-shattering kaboom, but the energy that should have gone into glassing the titan-grade war-engine inside the shield, will instead aggravate that already agitated adjacent alternate dimension. Probably leaving a hilariously proportioned blast silhouette as it does so. It's unclear if human use of void shields is MORE exciting for daemons than the emotions that we generate during warfare, but it is a thought. Seeing as both people and dramatically slower moving projectiles can pass through voids unfazed (unless the shield is tuned specifically to prevent them doing so), it's likely that most sand just falls through, perhaps with a bit less kinetic energy. And smelling somewhat of ozone. And sulphur.
So normally only the psychic connections agitate the warp. But if you’re putting the energy directly into it, will you get nuclear blast demons eventually?
The answer is yes but its complicated. Current lore is that its not just psychic beings or emotions, but actions themselves also empower Chaos and Daemons. A Necron lord decapitating a Custodes in 1v1 combat and then cheering for their victory will still give power to Khorne, is a direct example given in the arks of omen. And in the lore something that is unfeeling like a sword can still develop a warp connection if enough people believe/associate that sword with an idea. A family blade passed down through the ages with a history of being used to kill your families enemies would develop a presence in the warp, because "ideas" and "associations" have power in the warp, even if the object in question couldn't create those ideas on its own. So nuclear weapons as a general concept? Yes, there are probably daemons born of nuclear fallout and warfare. There may very well be a pair of twin Daemons of Khorne or Nurgle that were born out of little boy and fat man being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The real issue with nukes (and explosives in general) is that they tend to blow up. hard to have a lasting idea and impression of something when it self-terminates. You see a lot of Demonic swords and armour, not a lot of demoic grenades and land mines.
Fat Man & Little Boy just sounds like a Great Unclean One & Nurgling.
There goes my headcanon for a 40k holy hand grenade.
What if all of Terra believed that food entered the anus and exited the mouth. Would it come to fruition?
No, because much like Orkz, you don't rewrite the rules of reality with your warp hax you just use warp hax to empower/circumvent/twist the rules of reality. Not even the Emperor himself could use warp hax to make you eat with your ass and shit out your mouth. Well, using ambient belief and faith anyway. I'm sure he could go full Basilio Fo and invert your intestines in a lab if he really wanted to, or use his massive power to rebuild your body to allow such a thing. But just by believing in it really hard? No, absolutely not. Warp hax is a hand tipping the scales of reality, it cannot completely change the laws of creation so much as it just influences them.
No, Humans aren't Orks.
I think one of the best explanations is in the culture vs 40k crossover fanfic someone wrote where the described the warp as having universal pattern recognition and amplification properties moderated through conscious observation.
>generate an earth-shattering kaboom Your comment was being read in a normal internet person comment voice up until that point. From that point on you sounded like Marvin Martian in my head.
> Tuning a void shield to absorb as wide a range of incoming attacks without weakening the entire projection is an exercise in mystic-science. EM, Thermal, Kinetic, Explosive.
Depending on what level of physics you did, Thermal and Explosive energy are just types of kinetic energy.
Eve Physics (it's a vidya game reference)
Jiggle Physics. As close to perpetual motion as game design can get us.
These bozos just need to fit a reactive armour hardener and stop worrying about the tuning.
I wonder if there’s ever been an incident of that displaced energy disrupting something physical in the warp. Like overloading a ships systems as it transits.
I'm not sure how you could ever be certain of the cause and effect within the Realm of Chaos. It is after a dimension of pure energy in the first place. It sort of adds more nuance to the question about whether humans had a larger part to play in the disruption of the Warp during the Age of Strife and the Fall of the Ancient Eldar Empire than simply the emergence of human psykers. Was it an abstract kind of disruption (humanity's swift expansion has imposed a new status quo on the galaxy that the existing races adapt to poorly)? Or incredibly direct (human tech literally punching holes in real-space for convenience is damaging the fabric of space and time at a level not seen since the Imprisoning Wars)?
My gut - a little from column a, a little from column b.
A bit doesn't make sense to me, I've read the gaunts ghosts novels and it always seems like a void shield can stop people from moving between rooms, but you say slow moving people can get through them so I'm confused now as to why they didn't just walk through the shields. There's also instances where people get cut in 2 by them when they activate, which is guess fine, but doesn't make sense to me now lore wise.
