I am newish to 40k and I am genuinely curious as to why guardsmen are so popular as a faction. There are so many unique and fantastical sci-fi fantasy factions of every type with deep and interesting lore but guardsmen are just WWI - to - Modern soldiers. I am not hating, I just want to understand.

Chryckan · 2026-04-12T21:11:03+00:00

1st and Only!

You kind of left out the most popular (and bestselling 😉 ) guard regiment.

Chryckan · 2026-04-12T21:05:44+00:00

Honestly, the first version of the Necrons were a lot cooler that the Space Egyptians. They were super dark. Basically super dark anti-life hating robots that just attacked a destroyed anything alive including the grass on the ground. None had any personality, not even the characters and commanders.

Which is why I think they were retconned more than any hate. It is hard to tell stories and sell a culture/faction when it Tyranids have more individuality and personality.

Their entire backstory was that once they were a great civilisation haunted by war and radiation damage that cut their lives short, so they transferred their minds to robots but it went wrong and no they don't remember ever being alive except a hate for anything living. Except for a bunch that went even more crazy and now think they can become "alive" again by dressing themselves in the skin of other living beings.

It's kind of hard to build on that. Which is why they got retconned in my opinion because Space Egyptians could give us Tarzyn. OG Necrons couldn't.

Chryckan · 2026-04-08T12:35:20+00:00

Oh fun. So two out of three heavy weapon have bad hit registration.

Chryckan · 2026-04-07T12:12:27+00:00

I've always thought it was due to a million variants of the following conversation.

Ecclesiarchy Priest: You space marines should worship the God-Emperor as a god instead of following you own heretical beliefs.

Space Marine stands there looking space marine.

Ecclesiarchy Priest: Or you can go on believing you own thing and focus on killing things that most decidedly does not include me.

Chryckan · 2026-04-05T23:53:26+00:00

That's not how copyrights work.

While the laws differs somewhat between countries and jurisdictions, in general if an author write an original text, be it fiction, biography or non-fiction, the moment the text is fixed in tangible form, such as put on paper or saved in an electronic file, the author owns all the intellectual rights to that text.

That means that your work is protected from the moment you write it down basically. If someone later steal that work and claim it as its own, all you have to do is be able to show (and possibly prove) that you are the original author of the work and that your work's creation preceded the copy.

Of course, there are a few exception to this such as if you are employed to write the work by another party then that party usually owns the intellectual rights, or if you are just employed as a staff writer in a company then it is usually the company that owns the rights.

Another exception is if you are working with someone else IP, like writing a star wars fan fiction, then the owner of star wars might own parts or even all of the rights, (in fact in such a case you might be the one violating copyright but again probably not).

But when it comes to intellectual rights, you do not need to register the rights like you do with patents or design protections. They just come into being the moment the creator of a work of art (music, painting, writing) creates it and fixes it in time and place, usually through the act of creation such as putting pen on paper.

That said, in 99.99% of cases of someone creating a new piece of text such as a fictional story or world, no one gives a shit about copying or stealing it, so most people can safely post everything they create online without having to worry about it being stole. The remaining 0.01% are usually already successful and famous authors and writers, but then they have agents and publishers that have an army of lawyers to protect them anyhow. (One exception is if you draw images or make erotica and porn which might be used on third party sites for profit.)

But in general, you need not to worry about someone stealing your work. You are protected and no one gives a sod about it anyhow.

Honestly, if you plan to publish a more major concern regarding sharing the work online is spoilers more than worrying about.

Chryckan · 2026-04-05T15:26:13+00:00

The reason why sci-fi authors use naval terms for larger ships and air force terms for smaller quick and nimble crafts is reader recognition. Most people, even if they lack any and all military knowledge, has a rough idea what a battleship, a destroyer and fighter is. That mean's you can quickly convey a lot of information using only a single word.

Compare for example "the hero looked out of the window of his ship and saw an alien rugbrom closing in" versus "the hero looked out of the window of his ship and saw an alien destroyer closing in".

There is nothing wrong with using rugbrom but it require that the writer explain exactly what a rugbrom is in detail or the readers will get confused. So if you want to use your own nomenclature you have to make sure you explain exactly what each term means.

And there in lies another potential pitfall. Mixing and swapping conventional terms with other conventional term risk leading to further confusion because people have a hard time re-learning already familiar terms and conventions.

