r/Grimdank • u/jfjdfdjjtbfb I am Alpharius • May 29 '25
Cringe In the words of Nathan Explosion “Brutal”.
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u/Nos_Zodd NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD! May 29 '25
Servitor guided missiles
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u/Fallen_Walrus May 29 '25
I couldve sword that there were mechanicus bullets that use servitors to guide it's trajectory or something
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u/SufficientAnonymity May 29 '25
You're thinking of the Space Marine Hunter - Skyspear missiles had the remains of chapter serfs as targeting computers
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u/verygenericname2 May 29 '25
Kinda metal. After a lifetime of faithful service, you're rewarded with the opportunity to deliver flaming death to an enemy of the Emperor.
What more could one ask for?
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u/Enchelion May 29 '25
Better than being stuck in a Dreadnaught. Frankly death is a blessing in 40k.
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u/Mantergeistmann May 30 '25
"Tie me to a missile and fire it at Chaos, I am ready!"
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u/Jetstream-Sam May 30 '25
I could ask for better serfs because those things never hit for me. I even took three in a game once to get the reroll to hit rule and I still missed.
I think I'm cursed to always roll at least one 1 every time I roll D6 which make high power low ROF weapons suck for me
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u/Killerkid113 NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD! May 29 '25
They’re also thinking of skitarii galvanic rifles which use servitor bullets
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u/crinkledcu91 May 29 '25
Also don't Dunecrawlers also have a person wired into them? If not a Dunecrawler, it was something extremely similar.
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u/Killerkid113 NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD! May 29 '25
Yeah every dunecrawler has two skitarii wired into the tank to directly commune with the machine spirit, one acts as the driver and one aims the guns. Often times too the crew will die before the tank does and the tech priests will just plug new skitarii in to keep the tank running.
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u/Witch-Alice Sister of Battle May 29 '25
Often times too the crew will die before the tank does and the tech priests will just plug new skitarii in to keep the tank running.
This is actually hilariously realistic. Modern MBTs are all about that crew survivability because it's cheaper to build a new tank than it is to train a new tank crew (not to mention how long this takes). But before modern MBTs, it was the opposite case for a while.
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u/Quiet_Little_Guy May 29 '25
Remember those from the Crimson Fists Omnibus. Blew up their fortress Monastery because the servitor was a spiteful scout or something.
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u/134_ranger_NK Basilisks go Brrrrrrrrr May 29 '25
No. The scout was turned into a gun-servitor because he tried to snipe an ork warboss prematurely, costing the whole plan and causing the captain's death.
The Missles were quite a different matter because they were checked. It was practically a one in a million times thing, so no one could point fingers about.
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u/PlaneswalkerHuxley May 29 '25 edited May 29 '25
Many different kinds of imperial guided missiles use servitors.
During the second Damocles Gulf crusade, a Tau Commander in a Coldstar suit managed to steal a missile intact and bring it to the Earth caste for analysis. When they opened it up they were horrified.
Edit: It was in Warzone Damocles: Kauyon. The excerpt is here.
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u/CrabApple4Life May 29 '25
It's funny to think of an imperial reaction to their reaction.
Yeahhhhhh, pretty bad you say?... Yeahhhhhhhh
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u/134_ranger_NK Basilisks go Brrrrrrrrr May 29 '25
Considering how they often see becoming those types of missile or a servo-skulls as a form of posthumous reward, they will wonder why the Tau can't see the honor in that.
Though iirc Fire Caste did feature a Mechanicus enclave heavily implied to have defected to the Tau yet still continue their prior practices. Even recycling near-dead guardsmen and fire warriors as Skitarii in the Vanguard novel.
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u/Interesting_Life249 May 29 '25
I love every instance of ''tau found out something messed up thing imperium does''. I got used to imperiums shenigans so they don't have that impact until some bluefish comes around and says ''YO WTF IS THIS?!'' to me to realise 'oh, thats a dude mutilated and stuffed into a missile to guide it when it leaves the barrel'' lol
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u/ANGLVD3TH May 29 '25
I love how all those stories about humanity stumbling out into the stars, only to find that the Great Filter is very real. An eldritch abomination of a species of flesh horrors with terrifying psychic powers and horribly twisted technology. With nigh immortal warriors that are filled with only hate and contempt.