I’m going to guess that the field can be tuned to different power levels; ranging from stop a nuke/macro cannon shot, to stop even fine dust. But generally in warfare I reckon you’d only tune them to deal with wherever you’re going to encounter. A Titan doesn’t need to fear a person walking around it (because they’d have to be insane or just a idiot) but it does need to stop a tank shell or plasma shot.
i remember that unit of heavy troopers got cut in half from void shield generators installed in doorways. I don't recall them mentioning it being tuned oddly. there is also a story during one of the siege of terra books where they are dogfighting either near or in a void shield and ships being destroyed by it. seems there are a lot of different applications
Now I imagine a Inquisitor within a Titan and smelling sulfur and going "hmm... I smell heresy"
Yeah, in *Titandeath* Sanguinius and his Guard fly down to attack a traitor Imperator titan. They had to time their jump just right because, the primarch notes, if they hit the void shields at the speed of their descent they'll trigger them. >Sanguinius folded back his wings, sending himself into a steep, rapid dive. The Imperator *Axis Mundi* grew before him. It wore a face that boldly proclaimed the sensibilities of its new masters – a skull, weeping tears of blood carved from faceted gemstones the size of a Space Marine. >Las-beams flicked blind needle-jabs. Graceful arcs of tracer bullets curved towards him. A single hit to his wing and he would fall into the broil of fire and death. There were none, though projectiles filled the space around him. >I do not die here today, he thought. Within his helm he gritted his teeth. Welters of data spread themselves over his helmplate. Most urgent to his suit cogitator was the strength of *Axis Mundi*’s void shields, and it presented the facts of this front and centre, ornamented with red runes that promised imminent disaster, with pertinent numerical details in large amber digits to prove the warnings’ veracity. According to the systems of his golden plate, the void shields were still engaged, and at high levels of potency. Sanguinius was coming in too fast. He would trip their displacement reaction. If he were fortunate, he would be atomised as his being was displaced into the warp. If he were not, he would arrive there alive. >‘I do not die here today,’ he whispered. *Titandeath*
*Sanguinius doing mad, impossible shit knowing full well when he'll die* Raldoran on the verge of catastrophic heart attack for the entire duration of the Siege: Sanguinius, no! Sanguinius: Sanguinius, yes!
Sanguinius always yes!
Wait, what day is it?
Prophecy protected Sanguinius is ridiculously OP. He literally has plot armor.
In conclusion, being doomed is a land of contrasts.
yea hes literally the most powerful being in the whole HH because unlike say sigismund who has plot srmour because he exists post heresy, sanguinius has in universe plot armour, he is invicible because he need to play his part but he knows that and tbh its kinda cool they cooked with that one
I think its really fun Sanguinius realized he had plot armor and ran with it. Seeing him tear through everything was a treat, but bittersweet
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Vortex_torpedo The opposite of a Void Shield. A vacuum torpedo that sucks every into the warp. Vortex weapons are wild.
The laws of physics as we know them do not function in the warp so anything that gets shunted into it probably just immediately dissipates into the roiling sea of psychic energy that is the empyrean. Or maybe the daemons just surround the megaton explosion and eat it like it’s a giant piece of bread or something idk.
Maybe that's where the traitors got their munition. Maybe there's a daemon that makes a living selling a whole load of unexploded ordinances it fished in the warp for sacrifices or something.
Traitors get their ammunition from raiding Imperials/other traitors or from deals with the Dark Mechanicum in the Eye of Terror. If they are willing to bargain with daemons then they may also acquire weapons forged from unreality by contacting the Forge of Souls within the warp.
Skarbrand hate sand! Is coarse! Get everywhere! Skarbrand hate!
It's like some WH40K version of a Disney film - Happy little nurgling bobbing around the cesspool, considering what to do today. Its always felt out of place compared to its brothers and sisters, who were so keen to fight and battle... All Little Nurgy wanted was a hug from Pappa. Why didn't he love them? :-( What had they done wrong... and then, a plan came to them in a flash of puss! "I KNOW what I'll do!" Little Nurgy was, for the first time, filled with a sense of love, purpose and... yes, even hope! "I'm going t \[footage missing\]
in some infantismal part of the lore, theres a non-0 chance that a void shield opens into the warp someday, and instead of catching the projectile, out comes a Volcano Lance instagibbing the fool that dared shoot the titan
Poor nurgling. That sand would dry him up like a slug. 😢
[Check out Warp Missiles](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp_Missile) I always found the thought hilarious that you're a daemon just doing your daemon things in the warp when all of a sudden a missile just appears out of nowhere, and if you don't get out of the way, the crew that targeted it in the materium is just like "well I guess that missile didn't make it, fire another one"
You know, that actually explains why Chaos keeps invading the Imperium and hates the Emperor so much. If someone treated my dimension as a dumping site for everything from sand to nuclear missiles, I'd probably moderately dislike them too.
