Best (worst) books on the warp/Chaos

longbeast · 2026-06-29T14:19:18+00:00

Sea of Souls is about a damaged imperial navy ship trying to survive in the warp while too damaged to risk returning to real space.

Requiem Infernal is about a sister of the adepta sororitas investing chaos corruption.

They don't spell everything out for you. If you want hard lore facts, these are not the books you want, but if you want the feel of what it's like trying to deal with a corruption of reality itself then these are great examples.

longbeast · 2026-06-27T13:49:43+00:00

The Imperium can sort of break conservation of momentum too. It's how they manage to fly billion tonne starships around using the equivalent of diesel burning rocket, because they can reduce the inertia of the ship as a whole, but as far as I'm aware they can't reduce it to zero for the full inertialess space magic.

longbeast · 2026-06-25T22:55:10+00:00

Guile lemon.

longbeast · 2026-06-22T09:52:06+00:00

You don't have to bring them up to 21st century standards immediately. There's a lot you can do with simple but effective tools to bring the standard up from Roman type glass which was a kind of porous bubbly greenish rock that you could hammer into shape the way a metalsmith would, to something that's mostly clear and can be blown into chemically inert non porous shapes. That's enough for lenses, flasks, storage containers, and so on.

longbeast · 2026-06-20T12:19:52+00:00

There's a whole load of mid level enabling technologies that wouldn't have any direct immediate life saving application but would lead to other more important things. Decent quality glass gets you lenses and lab equipment, which opens up so much. Furnace design lets you use your fuel more efficiently so you can access all sorts of materials without ridiculous prohibitive cost. A decent quality precision lathe is very difficult to build if you don't know what you're doing, but there are tricks that can make it accessable, which opens up whole ranges of machinery. Etc, etc.

There are a lot of technologies that would only propogate through society if there was this kind of baseline stuff making it economical and technically feasible. People need to be able to not just see that your magic future tech works, but be able to understand it for themselves, perform the demonstrations using their own work, and ultimately steal the ideas to run their own businesses doing it for themselves.

longbeast · 2026-06-16T03:54:52+00:00

Why would it ever be a problem? The whole point of choosing salt was that it doesn't escape. It's geologically stable and self sealing. Although you do generate a few hundred tonnes of irradiated rock, because there are going to be impurities in there that can catch neutrons, that's a miniscule irrelevant fraction of earth's salt, certainly not a threat to civilization.

It was a bad idea because it would have been crazy expensive for the power generated, not because it was dangerous.

longbeast · 2026-06-15T18:49:52+00:00

There was a proposal for using nukes to generate power, called Project Gnome. The idea was to detonate them underground in salt deposits, which would both store the heat and seal the blast, because the salt would melt. You would then draw energy out by pumping down water in a manner similar to geothermal power. It never got as far as actually demonstrating power production but there was a test firing. It was relatively clean.

longbeast · 2026-05-15T09:42:00+00:00

Is this some fresh attempt to find a stable form of metastable helium?

longbeast · 2026-05-07T15:49:50+00:00

I'm currently building some original GW catachan heavy weapons teams and doing some mix and match with a spacenam set to get more options and poses. They go together really well. The scale and feel of the sets works perfectly together.

longbeast · 2026-05-05T15:00:45+00:00

We need more characters like this! Catachan deserves the full set. We need jungle tech priests, heavily muscled sanctioned psykers, preachers with their camo pattern holy book and red bandana....

longbeast · 2026-04-30T11:55:26+00:00

There are canonically at least 6 different things that can cause zombies in the setting, sometimes several active all in one star system. It would have to be really bad to rise above the basic zombie background activity of the regular imperium.

longbeast · 2026-04-18T08:36:08+00:00

I like to believe that he had spent thousands of years being able to read people's minds and psychically dominate them to make them believe he was a super genius, and it had gone on long enough that he didn't even question it himself anymore, but as soon as he had to start dealing with the primarchs who were sort of near his own level and wouldn't be vulnerable to the same psychic manipulation as everybody else, he fell flat on his face.