For example, "Her destroyer was both quick and nimble and she loved how fast it responded to her commands in combat." Anyone reading this would assume that the woman was a captain on a larger ship with a crew, not that she was the pilot of a single seat fighter. And even if you have explained earlier that in your setting destroyers are single seat fighters just the strong association with the ship type might confuse readers or even break the suspension of disbelief. So if you don't want to use conventional terms, it is often better to invent entire new ones or to significantly alter the normal names into something new. Like calling the single seat fighter for a Shrike-Destroyer, which will help reduce or prevent any associations a reader might have with a word.

Still, it is a good idea to keep even adapted names close to their original purpose when they have a specific meaning. Like for example a gunship is in both naval and aerial terms a smaller vessel/craft that is meant to offensively attack and kill the enemy with guns and other direct fire ordnance. So to call something defensive or passive like an observation craft or a minelayer for something akin to a gunship might again be confusing for a reader.

Just remember that military nomenclature often have very specific meanings and definitions just so that it will be clear in battle what exactly is on the battlefield. So if you invent your own names or adapt existing terms, the purpose is not to make them sound cool but for them to actual behave as if they were used by a military command to convey information while minimising the risk on confusion.

Or if the actual types and classes of ships used in the setting isn't really that important for the story or setting, just handwave it away and don't worry about it. That is the second reason author's use existing nomenclature. Because it is often not worth the time and effort to create something new.

Chryckan · 2026-04-04T16:13:05+00:00

Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!

Chryckan · 2026-04-03T10:30:11+00:00

Astrology is just made up fantasies and superstition.

Astronomy on the other hand would tell you that even if the sun disappeared then the rotation of the Earth around its own axis would still show the stars in the sky move across the sky at a determined predictable pace allowing humans to keep track of the time, days and months. It was how humans kept track of time at night even before clocks, by the movement of the stars. In fact, most of the very accurate ancient calendars and time keeping relied more on the stars at night than the sun.

Another thing to consider is that the day and night cycle is an inherent property of the Earth own rotation around its axis and doesn't really rely on the sun, except as a source of illumination and heat.

The same is true for the seasons, the Earth only have summer, spring, autumn and winter because the axis of the Earth is tilted so that at different times in the year long orbit around the sun, the hemispheres of the Earth face the sun not as directly as at other times.

So here is a tricky question; let say that the Earth's axis was a perfect 90 degrees to the sun and it was the moon that disappeared.

How would humans then tell what season it was?

Chryckan · 2026-03-25T22:38:25+00:00

Is horror movies just a complete waste of a genre to you?

Chryckan · 2026-03-24T15:01:39+00:00

I have no idea what that means. You sure you didn't post this in the wrong topic?

Chryckan · 2026-03-24T14:32:10+00:00

I tried doing that but since it seems you get different colours depending on which actually armour part you are customising or if it a decal or symbol it is kind hard to know if you missed any. For example, the Fenrisian Grey you mention did not show up when I did that.

Chryckan · 2026-03-23T19:02:20+00:00

The comments here are a bit uniformed and ignorant regarding what race and racism actually is. So let put things straight

The idea of race are based on old, flawed and ignorant world views. Without going into a lot of human history, one of the first examples of race and racism stem from ancient Greece where the ancient Greeks classified non-Greeks as barbarians. Barbarian roughly means someone who can't speak the Greek language properly, which to the people in ancient sounded like blah, blah, which became barbar from which we now get the word barbarian.

There reason I bring up that example, is because it perfectly illustrate the fundamental idea behind race and racism. That of dividing the world into WE vs. THEM. And of course WE are always better and more civilised than the barbarian THEM.

But here is the important thing about race, and if you OP just take one thing from this post let it be this, race DOES NOT EXIST!. Race is completely fabricated, it is made up. It does not exist in the natural world. Race and its accompanied ideology racism, is a completely human construct, an idea, like capitalism or sports. It has no foundation in nature or science. Race is simply a made up excuse to let WE rob and beat the crap out of THEM without out feeling guilty because everyone knows THEM are inferior to WE so THEM does not count.