Void Shields are one of my favourite tech in 40k, or science fiction in general. They are a big reason conventional WMDs don't work in 40k, and things like atomics, meteorites, and relativistic missiles never show up in large amounts. Void Shields simply don't care about the power of the attack, it just needs enough energy to "activate" and then the attack is simply teleported partially into Hell regardless of strength. You can't Nuke a Titan or City in 40k as a simple solution, as it can take months to overload the voids without specialised tools. It makes so much of 40k (sort of) make sense. Everyone has access to Void Shields. So everyone have to plan around them; Space Battles becomes close quarters brawls since you need a quantity of mass to overload the Voids instead of super high-speed projectiles. City siges become more medival style castles because you need to walk through the shield to utilise any amount of artillery or ranged weapons. Not to understate that this is still a technology powered by Hell itself. I think Void Shields add a lot to the setting...
Not as hilarious as the shield Orks use. Dont they essentially fly around on space rocks and no kne actually knows how they survive?
Roks are kinda safe. They have shields and air and that's really all you need.
Some cultist in the eye of terror having a hell of a time with a freshly flayed bunch of bodies being hung up, only to have the specimens get ruined as they all get sandblasted.
Nurglings are doing their happy-ring-dance, singing and giggling in Nurgle's Garden. Metric-fuck-ton of super hot sand ruins their joy.
Peter F. Hamilton loves to use different type of gate or portal technology in his books. In his Salvation Sequense trilogy he had something similar to void shields, used on missiles to make them pretty much impossible to shoot down. He also had a concept for using them for propulsion, where one end of the gate is dropped into a sun and then only opening the other end a tiny bit and then use it as a rocket. He also used the same method for superweapons, drop one gate in a sun and then open the other end fully once one of the aforementioned missiles had penetrated an enemy ship or installation.
To add to the horror of the warp, imagine a merchant voidship just cruising, doing its best not to be graped with lemon juice and vinegar by the aether, just to receive a random city leveling weapon strike from no where. Just boom. Fakked.
inb4 the warp isn't even inherently dangerous, it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's dangerous, because the imperium of man's collective void shield use was enough to turn it in a garbage dump of explosives
'May I intodruce you to my void litter bin?'
This is also why Distortion weapons are so funny. Just sending chunks of tanks and soldiers into some demons breakfast
Oh heck, this makes me think of something I've got to post on r/40kOrkScience . Because now I'm just imagining Orks throwing Gretchin at void shields and laughting even more than before.
Had this thought as well when I first learned how voids work. Funny stuff.
The thing that never made sense to me is why void shields are one way only. Every other path to the warp is a two way interaction. There's risk involved with using the warp. But void shields are a perfect one-way portal with no downsides. Kind of points to it being a mistake to have make the work like that at all. They should have just been energy shields.
I imagine anything whose attention was caught by the rift opened with the void shield also gets exploded by whatever the void shield opened the rift to divert.
https://youtu.be/IcJ-dxDKccw?si=QsnCqT2CEZJcROOd
Poor nurgling
What's crazy is if you go slow enough you can bypass them. That's why fighters and torpedoes are the threats they are (taken down by turret ratings instead)
Maybe that's the real reason chaos seems to have such a hate boner for humanity; nothing ruins a feast of souls like a surprise fusillade from a macro cannon battery
Oh, so that my also be a reason why some ships don't survive Warp travel.
So that’s how Terra lost oceans! Tsunamied those against void shields sandstorm style
I'm just imagining a line of Titans advancing on some Chaos Space Marine, their leader orders them to fire all of their guns at them, meanwhile in the Warp, Khorne or Tzeentch or whoever is just chilling and a bunch of Bolter rounds just start flying around and they're just like "WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUUUUCK-"
Dont they have a bit where that War-Biker-Boss flies through the void shield of a titan and bursts into flames, but still lives to comet into the cockpit and kill the Princeps??
It reminds me of the shields that the Sov City had in the Judge Dredd apocalypse war
Take it whit a pinch but im not sure the other dimension is the warp, if i recall correct is just another dimension, but it never state it was the warp.
https://youtu.be/IcJ-dxDKccw?si=QsnCqT2CEZJcROOd
I love my displacer fields and OG Shokk Attak Guns 💪
Tbf a mere megaton warhead means nothing in the warp, as the Eye of Terror novel tells how greater daemons in the warp are casual solar system busters, and that some are so powerful that they can contort the raw stellar mass of dozens of stars like putty. A mere megaton warhead isn't doing shit in the warp
From what I’ve read, they’re less teleporters of matter and more so like wireless charging banks. They basically transfer energy from the real universe into the warp. The energy from a nuclear explosion would cause an energy release “in” the warp and thus it’s quite likely that demons enjoy feeding on void shields absorbing their own attacks.
The Warp tends to be a bit denser than interstellar space, but it's not like a mosh pit. It's still mostly empty unless something has bothered to go a pretty long way to shower in the splash from your void shields.
This why the chaos gods are such dicks, except nurgle since he loves everyone so much
He forced his love on some people, too, though
he rape-y fasho