>A farmer could build fusion reactor without any knowledge of how it works.
Nice fanwank.
STCs do NOT turn dirt into fusion reactors.
They don't let an illiterate build a spaceship.

There are two types of STC, the ones that are the blueprints for building shit and the ones that allowed colonist to do what you claim they do and even then I doubt it's push button receive tractor. But regardless, short answer? No. Long answer? Sort of, but not really.

>>18114134
They provide all the instructions on how to do it but none of the knowledge behind how it works. They do exactly what I said.

>>18114163
>I doubt it's push button receive tractor
I didn't say they could. :\

>>18114189
>I didn't say they could. :\
>A farmer could build fusion reactor
This heavily implies "shovel in dirt, hit 'on' button".
How would this farmer get a hold of the resources to build a fusion reactor?
If the STC says 'coat the inside with 3mm of tungsten, then arrange platinum filaments as shown in diagram 4' the farmer couldn't build it.

>>18114317

But if the STC were a fully autonomous micro-factory, and simply told the farmer what raw materials needed to be dumped into a loading chute before hitting the "on" button, it'd work, right?

Just look at the first Gaunt's Ghosts book. As soon as the STC was activated, it started spitting out Iron Men. It obviously had the raw materials somewhere, and was simply manufacturing them on the final products on the fly.

The STC (the kind AdMech has boners for) contains instructions for everything. EVERYTHING.

So while it doesn't let a farmer poosh butan receev reactor, it has all the steps to go from one to the other.

The other thing is that it was smart enough to take in 'I've got some grox, some wood, and iron' and go from there, helping you with steps to make a refinery, how to survey, all that good stuff.

It has/d everything you need to go from 'shitty feral world' to 'totally ballin' DAoT world'.

And, quite honestly, no, it didn't hurt. Baneblades are fucking awesome. It let humans do crazier science, not this 'scabble frantically and put guns on tractors' sort of thing.

>>18114402
I think that's what it did. It'd be like "Okay, you want a refinery, then you'll need to give me A, B, and C. I'll do the rest"

"The STC system was an evolved computer designed to provide construction details for colonists. Each group of colonists carried such a system. It enabled the colonists to build efficient shelters, generators and transports without any prior knowledge and using almost any locally available materials. For example, the user simply asked how to build a house or a tractor and the computer supplies all the necessary plans."

A Standard Template Constructor was discovered on the planet Menazoid Epsilon1, during the Sabbat Crusade by Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. It produced the legendary Men of Iron. However, the Constructor had been corrupted by the influence of Chaos, and was subsequently destroyed by the Tanith First and Only regiment of the Imperial Guard.

A STC library is located on the planet Hito2. This planet escaped the Warp and was reclaimed by the Imperium. The library was hidden by the local Order of Heavenly Virtues who managed to deceive Imperial agents.

An original STC Titan, a "Castigor-class autonomous bipedal weapons platform, created for fire support and siege operations", was discovered on the planet Chaeroneia3. It was quite larger than an Imperator Titan and of superior technology.

A STC for a combat knife discovered by two scouts. They were hailed as heroes for this discovery, and recieved a planet each. The knife is currently used by 17 chapters of the Adeptus Astartes1.

A STC called Panacea was found on the Imperial Forge World Verdigris IX, a medical miracle that could save billion of human lives from poison and disease, but it was stolen by the Dark Eldar Malys and her Kabal in the Panacea Wars.

You have to remember that the STCs were made by AIs created by AIs created to create AIs (and so forth). They are technology from the most glorious golden age of the empire. They were devices programmed with literally the sum total of all scientific knowledge and knowhow, designed with the sole purpose of being able to teach its users how to produce whatever they wanted to produce using whatever tools and resources were available.

If you went with it with a rock and a stick, and asked for a titan, it would tell you, step by step, how to use that rock and that stick to build a tool to gather more wood and stone to build more tools and buildings and workshops and machines, etc until you've got the infrastructure necessary to build the parts you need to assemble the titan in question.

A functioning STC can and will provide highly specialized, step-by-step instructions capable of taking you from the stone age to high-warp technology, using whatever the fuck you happen to have around.

And a functioning STC knows about all the shortcuts and engineering feets once known in the golden age. It doesnt just produce 'a knife' it produces a knife that the greatest engineering minds (and all of their AIs) of all time could not find a way of improving upon.

>>18115591
Most of what we have now are STC patterns. Printouts of the instructions provided by an STC when asked for something. The pattern is designed for a specific set of locally available resources and infrastructure - they are stopgaps designed to give the colonists the tech they needed to build the infrastructure they needed to get up to proper technology levels. That's why they mostly suck compared to the potential of a functioning STC.

