Human Technology in 40K

Of all the subjects in 40k, the state and approach to technology shown by the majority of humanity is difficult to accurately describe fully. This partly is due to it rarely being the prime focus of much of the narrative and partly due to much of the early history of humanities’ technological development being lost to history and millennia. That being said I will endeavour to present what I have put together as clearly as possible.

Almost nothing concrete is known about humanities early expansion into space, and subsequent colonisation of much of the galaxy following the discovery of navigators in around M20. What is beyond doubt however is that much of humanity was extremely technologically advanced at this point, with much of their culture focused toward the continual refinement and improvement of technological excellence, to the point it is implied that they were at least able to compete with the near god-like level of technology displayed by the post-scarcity eldar empire at this time. Such examples of this advanced technology include fully sentient AIs and weapons that were able to create artificial singularities.


Such was the level of technological development of humanity at this time that almost all pieces of hardware, no matter how simple, made usage of some kind of advanced computer programing in their operation, displaying levels of self-awareness/self-functionality from near non-existent (like modern computer systems) to beyond human level. Most human space vessels at this time for example were mostly controlled by a fully sentient AI. It is implied that very little actual innovation, maintenance or operation of human technology at this time was actually performed by humans themselves, with all such tasks being delegated to AIs of varying degrees of intelligence. However this high level of technological sophistication and near total reliance on AIs meant that very few humans actually now understood how to correctly build or operate most of their more advanced pieces of technology. This led to problems when new human colonies were being established on ever more distant worlds. Without frequent access to the AI driven infrastructure of more developed human space due to long and often dangerous warp travel times, new colonists found it difficult to establish and grow new colonies into civilizations the equal of those from which they had come, simply due to lack of advanced technical understanding amongst most of the colonists.
The solution to this problem was pioneered on Mars (the home of human technological development since the very earliest days of space colonization) with the development of the Standard Template Construct (STC) system. What exactly an STC consists of varies considerably over time and space, making analysing this concept quite confusing. However what seems to be apparent is that Mars held some kind of vast digital repository of all human technological knowledge, conveniently broken down into simple to follow plans that all new colony ships seeking to colonise distant worlds would take a copy of. This collection of plans was known as the STC database.
Like near everything at this time the STC database copies’ the new colonists took with them seemed to always incorporate some kind of semi-intelligent AI. When colonists desired to build a piece of technology for a specific purpose, all one would have to do is input a request for that piece of technology into the AI along with a list of materials/components available and the AI would in short order spit out a series of simple to follow instructions/blueprints to construct that piece of technology using only what materials were available. In this way colonists with little to no knowledge of the exact science or engineering were able to re-create quite advanced pieces of technology fit for purpose. Again due to this fact and the oft times limited resources presented to the AI, most of the designs generated were quite simple and hard wearing by the standards of wider humanity, suited to the harsh conditions, limited resources and limited knowledge of early colonists. As many of the challenges faced by early colonists were often very similar in nature, the STC blueprints provided to the colonists by the AI were often very similar/identical across many different worlds (known as ‘patterns’ in M41), with designs similar to a land raider or rhino being a common example of a very easy to build and maintain agricultural/transport vehicle for harsh environments. Many of these machines produced from STC designs themselves contained digital machinery incorporating some kind of AI, again to help aid human operators with little/no understanding of the machine they had produced.
It is also clear that some (if not all, though this is not known) STC databases and attendant AIs came with some kind of ‘assembler’ (also unhelpfully referred to as just an STC), which acted like some kind of giant 3d printer/self-automated factory which could spit out STC designs with no human input at all other than shoving in raw construction materials.

Over the long millennia of humanities’ expansion into space, a huge amount of their technology grew to be mostly derived from an STC base. While this was extremely convenient for a long period of time it proved to be a massive weakness when the AIs that operated nearly all of their technology decided to rebel. Most well-known of these AI rebels were the men of iron, who acted as extremely deadly robot foot soldiers, who until recently had performed menial tasks for humans or acted as soldiers in their place.
In one fell swoop almost all of humanities advanced technology was swept out from underneath them, with even some of the most ‘simple’ pieces of human technology potentially being corrupted by viruses and information warfare used by both humans and the rebel AIs during the war. Though humanity was ultimately victorious in this conflict (leading to the banning of all free thinking AI forever afterwards) the damage to their stellar domain was immeasurable. Nearly every complete STC database (including the original on Mars) was corrupted or damaged. The few STC plans that were able to survive the catastrophe were those few plans that certain individuals had the foresight to make separate individual or multiple hard copies of; most of these being only those pieces of technology vital for survival with most of the more exotic and niche STCs being destroyed/forgotten. Even many of these ‘hard copies’ tended to be recorded in a simple digital format and thus still liable to data corruption, leaving many of these remaining print out STCs either unreadable or incomplete.
The age of strife from the formation of slaanesh in the warp followed the war with the men of iron, further cutting off the now heavily damaged human colonies from eachother. With so few humans now possessing the technical knowledge to re-produce advanced technology from scratch, many worlds regressed to barbarism, with various factions fighting over scraps of advanced technology they had little or no understanding of and no hope of re-producing from scratch. Those worlds who weathered the storm a little better were sometimes able to get by by merely re-producing those few complete STC blueprints they had been fortunate enough to be left with, again often with little to no technical/scientific understanding of the devise they were blindly re-producing. Only on a very few human colonies did technology continue to progress significantly after this point.