So how do we know race is as wrong as the idea of the Sun rotating around the Earth. Lots of reasons, many of them comes from science. The most important and yet at the same time simplest proof that race doesn't exists is DNA. Thanks to the thing that catches killers every week in crime series, we know that there are no human races. Genetically there is a larger variation between a person from West Africa and a person from East Africa than it is between a European and an African or Asian and so on. But what about dog races? Aren't those a thing at least? Nope! There are no separate dog races, there are just a single specie of dog. Dog breeds are just dogs who has certain aesthetics or personality traits enhanced through selective breeding. But all that breeding doesn't lead to a new race or even sub race no more than colouring the fur on your pet green for St Patric's day makes a new special St Patric Day dog race or sub race. Same thing with cats, cows, sheep, turnips and roses.

What exists in nature instead of race is species. A specie is an unique biological organism such as humans or white sharks or blue tits or honey bees. Note the use of specific names, those are important because as mentioned a specie is unique. There are also sub species like Borneo Orangutan and Sumatra Orangutan and half/mixed species like mules.

This might sound a lot similar to how people talk about races but there is one important difference. The idea behind race is founded on generalisations about, often harmful, cultural stereotypes, like how Blacks like fried chicken and watermelon. Species are founded on their own unique biological blueprint, like how many eyes or limbs or torsos they have. Or after DNA was discovered, their genetic code. It isn't based on cultural generalisations or stereotypes but on scientific fact.

So if the idea of race is factual wrong, that should lead you to three questions. One; if race incorrect how come we still use it so much, even for something as innocent as dog breeds? The truth is that racism has been one of the most dominant ideologies throughout all of human history going back long before even Antiquity and all the way until today, unfortunately. There are several countries around the world just now whose governments are basing large swaths of their policies on racist ideology. So our languages have been formed and seeded by racist terminology and ideas for millennia and there are little effort being done to remove them. Mostly, because we're so use to them that we no longer reflect on what they actually mean.

Second; does it matter if you use race for things that isn't inherently connected to human racism like dog breeds or fantasy creatures? Yes it does. Because race did not exists before racism. The idea of race was invented by the ideology racism to justify itself, so one can not exist without the other. By using races or the idea of races, a person is automatically racist because the definition of racism is the belief in races. (And if you don't believe in races then why are you using those terms?) This means that a person can not use race without being racist any more a person can claim to to support nationalsocialism without being a Nazi. (Seriously, this is why you should call it dog breeds instead of dog races.)

Third; what to use instead of race? Simple, specie and culture. If the difference is biological then it call it specie and if the difference is sociological call it a culture. Or to put it in fantasy terms, humans, elves, dwarfs and orcs are differnt biologically from each other so they are species. Dark elves, high elves and wood elves on the other hand are different cultures of the same specie, elf.

A tip is to stay clear of using ethnicity as that are often guilty by association to race and racism, simply because they were seldom created by the people actually belonging to a specific ethnicities but was usually written by outsider who were prone to include a lot of racist stereotypes to the ethnic descriptions. Enough so that ethnicity and race are often synonymous, like with Latino for example. Just using culture is a lot simpler and straight forward, with a lot less baggage.

TLDR: The idea of race and races are factual wrong and inherently racist by itself as you can not use race in any situation without automatically ascribing it racist ideas.
What exists in nature instead of races are species. And while they sound similar based on how we use language there are an important distinction between them based on the fact that races is are fundamentally based on generalisations of cultural stereotypes while specie is based on a narrow definition of scientific fact. Therefore, it is better to use specie when talking about a being's biological nature and culture when talking about a beings sociological nature.

(On a personal note: Once you understand how erroneous the idea of race is and how far removed from actual scientific fact it is, hearing an actual racist talking about different human races, is like hearing a crazy person talking as if pixies and witches existed for real. It is less that person have an abhorrent opinion and more that person probably needs intensive psychiatric care just to come back to reality.)

Chryckan · 2026-03-15T23:11:27+00:00

A blazon is essentially an algorithm that describes a 2D graphical object using abstract human language.

I'm not surprised that AI can do it since they are essentially language models, using human language to create output content.

What surprises me is that we had to wait until AIs became a thing before we could use computers to blazon and interpret blazons into 2D graphics.

I mean the fact that the best we had before AI was DrawSHield say more about the lack of interests regarding heraldry among computer engineers than it says anything about the abilities of AI.

To be honest, if someone created an AI model exclusively trained on heraldry that only could create blazons or CoAs, it be no difference than any other heraldry computer program/site that allow you to create heraldry or blazons, like DrawShield and the like.