If an item would require lots of colonists needing access to it, they would print out these instructions and distribute them across the colony. Hence, patterns for things like lasguns and spoons are common and not very impressive. But as the tech advanced, fewer copies were required, and so the odds of the item being lost were greater. Few colonies ever went to war. Thats why the baneblade templates are classified as a 'light tank'. No one printed out the templates for 'heavy tank' and so no copies of the instructions have survived.

Gentlemen, if a single functioning STC was discovered and brought to any planet with any sort of half-decent manufacturing infrastructure, it would single-handedly bring the imperium of man out of the darkness. That is why the admechs get bent out of shape about them, that is why they will sacrifice so much at the mearest rumor of one. The day an STC returns to Mars is the day hope returns to mankind.

>>18115205

Note that the Chaeroneia STC was a demon as well, realizing it only existed to create war and destruction and that the most effective way to do that was to aid Chaos.

>>18115700

>The day an STC returns to Mars is the day hope returns to mankind.

Or the day the AdMech finally says, "We don't need your shitty Imperium anymore," and things go all to hell.

If you want to argue about whether the seperation of knowledge did more harm than good, then no.

The STCs were considered a colonial necessity. This was already at a time when AIs were doing most of the great thinking for mankind anyway. What was needed on colonial worlds were workers, not thinkers. They could save philosophy and science for a time when they had cozy universities to think in and robots to do their physical labor.

What they needed was a way of giving colonists all the scince without having to train them all to be eggheads. The STC was the logical choice. Do you blame a book for remembering things for you? No. It is a tool, and a powerful one. The STC was no different. Without it, the colonies of man would have spread stuntedly, slowly. Mankind would not enjoy the domain it does today. Colonies would have failed due to poor education, parts and tech would be inconsistent from planet to planet.

Granted, the war against the men of iron would have played out a little differently, but not by that much. The STCs aren't sapient or anything, they didn't pick sides. They just got used by the robots is all. If anything it gave us a fighting chance.

>>18115205
>An original STC Titan, a "Castigor-class autonomous bipedal weapons platform, created for fire support and siege operations", was discovered on the planet Chaeroneia3. It was quite larger than an Imperator Titan and of superior technology.
>fire support
>support
Oh, dark age of technology humans. Using super better-than-an-imperator Titans in a support role.

>>18115748
And they'd win, seeing as they operate all of the ships, own and operate all Titan legions, run the forgeworlds and now have super tech at their disposal.

you know, i wouldn't mind a 40k game set in the dark age of technology. It would be kinda like exalted: the first age, but grimmer and darker.

>>18115862


But things were noble and bright in the Dark Age of Technology.

Until robots began murdering everyone.

>>18115875
The Dark Age of Technology is what happened after the robots ended their murderspree.

>>18115875
>Until demons began murdering everyone.

>>18115944
>Until aliens began murdering everyone.

>>18116083
Until I ended that shit with by eating a superpower with my vagina and shooting down galaxy spanning warp storms with my cock.

Seriously humans, if it wasn't for you wouldn't even have an Imperium. So why not toss the corpse to the curb and come home to papa Slaanesh. Remember, mommy saved your ass.

Hey, remember how everything was before Slaanesh showed up to the party?

Those were good times.

>>18115748
How is that a problem? The Mechanicum takes over the Sol System and then moves on to control of the galaxy, finally making the place safe for humanity once more.

This thread just made me realize what I want my black crusade climax to be. The discovery and subsequent exploitation of a full blown STC machine.

>>18116496
>Climax of any 40k RPG
>Not the PCs dying cold, alone and forgotten

Question: Could an STC fix the golden throne?

>>18116561
>Climax
>They still gotta do fuckall with that STC, and will probably get their shit pushed in by the Imperium due to sheer production power, and will die forgotten and alone, abandoned by the gods.

>>18116830
Not unless it was designed to make/help make golden thrones. Which is possible considering where the Emprah got his.

>>18116830

STCs weren't around for that nor had the knowledge to create a Golden Throne... They could help to fix it though. A lot of help (Create tools, devices, etc).

>>18116830
Don't think so, seems to be an Emprah original.

I guess what I'm wondering is... do you ask the STC to make you a "Castigor-class autonomous bipedal weapons platform for seige and fire support", and have it explain how to make the closest equivelent with the tools and materials at hand...

or do you ask it for "something big and intimidating to serve in a long-range support position" and have it design something from scratch for you?

Like, did it have a big catalogue of items it could figure out how to make, or could it go so far as to use its knowledge to design patterns for new items and machines as the situation required?