Mars itself was damaged just as badly as any other world during the age of strife with the terraforming devises used to sustain the planet’s artificial atmosphere being destroyed, once again reducing mars to the red wasteland it had been in the distant past. The few survivors huddled in the remaining radiation shelters but with little knowledge of how to maintain the complex atmospheric and life support machinery many of these holdouts too quickly fell. The few that survived were thanks to the few surviving individuals who held onto a few basic scraps of mechanical knowledge and were thus able to keep the life support systems maintained. A cult began to form around these individuals, the cult of the Omnisiah, a divine representation of all knowledge. Those who still possessed knowledge, especially mechanical knowledge, were able to survive thanks to it. Soon knowledge itself and everything derived from it started to be seen as divine, as it is what allowed them to survive when others without it had died. Of course the most divine of all forms of knowledge were complete STCs, the very devises which had enabled their survival. As such the very notion of ‘improving’ or ‘altering’ an STC design came to be seen as heresy (viewed in a similar way to trying to re-write parts of the bible or Quran to ‘improve’ or ‘update’ them) as in their eyes such STC designs were already prefect and sacred relics from a time when humanities’ technological knowledge was magnitudes better than at present. Every machine began to be regarded as containing its own ‘spirit’ which must be respected through regular maintenance and prayers in order to function properly (whether or not the machine actually contained any kind of independent AI programing), as those performing these rites still often had little knowledge as to the exact inner workings of the machines they were revering. Indeed those machines that contained some kind of semi-autonomous system quickly became regarded as those which possessed a particularly ‘strong’ machine spirit and were thus partially guided by it. Those machines which still contained some form of rudimentary yet uncorrupted AI (such as imperial titans, star ships and land raiders) were seen as possessing the very greatest spirits and thus were highly venerated.
Quickly this ‘machine cult’ expanded to absorb all the other remaining factions on mars, undertaking many expeditions into the dangerous AI haunted ancient vaults of mars for STCs. Whilst eventually mars was stabilized and well on its way to becoming a prosperous society once again under the cult, so much knowledge was still lost with many STCs likely to be found on other planets. Fleets were dispatched in the gaps of the ever prevalent warp storms to try and locate these STCs on distant world in the name of the Omnisiah and in so doing established the first independent forge worlds, in imitation of their home of mars. Of course these expeditions only started to make significant gains when combined with the forces of the Emperor’s great crusade, empowered by him to be the imperium’s sole voice in the production and maintenance of technology.
Slowly as ever more worlds were conquered yet more STCs and STC fragments were brought back to mars where they could be studied and combined to produce working and complete STC blueprints. Many STC plans were combined into new plans at this time, creating most of the hardware still used by the imperium to this day, such as fitting newly recovered weapon STC designs onto the existing rhino or leman russ STC. At the same time with ever more discoveries, factions within the mechanicum started to become more ‘liberal’ in their attitude to technology, taking what they had learned from studying innumerable blueprints to try and re-discover the underlying scientific principles which led to their creation and for the first time in millennia start to consider creating entirely new, non STC derived technology. As most of these STC designs recovered still contained a heavy reliance on AI systems some even started research into the outlawed study of AIs.
Any thought to a return to a more technologically enlightened age however was shattered with the horus heresy, with most of the more ‘liberal’ elements of the mechanicum ultimately ending up joining him and becoming corrupted by chaos. Mars itself descended into civil war with the painstakingly re-constructed new STC database becoming heavily corrupted by chaos scrap code. Such corrupted STC plans now rather than simply not working when constructed like the many incomplete STCs collected off world may actually try to attack its constructor directly or indirectly by infecting other ‘clean’ machines with yet more corrupted coding. As such any further expeditions into the ancient vaults of mars to recover more STCs became not just dangerous but near suicidal thanks to chaos corrupted machinery.
Though the dark mechanicum was eventually bested along with horus, a great many of them fled taking a great deal of the complete STC plans with them, yet further reducing the amount of knowledge preserved by the loyalist mechanicum with most of those remaining loyal being the more zealous adherents to the cult mechanicum, now even more vindicated in their distrust of innovation or development of new technology thanks to the data corruption caused by chaos. In the 10k years since, this conservative attitude has only grown more entrenched with most technology becoming stagnant, with the only ‘new’ introductions sanctioned being complete STCs recovered off Mars. The feudal society of the imperium also does little to help this, with individual forge worlds jealously guarding rarer STCs they themselves have access to, to maintain an edge over the others.
This is not to say that all innovation has completely stopped in the current era, only that it is so slow as to only just match the rate at which existing technology is lost. This is because any sort of ‘improvement’ upon an STC based machine (no matter how minor) must be painstakingly tested to ensure that said modification is not ‘harming’ the existing machine spirit. The extremely fundamentalist and dogmatic mechanicum and the byzantine bureaucracy of the often very disparate imperium ensures such a process can take centuries and even then is unlikely to be accepted by some of the most conservative mechanicum factions as ‘non heretical’. Such examples of this ‘controversial innovation’ can be seen in the space marine razorback and several land raider variants. Such ‘improvements’ on imperial STC technology were relatively common in the more liberal days of the great crusade but now only occur once in a blue moon. The goal of the ad mech as it has been since their earliest days on mars is the recovery of an entire and uncorrupted STC database, either in original digital format or in a complete library of separate hard copies. Needleless to say nothing close to this has ever been found.