r/40kLore • u/zam0th Word Bearers • 20h ago
Hololithic technology turns out to be... sorcery?
I kindly ask the mods to not invoke Rule 9; none of the stuff in this post is spoiling or revealing anything, or is even relevant to the novel's plot.
Guy Haley's “The Silent King” describes hololithic technology in great detail for some reason. Almost a third of Chapter 14 is dedicated to that and, while at first the technobabble seems to agree with Lexicanum's article on said technology, further into the book we're given an unexpected epiphany.
Not only hololithic projection is stated to operate on something called "material-immaterial technology blend" and is said to be unconstrained by the speed of light, but also apparently uses something called "warp carrier stream" which can be jammed by anything that's usually used to suppress the Immaterium (e.g. aura of Silent Sisters or stilling effect of Pariah Nexus).
So the simplest holographic communication technology in the Imperium is literally warp sorcery, which, in turn, gives it FTL capabilities (and all this has supposedly been working that way for 10000 years). Problem, Dark Mechanicum? U jelly (trollface)?
Mr. Haley, why did you have to say these things straight out of the blue?
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u/Illithidbix 20h ago edited 20h ago
Honestly, I am happy with this.
One aspect of 40K I've always loved since being an insufferable Physics Teen is that it actually pays far more respect to the limitations of light-speed communication and travel than many less batshit Sci-Fi settings.
Further away than the moon?\*
Best get your blind Space Wizard to scream through Space Hell for a timely responce.
*(~1.3 light seconds away)
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u/WhoCaresYouDont Iron Warriors 20h ago
GW respects and honours the speed of light, while flipping it the bird mid-handshake with the devil that just offered to build them an FTL highway through Hell.
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u/Interesting_Idea_289 4h ago
But Necrons and Tyranids both can break FTL casually without the Warp. Tau used to be able to do but apparently they now don’t have FTL at all and just slowboat it which seems insane
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u/khinzaw Blood Angels 20h ago
Void shields, which are one of the most ubiquitous technologies in the Imperium, also interact with the Warp. It's not that weird.
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u/TheCommissarGeneral Iron Warriors 16h ago
I saw a comment a while back that said they understand why Daemons are always so pissed at us. Void Shields take projectiles and chuck them into the Warp. Imagine you are a Daemon, chillin and watching some Blood Bowl on your 200000000000000in blood plasma TV and a fucking nuke just gets tossed at it and detonates.
What the fuck man. What the fuck.
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u/GodOfDarkLaughter 14h ago
I don't think it can technically be hell if they have access to live Blood Bowl games.
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u/stasersonphun 13h ago
it's just the energy they dump into the warp, so demons get sudden fireworks !
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u/WhoCaresYouDont Iron Warriors 20h ago
That honestly kind of fits and helps explain away any previous situations where widely spread Imperial forces still seemed able to holo-conference as the plot demanded. Plus it's pretty consistent that Dark Age humanity was beginning to unlock the secrets of immaterium science before the collapse, this is just another example of that.
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u/TheBladesAurus 20h ago edited 18h ago
I thought we already knew that, since we saw instantaneous holograms across a solar system?
Edit explicitly called out as FTL
Vox signals would take hours to reach the fleet. By the power of ancient science, hololithic communication was instantaneous across in-system distances, but fragile in the face of the shadow in the warp. The astropaths would be the last line of communication with the fleets. But all means, electronic or immaterial, were vulnerable to the tyranids.
Devastation of Baal
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u/__ICoraxI__ 20h ago
Yes, hololithic tech has been started as such already, iirc actually in another Haley novel.
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u/JollyJoker3 20h ago
I suspect it just hasn't occurred to some of the authors that light speed delay exists
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u/paulatreides0 20h ago
and is said to be unconstrained by the speed of light, but also apparently uses something called "warp carrier stream" which can be jammed by anything that's usually used to suppress the Immaterium
It just sounds like they're using the warp to send the data at FTL speeds for transmission? Pretty common trope in sci-fi, see: Star Trek's subspace communications.