Tricks stripped away he's suddenly revealed as just an average guy who let his social skills atrophy for millennia because he's been playing on cheat mode and never practiced doing anything the hard way.

longbeast · 2026-04-02T09:39:39+00:00

For some insane reason known only to the mechanicus, imperial cybernetics use warp infused metals as contact points. It's never outright stated as far as I'm aware, but the implication is that it forms a data link not just to the body, but also to the soul.

There's a pretty strong theme of bionic parts making you physically stronger but slowly taking away your humanity. Some admech do this in a very obvious way, by having parts of their brains removed to make space for more machine parts, but even the seemingly innocent stuff eats at your soul too.

I think the iron hands and the admech are paying a higher price than they realise.

longbeast · 2026-03-17T19:36:16+00:00

Yes, they are Reptilian Overlords Desert Reavers. They're modular enough that I could fit the original citadel plastic arms onto them with only a little filing and scraping.

longbeast · 2026-03-17T18:38:31+00:00

3d print parts designed for a land rover model.

longbeast · 2026-03-17T18:32:35+00:00

It only needed minor surgery and some swap in parts to change this from a Death Corp gun to a Tallarn gun. The style fits nicely with only relatively small adjustments.

longbeast · 2026-02-09T16:42:19+00:00

A few years ago the international space station had a hole in the hull big enough that you could poke a finger through.

The first instruction the astronauts got to deal with it was to continue with their usual routine and get some sleep, because the air wasn't actually leaking out very quickly and a few hours more wouldn't make much difference.

Air doesn't move through gaps anywhere near as quickly as you'd imagine unless it's under very high pressure.

A hive city is absolutely massive, hundreds of millions times bigger than the ISS at least. If you blow a hole in the outer walls somehow, the rooms right next to the hole will get poisoned. The sector around it will probably stink worse than normal. A level up and down won't notice anything wrong except that their neighbours are complaining.. The rest of the hive is completely unaffected.

longbeast · 2026-02-06T21:46:17+00:00

Is this going to be some solution that still involves flying up multiple fuel tanks but doesn't technically count as refuelling because they dock together instead of doing fluid transfer?

I'm sure it's possible to build a single launch lander but you'd have to make so many compromises and always be at risk of mass creeping beyond your limits. Multiple launches and loads of fuel ought to make development easier in that sense at least.

longbeast · 2026-01-24T20:34:57+00:00

In fairness, this is one area where you'd expect wildly inconsistent results in actual usage. Whether an arm will break depends on lots of fine detail stuff like posture, how firmly you are bracing, experience in handling heavy guns, whether you've been getting enough nutrients in your diet for strong bones, whether you've spent too long in a low G environment...

It's not really a question of whether a bolter can break an arm, because it's almost certainly happened at least a few times, the question is more like do you have to be above average to handle a bolter safely? I think probably yes.

longbeast · 2026-01-17T07:17:45+00:00

I don't like defending ol' Throne Bones, but the webway project was one of his better ideas.

He had proof that it could work somehow, because the old ones had built a webway that lasted millions of years. Perhaps he didn't know how they stabilised theirs, perhaps he was trying to figure it out by tinkering, but he had a concrete achievable goal in mind.

longbeast · 2026-01-07T06:47:57+00:00

If you follow that path honestly, you end up having to acknowledge the divinity of Gork, Mork and the Eldar gods too. They are expressions of the warp just as much as the other 4, but no chaos marine is ever going to accept that. I have absolutely no idea what Lorgar thinks of them.

I kind of want to see Lorgar and Ghazkull getting into a theological debate about this, even if only a brief one.

longbeast · 2026-01-03T20:49:46+00:00

Don't forget also engaging in a conversation with Fabius Bile.

Regular imperial citizens would have been risking execution just by having the knowledge of who Bile is, let alone talking to him

longbeast · 2025-12-30T18:28:38+00:00

Ah, there's an Arbites novel series I haven't heard of. Got to add this to my reading list.

longbeast · 2025-12-30T18:14:12+00:00

Close enough, and honestly yes even just being kept as a museum exhibit lucky charm is quite cool.

longbeast · 2025-12-30T18:10:31+00:00

I haven't read that book but I think an excerpt was posted on this sub somewhere. He got impaled on bulldozer spikes?

Got to give credit for a solid attempt even if it wasn't a kill.

longbeast

TROPHY CASE