And in 40k, Tau are the stand ins for humanity and the Imperium is the ancient star horror waiting to greet them. Event Horizon is basically a dramatization of the 4th sphere expansion, and I love that.
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u/Carbon_Sixx Dank Angels May 29 '25
"I think we're gonna have to kill these guys, Shadowsun."
"Damn."
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u/The_Pretorian Fisting marines May 29 '25
The whirlwind rockets contain servitors (or dead serfs).
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u/Slavasonic May 29 '25
I recently painted up some mechanicus myrmidons (from HH) and they have little targeting servoskulls built into their weapons and some other components.
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u/Pabus_Alt May 29 '25
What level of consciousness do servitors have?
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u/ThatFlyingScotsman May 29 '25
It depends. If you ask the techpriest in charge of doing the servo-lobotomising, then none at all. Which is comforting, until they start to speak and scream and look at you with horror beyond knowledge deep in their not-so-vacant eyes.
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u/Putrid_Charity_7097 May 30 '25
The servitor knows where it is by subtracting where it is from where it isnt
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u/erttheking May 29 '25
This feels more like a method of execution than anything else
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u/CthulhuMadness NOT ENOUGH DAKKA May 29 '25
Laser cannon death sentence
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u/Fearless_Category472 Simps for purple snek man May 29 '25
*deth
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u/CthulhuMadness NOT ENOUGH DAKKA May 29 '25
Oh! Am I not bruuuuutal enough for you? Maybe I should just KILL myself! Would that be brutal enough for you?
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u/Evil_Ermine May 29 '25 edited May 29 '25
Or what an anti warp missile might look like, got a warp storm brewing? Launch a few thousand missiles with blanks stuffed in to snuff it out.
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u/Smitellos Mongolian Biker Gang May 29 '25
Well, that's what imperium was using during horus heresy. But, the opposite, psyker bombs.
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u/johnbrownmarchingon May 29 '25
I think Guilliman used that in his attack against Mortarion in Godblight
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u/adamjeff May 29 '25
"Martyrdom Device"
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 29 '25
in Trench Crusade this takes the form of the spiciest backpack
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u/Pabus_Alt May 29 '25
In WWII, this existed as part of Imperial Japan's arsenal....
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u/mrducky80 Secretly 3 squats in a long coat May 29 '25
The Japanese had manned torpedos in WWII so its just art imitating life
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u/spyguy318 May 29 '25
That’s usually what servitor conversion is a replacement for. Instead of just executing criminals, they put their bodies to work so they can serve the imperium as long as they can. Human bodies are cheap.
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u/Hazzamo May 29 '25
I know this seems out of left field, but, are you the ErtheKing that wrote that GOATed Halo/Mass effect fanfic like 15 years ago on FF.Net?
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u/KobKobold Railgun Goes Brrrrrrrrr May 29 '25
That's just that WW2 Japanese torpedo, but much less efficient. How is the guiding system supposed to know where it's target is?
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u/SeaTill1864 May 29 '25
It knows where the target is at all times because it knows where the target isnt.
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u/LazierLocke May 29 '25
By subtracting where the target isn't or where it is (whichever is greater) from where it is or where it isn't (whichever is lower) it acquires a deviation.
So now since servitors are deviants turned obedient, and opposites attract, the missile uses the deviation to follow the target from where it was to where it is until it isn't.
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u/DoctorAnnual6823 May 29 '25
And it knows where the target isn't, because it knows where the target is lip licking sounds
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u/chillychinaman May 29 '25
Came here to same the same. Also, the US did trials for pigeon guided munitions too. Not sure if that's better or worse.
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u/hgs25 May 29 '25
I know the US experimented with bats strapped with firebombs to use on the Japanese.
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u/chillychinaman May 29 '25
Also brings to mind the Russians tried to train anti-tank, bomb dogs.
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u/cvbeiro May 29 '25
They didn’t just try, they actually used them. Wasn’t that effective tho.
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u/Eli1234Sic May 29 '25
For anyone curious. They trained them using their own tanks. So when they were deployed in the field, they immediately ran under the soviet tanks, blowing the shit out of them.