Could you hand it an alien artifact (or a golden throne) and ask it to reverse engineer it?

Does it just know things, or is it heuristic?

>>18116561
Well naturally the STC will be under attack by evil forces of not good, and the party will be forced into combat.

In straight up battle they will almost certainly lose leaving the STC in the hands of the villains.

If they retreat the villains have control over the STC and do X with it to make returning with reinforcements valiant but ultimately futile.

The best solution will likely be sabotage and/or demolition making the STC useless to both the enemy and the Imperium.

Such senseless waste, the saving of humanity lost because of the foolish aspirations of a villainous few. Our war is a quiet sad secret ordeal where great things must be denied to those we strive to protect so that we may prevent even greater atrocity.

Such is the lot of those who follow the acolytes path.

my brain is fapping to this thread but I'm too drunk to probably remember any of it.

imuneo knowledge

yes, I'm immune to gaining knowledge right now captcha

>>18116982
Standard Template part I assume it's from a catalogue.

>>18117001

>Acolytes
>Black Crusade

>>18116982
"STC, we require mobile fire support able to engage targets in high orbit with a minimal logistical footprint, without combined arms support, reccomendation?"
"Avalible resources?"
"Resources listed on data stick in port F."
"Processing... Reccomendation: Castigor-class autonomous bipedal weapons platform for seige and fire support. Production requirements as listed in printout, Estamated time of production using 4 6 hour shifts is three weeks two days twelve hours with 6 hour error ratio."

At least that is how I picture the system functioning at the time.

>>18117001
Do you have any idea what would happen if anyone, for any reason spoke up and said "We destroyed the STC to keep it out of enemy hands!"

The Admechs would slough off ten thousand years of stagnation and tradition soley for the opportunity to invent devices capable of recording the very ideas they would come up with as they tried to invent new and innovative ways to torture those poor fools. And thats just to start.

No, better to let the STC fall into the wrong hands and sacrifice the entire galaxy in war to win it back then to destroy it.

Countless astartes, the skitari legion, the entirety of the titan fleets, every vessel, every world that holds the machine god sacred would put aside all current conflicsts and march at even the slightest proof of a complete STCs survival.

Do you know why the admechs don't like alien technology? It's because they believe that once upon a time mankind knew all there was to know, and that anything else was dangerous. Whats more, mankind put that knowledge in a box and sent it out to the stars. That knowledge lies intact within a complete STC. Perfect and Holy. All that could ever be known, the eternal glorious proof of the perfection and dominion of mankind, safe and sound within the STC, waiting to be redicovered.

To the admechs an STC is as though someone had taken the very Omniscience of God and copied it in perfection. Each patten discovered a reflection of the glorious whole, a proof of the divine. The STC isn't some tool or relic or even holy icon to them. It is their God in floppy-disc form, the perfection and proof of perfection of the greatest of machine spirits, the most high divinity of the machine. It is the face of god.

There is, i think, no limit to what the admechs would do to get their hands on one, from the lowliest enginseer to the highest magos.

Telling them you broke it is not a good idea.

>>18117252

If it's corrupted by chaos it will be destroyed. There has been proof posted earlier that has been quoted from the lexicanum that it has been done before. Better to destroy it then let Chaos have their way with it.

>>18117139
To what degree would the system be able to make due with substitutions though?

I remember hearing something about a pattern for russ tanks that ran on coal because the planet in question lacked the resources to make gas or promethium.

That would imply its capable of working outside the box and figuring things out on its own to some extent, right?

>>18117252
Nah, Macharius blew up a DAoT wonderland and continued to be awesome and not-tortured until the end of his days. You've just gotta be a bad ass.

>>18117139

I don't know what's going on in this thread and by no means to I intent to derail, but I simply must request an explanation/source for that ludicrously awesome image.

If there's anything bigger of that variety, I'd love it as a wallpaper.

>>18117069
Sorry kinda maybe drunker than >>18117003 right now. Such is DMing.

Just reverse everything and change the moral to 'Fucking Corpse-worshipers, always ruining the cool fun stuff.'

>>18117304
well my understanding or at least conception of it is that you tell it what you have and what you want, then the system figures out how to get from point A to point B.

So if your on a planet lacking something critical, it will direct you to develop matter transmutation gear or space flight to get the materials for it. Naturally it has some limits, I imagine a planet totally lacking undissolved metals would strain its abilities for example, but if you had an AI with the sum total of all human knowladge and the ability to properly connect them together, you would have an STC. (mind you, if human knowladge allowed us to do more then Star Trek has!)