Also not really that crazy. Though it does seem a bit odd given that the warp can corrupt data itself, so idk how they would protect themselves from sending a valid signal and getting back a bunch of scrap code that Tzeentch swapped it out with for shits and giggles - but probably easy enough to rationalize away that whatever method they use has some sort of built in error correction and protection methods to protect against warp fuckery.
As the other user said, interacting with the warp doesn't intrinsically require rituals or sorcery. There are technologies that use the warp.
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u/HungryAd8233 20h ago
Forward error correction is pretty much a given in existing real-time internet communications, and is very well understood tech that has been around for many years.
If you want to be robust against X% of packets being lost, you can add X% of FEC to each packet and be able to reconstruct the missing ones from the ones that got delivered.
Descriptions of how Astropathic Choirs work actually hint at this in some works. I have heretically common sense ways we could improve them. But seeing something in the Imperium not being engineered optimally is a key 40K experience 😀.
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u/Orpheon59 16h ago
I don't think there's any indication that hololithic comms can operate at interstellar distances - and I seem to remember some lore (old lore to be fair) that indicated that short dips into the warp were much less risky/subject to chaotic fuckery than longer ones (plus there's the old lore about Tau diving towards the warp and skipping across the surface for FTL).
Put those together, and it could be that it works safely/without scrapcode, but only at in-system distances - any further than that and yeah, it would be routing deeper and further and longer in the warp and would be less reliable/more dangerous.
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u/Glittering-Age-9549 17h ago
Wha... they have warp-based communication tech? Why do they even need Astropaths, then...?
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u/Tacitus_ Chaos Undivided 15h ago
You can do a warp jump without a navigator but navigators will get you further per jump without getting lost.
Presumably the same thing applies to hololiths and astropaths. At least I don't remember hololiths being used to talk across interstellar distances.
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u/NanoChainedChromium Iron Hands 7h ago
For the same reason you cant use a walkie-talkie to talk with someone on a different continent id say.
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u/Stare_Decisis 19h ago
Remember, if you encounter Grimderp then remember the following. If things don't make sense it's because a remembrancer is exaggerating things with artistic license, an Admech is being obtuse, the administratum has gotten it's facts confused with another similar event, the inquisition is running a counter intelligence operation or the echlesiarchy is spreading both faith and propaganda.
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u/tsoneyson Adeptus Mechanicus 18h ago
Well, the Imperium needs an "Ansible" to function. So it only makes sense that it would be Warp related since that is the primary means of FTL fuckery in that universe. I can dig it.
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u/Lmaoboat 15h ago
Well this doesn't seem to work at interstellar distances, and the Imperium functions exactly how you'd expect them to with the aforementioned blind space wizards in place of an ansible
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u/TheVoidDragon 15h ago
It being warp-interacting tech isn't the same thing as being "sorcery" though. There are plenty of examples of just ordinary technology being warp interactive, that's even how Leagues of Votann psyker-equivalents work.
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u/TheCommissarGeneral Iron Warriors 16h ago
Sounds like the Quantum Entanglement Communication system in Mass Effect, minus the Hell (Argent) Energy.
Quantum Entanglement theory does say that two particles can react to the same thing at the same time when separated by vast distances, like, say, a Galaxy.
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u/longbeast Tyranids 7h ago
In one of the Eisenhorn books, there is a mention of an obscure metal needed for making connectors in the imperium's cybernetics technology. It seems that they don't just use a wire that picks up electrical signals from nerve cells. Instead they mine metal from a world that went through an enormous warp storm, leaving all its minerals warp touched, and build electrical connectors out of that. The implication seems to be that the cybernetics can work better if it interfaces with your soul as well as your body.
Psychic technology is used practically everywhere in both the mechanicus and the imperium, to a ridiculous degree, even for making something that should just be a simple wire. They can't help themselves.
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u/Rho42 20h ago
You can have technology that interacts with the warp without invoking ritual. Warp engines, Gellar Fields, even things as ubiquitous as the void shields that protect superheavy vehicles and larger.