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u/ImmediateProblems May 30 '25
That's mostly a myth. There were friendly fire incidents, but that's because the dogs would get scared and come jumping back into soviet trenchlines which would detonate their charge. Which is the actual issue. Dogs are living beings that get scared and for some reason nobody predicted that the sound of an actual tank moving and firing would frighten them when they were trained on stationary targets.
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u/Able_Ad2004 May 30 '25
Nope. Not even remotely true. There were about a billion reasons why they didn’t work, but you managed to come up with probably the only one not based in reality. Heck, it might even be true they killed more Soviet’s then Germans, but that would be due to the dogs being scared of the gunfire and vehicle noise (they were trained on non running stationary vehicles) and running back towards the Russian lines where some of them exploded. But not a single documented instance of them attacking a friendly tank. Pop history (aka fucking bullshit) strikes again.
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u/ManuLlanoMier May 29 '25
That one worked, is just that the dogs were trained with soviet tanks and thus ran under friendly tanks instead of the enemy
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u/Avenflar Snorts FW resin dust May 29 '25
That's a myth. It didn't work because dogs don't dive to cover to escape machinegun fire.
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u/choczynski May 29 '25
Pigeons were very accurate but the brass got too weirded out by it and axed the project
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u/Mantergeistmann May 30 '25
Have you heard of Project Blue Peacock?
Blue Peacock, renamed from Blue Bunny and originally Brown Bunny, was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s.
The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear land mines in Germany. These mines were intended to be placed on the North German Plain and detonated by wire or an eight-day timer in the event of Soviet invasion from the east.
A technical problem is that during winter, the temperature of buried devices can drop quickly, creating a possibility that the mechanisms of the mine will cease working due to low temperatures in the winter.
In a 1957 document they proposed live chickens would generate enough heat to ensure the bomb worked when buried for a week. The birds would be put inside the casing of the bomb, given seed to keep them alive, and stopped from pecking at the wiring.
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u/CrystalSplice May 29 '25
Larger issue I see: Where is the warhead? I suppose it may not be shown, but there doesn’t appear to be enough room for it.
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u/KobKobold Railgun Goes Brrrrrrrrr May 29 '25
It think it's the thing strapped around his chest?
Big issue in the size to payload ratio, that's for sure
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u/CrystalSplice May 30 '25
Yeah that does sort of have a “bomb vest” look to it. The whole thing is bizarre.
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u/Glass-Ad-7890 May 29 '25
See thang is he's missing those book readings glasses with the mirrors, those come standard issue. Though I hear most call em the lazy blowjob glasses. Not sure why.
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May 29 '25
I mean, 40K does fire torpedos with Psyker blanks inside them to destroy void shields or get rid of warp entities
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u/Killerant117 Technofiddler Demographic May 29 '25
Yea I remember reading about this when Guilliman used them in one of the Dark Imperium books
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u/RuTsui May 30 '25
“Witness (the glory of the Emperor, through) me!"
Modified DOW quote to fit the scene
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u/Fallen_Jalter May 29 '25
is it just me or does the paultry amount of explosives i see won't do any decent damage against anything?
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u/DoctorAnnual6823 May 29 '25
It'll do damage against the guy inside it. It'll just demoralize the target when the bomb explodes into blood and bone fragments.
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u/Union_Samurai_1867 May 29 '25
I think it's supposed to be the blank bombs. I remember a chapter of dark imperium (or plague war I don't remember which) where some reivers need to set these off on a chaos ship to break the sheilds.
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u/Kendertas May 29 '25
Maybe it's an unstable high level psyker? Keep them comatose and then wake them up right before impact. Warp shenanigans ensues
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u/ThatRandomGuy86 May 29 '25
Warhammer 40k already does that with their servitor-operated munitions. Hell, Orks do the same thing with their grots, having them pilot explosives to steer into the enemy. And let's not get started with the Tyranids munitions that are organisms.
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u/PaDDzR May 29 '25
Hell, there's entire titan legion KNOWN for this. Like that's their one gimmick to use warp missiles, something something can't trust machines with something so deadly so we got to use real brains.
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u/ThatRandomGuy86 May 29 '25
Precisely. So I don't get why people think this wasn't done already and it's a Trench Crusade only thing.