>>18117404
the image is something I pulled off of google images, I needed a ton of important looking data for a Adeptus Evangelion campagin to back up my technobabble. I got it a couple of years ago so I am afraid I can't help much there. Sorry Anon. I also picked up this cockpit display at the same time. (close examination reveals the heads up display's source)

>>18115748
>Or the day the AdMech finally says, "We don't need your shitty Imperium anymore," and things go all to hell.

How would that be a problem? They've done a better job than the corpse-worshiping mongoloids in charge of everything else.

>Horus swayed the Fabricator General of the time, Kelbor-Hal, to the side of Chaos by promising him a complete STC database from the planet of Drakonis-Three-Eleven and brought the senior Tech-adept in his 63rd Expeditionary Fleet named Regulus over to his side with other STCs recovered from the Imperial conquest of the Auretian Technocracy. Horus promised much else in terms of technological knowledge to the Adeptus Mechanicus, including the right to develop technologies like artificial intelligence previously forbidden by the Emperor in the Treaty of Mars in return for their allegiance to his cause.

It would have been glorious. A true new age of Man. And afterwards, well, who's to say that Mars would have always continued to have a need for Horus?

>>18117863
Thanks anyways. For now, tiling will have to do.

I think OP might be onto something, in that STCs may have become too easy to rely on and over-centralised knowledge, and stifling innovation. Less people devote their lives to understanding technology, and they leave it to AIs- and of course when the Iron Men thing happened, those AIs became a disaster.

By the time the Imperium comes around, mankind is using technology so advanced there's little to no chance of figuring out much of it, and what knowledge they do have is jealously guarded. Humans have some of the best toys in the galaxy outside of maybe the Necrons, but they lost the manual for half of it and have to make up with brute force. And of course, the xenophobia means they can't use alien technology to make up for it.

>>18117139
Pretty much. STC's are emant to be a tool for the betterment of mankind. Did the rise in AI's decrease mankinds ability to think for itself?

Well, that's why the Admech was formed. Ascendance to the machine. The perfect Magos would be an STC in the form of man.

>>18117304
>STC, I require a suit of power armour.
>Order confirmed. Please insert five units of steel, ten microunits of silica and seven units of plasteel.
>Unfortunately, we're out of those. The orks took them in their latest raid.
>Deficit noted. Alternative suggested: fifteen units of microfibre, ten units of heavy cloth and five bales of twine.
>Uh, we just used all of our cloth-stores to build makeshift homes.
>Noted. Alternative: a pair of pasties from the hive-world's strip-joint, two blocks away from this location, and one roll of duct tape.
>Wait, glorious STC. Are you saying that you can build a suit of functioning power armour from those?
>Human, I've built bigger things with less. You don't want to know what I can do with two rolls of toilet paper and a pinch of laughing powder.

This thread needs archival simply for the sheer amount of lore pertaining to STCs, how they work, and how they differ from patterns or individual templates.

>>18115887
Actually, it's the entire age, as it's seen as when machines ruled over men.

This is your standard propaganda, to make people afraid of technology.
A number of magi refer to it as the Golden Age.

There's a lot of confusion over STCs.
It's likely there are 3 things, each refered to as an STC, and each a part of the original set up:
- An autoconstructor. A miniature factory, able to assemble machinery according to a prebuilt template.
- The Template. A digital file, or after the dark age, a print out, of how to construct machinery.
- The computer system designing these templates. Known as an Omnicopaeia to some. These computer systems would have been the first to go, so what's left would be a collection of printouts from one.

>>18117304
Dude, Rhinos during the Badab war used to be made of WOOD, when suplies ran low.

... and when they ran out of wood, they used compressed organic material.

There are two things called STCs:
Standard Template Construct: A set of machine blueprints from the database of Standard Templates.
Standard Template Constructor: A factory designed to mass produce Standard Template Construct type machines.

>>18118387
>>18118410

Likely a 'full' STC would be an AI interface, the epic database of stuff, and a fabrication engine rather close to the replicators on star trek, only without the ability to compress energy into matter.

The AI would be a vast boon to the Admech who know not to destroy it, being able to take what they know and find what they seek. (a sort of 'super agent' software really)

The Database is the holy grail they seek, ultimate knowladge (aside from 'Ultimately all things die' or 'Ultimately pain and suffering are all man will ever know' anyhow) with all the golden age knowladge, it would take centurys or maby melennia to sort through it even with their resources, but it would be a great boon.

The fabricator is essentially useless without blueprints to work from, to the point I bet the Admech have a few on mars, just waiting for the blueprints.


Hell, by that logic, they might have AI's and piles of Fabricators, but not a single database to use them with. Can you imagine how upsetting that would be?

Somebody beat me to it i guess, but vote up!
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=STCs+and+you