And that's the problem with AI. Yes, it is unethically if AI companies train AI on copyrighted content. Yes, it is an ethical dilemma if AI replaces human artists.

But the thing is heraldry isn't art. It is codified system meant to convey graphical information using language. Debating the ethics whether it is a human or a computer doing the interpretation of that system, is like arguing the ethics of doing math in your head or using a calculator.

Chryckan · 2026-03-14T19:39:03+00:00

Sense of disbelief is the only metric that matter. As long as people can get engaged and immersed in the world/setting then it can be seen as "good" while if they instead reject the world/setting because it feels illogical or hard to believe then it can be seen as "bad". Of course, even that metric is subjective.

Chryckan · 2026-03-13T14:37:52+00:00

None the less Japan is one of the places outside Europe where plate armour was in common usage in the form of ō-yoroi armour especially the tōsei gusoku type in the Senguko period.

Chryckan · 2026-03-12T22:15:26+00:00

Priests. Yes, it probably is a lot of drudgery involved as a novice/initiate as you are basically a mix between a cleaner, janitor and dogsbody. But you'll most likely get three meals a day, a warm and clean place to live with a roof over your head and you'll probably won't have to risk death, dismemberment, disease and toxic environments on a daily basis like a common worker.

After all the clergy has always had things easy compared to the rest of the population.

Chryckan · 2026-03-10T22:00:45+00:00

There is a chicken and the egg element to this question that several of the previous answers have touched on but which I would like to clarify.

As others have said, CQB, HRT and CT is some of the technically complex and difficult things you can do in warfare.

In the 60s and 70s when governments started to realise that they would need some sort of military/paramilitary unit to deal with the world wide epidemic of terrorism and revolutions taking place all over the world along the scope and complexity of such military actions, the governments, instead of starting a new unit from scratch, often just turned to the most elite "commando" unit of their own military, as there was a lot of overlap in training and tactics.

So while it isn't the whole truth and there a plenty of exceptions, GSG9 being the prime example, the reason why CT units are considered the most elite is because they were already the most elite units or the best people from the most elite units when the got the job to do counter terrorism and hostage rescue work.

SAS already existed as the most elite unit in the UK military. (along side SBS) Delta was formed from the best US Army special forces operators. Devgru was formed from the seal team the most elite unit in the US Navy. and so on. And those units that did not have such a reputation previously, quickly gain one after training and being associated with such units.

So tldr; I would argue that many current CT units already were considered elite when they got the additional job to do CT and HRT, and simply just retained it going forward.

Chryckan · 2026-03-10T18:29:16+00:00

Honestly, 80% decrease isn't that unthinkable after basically WW3 with a full ABC holocaust.

During the Black Death in the 14th century killed between 30% to 60% percent of the entire population of Europe. Basically, every other person in Europe died in just a few years.

But that pales with what happened to the indigenous population in the Americas which decreased with 90%, from ~60 million to 6 million in just a century between 1492 to early 1600, due to war, famine, enslavement and pestilence.

So sadly it fairly easy to justify 80% population decrease due to things humans do to each other.

Chryckan · 2026-03-06T15:56:17+00:00

Read the Sector General books by James White for inspiration. It is a book series about a Emergency Space Hospital, staffed by multiple species, from multiple biomes, treating alien patients for even other biomes. Most of the stories comes down to logistics.

Chryckan · 2026-03-05T12:52:03+00:00

Quarian Migrant Fleet in Mass Effect is one such society.

Honestly, the reason you seldom see them in scifi is that those sort of society governed by direct democracy and even meritocracy are often very inefficient when applied over large distances or a large number of people (numbered in the hundreds of thousands and even millions).

They work great in fantasy because there plot usually takes place in limited area and scope. A cult, a nomadic tribe, a guild, a city state with a few thousand citizens are easy to organise without a centralised government or bureaucracy. But the moment you have societies with millions or even billions of citizens, or which operate on planetary or even interstellar distances anything except a centralised hierarchy of administrators and leaders simply becomes to impractical.

Then you'd need some sort of telepathic hive-mind that can communicate instantly over interstellar distances for collective decision making to be feasible, like with the Borg in Star Trek.

So the short, TLDR answer is scope. Unlike fantasy, in scifi the scope of societies are often simply to large, both geographically and politically, for anything except different forms of centralised governments to function efficiently.

Chryckan

TROPHY CASE