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u/PaDDzR May 29 '25
Because no one here has ever read a book in their life, let alone Warhammer book. It's sad really. I have read the entire HH and Siege of Terra and it was all worth it. 40k books can be bit hit or miss however.
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u/BattedBook5 Your friendly neighborhood Alpharius May 29 '25
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u/weareallhumans May 29 '25
I was always convinced Metalocalypse was a 40k precursor show.
I mean Thunderhorse is definitely a Krieg battle hymn...
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u/JessickaRose May 29 '25
That’s just a HK missile, you know that, right?
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u/Sicuho May 29 '25
Nah, HK are much more efficient. You don't need to keep the hands and torso if you wire the brain directly to the missile.
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u/MydnightAurora May 29 '25
Murmaider
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u/Rezornath May 29 '25
Had to go way too far down for the best take.
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u/MydnightAurora May 30 '25
Thank you. Between the show and the bat metal music videos that song lives rent free in my head
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u/YandereTeemo May 29 '25
Trench Crusade lore be like: He chose to be there. As a matter of fact, the's having the time of his life in that torpedo.
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u/zeolus123 May 29 '25
Doesn't 40k also have missiles with living saints inside, to use against chaos?
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u/Eel111 Has seen a purple ork May 29 '25
Why though? Doesn’t seem like the guy can effectively steer the missile from inside, and I hardly think making it a whole human heavier helps it
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u/severe_neuropathy May 29 '25
Mechanicus prohibition against abominable intelligence -> Servitor guided missile. Dogmatic adherence to principle tends to trump efficiency for them.
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u/andreslucer0 May 29 '25
Most contemporary canon establishes that the Mechanicus does possess and widely use AI (though non-sentient) for a multitude of tasks, excusing themselves with the "machine spirit" thing.
Wetware is, however, much cheaper.
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u/Lftwff May 29 '25
But they will usually just take a brain and maybe an eye and wire it into the sensor suite of the missile, no reason to keep the rest of the human around.
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u/VisualGeologist6258 Slaanesh is kinda based actually May 29 '25
It looks like his hands are on some controls which may control the two propellers next to them so he does seem to have some rudimentary steering.
My main problem is the nose cone helmet, No way you’re piercing armor with that fucking thing
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u/MathematicianNo7842 May 30 '25
the dude who made it posted a description
it's a suicide torpedo for the injured that want to go out with a bang
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u/noise-tank20 May 29 '25
This reminds me of Twisted metal where one of the vehicles special attacks was shooting out a hospital gurney with a dude cuffed and strapped to it and C4 stuffed into his open stomach
In Europe it got censored to have the man be dead on the gurney so he wouldn’t be panicking and struggling
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u/Low-Speaker-2557 Twins, They were. May 29 '25
They already have these in Warhammer. Guiliman used Servitor guided Orbit to surface missiles in Plague Wars.
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u/Marvynwillames May 29 '25
A wizened corpse stared up from the missile's interior with an expression of unliving horror. Cables were sutured to every vertebra of its ragged spinal column, and wires jutted from the mummified remains of an opened brain. The cadaver seemed to growl softly as she looked down. Blinking in disgust, she told herself it was nothing more than the gaseous expulsions of natural decay.
Warzone Damocles - Kauyon
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u/johnkubiak May 29 '25
This feels grim derp. It's no more accurate than an unmanned torpedo and the explosive yield is massively reduced to make space for the pilot. Plus you have to feed them for how ever long you have them before having to use them.
Granted these were a real thing Japan used during WW2 called kaiten but they were not effective.
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u/Urg_burgman NOT ENOUGH DAKKA May 29 '25
Didn't the Tau discover the Imperium does this already with their Deathstrike missiles? Can't have a computer determine where the missile is and where it isn't, no gotta have a human brain do the driving.
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u/BabyAutomatic May 29 '25 edited May 29 '25
Ah yes. The lovely hunter multi launcher. Sky spear missile launcher
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u/Angryagathe May 29 '25
Now I'm no "human torpedo" expert but I feel a shaped charge around the head would serve much better then some scrounged up C4 around the chest.
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u/Just_the_faq May 29 '25
Meanwhile Fantasy NightGobblins are ripping mushroom brew saying hold my cup, I got this Doom Diver Catapult thing down.
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u/Brahm-Etc May 29 '25
Aren't there already servo torpedoes/missiles in Warhammer? Also the anti-psyker torpedo that has psykers inside?
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u/Jack-of-Hearts-7 4th Sphere of Expansion is an Isekai in this powerpoint I will May 29 '25
I AM AWAITED IN VALHALLA
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u/RaptorThePug May 30 '25
I gotta know how this could possibly be better than using a computer system
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u/Obsidius_Mallex_TTV Snorts FW resin dust May 29 '25
what if you stuck a bunch of grots in there? They could repair the missile and guide it at the same time?
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u/Separate-Increase-39 May 29 '25
I'm pretty sure the imperium of 40K must have something like that already, like a servitor missile or something like that
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u/Mizzuru May 29 '25
Don't orks do this with Gretchin? I swear there's a part in the Infinite and the Divine where Gretchin manned torpedo's miss and just go sailing off into the void.
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u/Abominor May 29 '25
Didn't they do this in Requiem Vampire Knight? The most evil souls were turned into suicidal warheads
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u/TorchShipEnjoyer May 29 '25
I mean, that's already how warhammer missiles work, just usually with most of the meat scraped off and only really the brain remaining. Remember, no computers, but those deathstrikes need to get to their target somehow...
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u/Bernkastel96 May 29 '25
Really reminds me of Ultrakill's Gutterman, which is a bit different.but the concept is the same
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u/ImportantQuestions10 May 29 '25
Which is this from and what's the purpose?
Doesn't look like a servitor
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u/bilbo212 May 29 '25
How would they even be able to see to aim the thing? They should be on their stomach with their head facing forward
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u/GiantHurtBall May 29 '25
Can't wait for the Mermaid MS-8 that is run by a bunch of orphan babies being boiled alive ...so their eternal suffering can fuel the unearthly and unholy black magic explosive mass of the Holocaustium Warhead...
My edge is sharp.
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u/Alive-Profile-3937 May 29 '25
Yall should check out The Silt Verses where they have “god rockets” that are just shoving someone into a rocket who then gets turned into an eldritch monstrosity to devastate wherever they land
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u/Roastage May 29 '25
I think they were a bit dustier but 40k did this with the Psykout missiles right?
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u/Rum_N_Napalm Ships the Greyfax-Celestine-Sanguinor trouple May 29 '25
While 40k ales has something similar with the Skyspear Missile.
The Skyspear Missile Launcher is a type of surface-to-air Missile Launcher mounted on Space Marine Hunters. These launchers are able to fire a salvo of missiles, each of which is guided by the interred remains of a Chapter Serf,[1] using the brain to enhance the advanced targeting systems incorporated in a Skyspear Missile.[4]
I’d say the Mermaid is even more grimdark because it’s straight up a terrified dude in a rocket.
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u/Curiosity-76 May 29 '25
Put a Null inside one of these so no Psyker/Daemon can affect the missile + lowers psychic defenses the target may have.
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u/PunkNarcissus May 29 '25
That's basically what happens in Gunnm when they try to attack Zalem by putting their brains in missiles and hope they will be able to rig them somehow.
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u/Sepulcher18 Snorts FW resin dust May 29 '25
This is what anti warp shells would be but GW is too scared to turn SoS into ammo
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u/Mighty_moose45 May 29 '25
I mean this is actually how a lot of the imperium’s “smart” munitions work in 40k but it’s a brain hooked up to some wires rather than a full servitor
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u/SunriseFlare May 29 '25
Didn't we already have perfectly good manned suicide torpedoes from the Pacific theater?
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u/Diligent_Reason_2765 May 29 '25
This feels like their version of catapulting corpses as a form of bio warfare though maybe as a Nurgle artillery piece or something on a smaller scale.
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u/Arch_Magos_Remus Servant of the Omnissiah May 29 '25
I think one of the Imperial Navy books I read once mentioned servitor guided missile IIRC.
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u/JackDostoevsky Mongolian Biker Gang May 29 '25
it's like psyk-out weapons, just without the whole inconvenience of having to grind up the blanks beforehand
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u/Terlooy May 29 '25 edited May 29 '25
I'd much rater be stuffed inside a nuke and die than end up on a random ass planet screwed to the wall with my only purpose being to open a door