What would a hard scifi 40k look like? pic unrelated

>>53671619

Shit

No psykers so therefore utterly different, too hard to even identify what would remain

>>53671619
Like gahbeej

>>53671619
Do you mean preserving as much of the setting as possible but making it all ""realistic""" or preserving the feel and aesthetics with a few elements which can be reasonably ported over?

>>53671619
The Domination is such a shitty alternate history book.

>>53671840
What would replacing the Chaos Gods with AI or something qualify as?

>>53671885
Is there such a thing as a good alternate history book?

>>53671893
It's sort of a sliding scale, and entirely depends on how those AI would be done. Probably more towards the feel and aesthetics side of things, but could be either end.

>>53671619
Probably another space cowboy setting, except you have several massive factions to deal with. All of them are human-descended. Chaos is an esoteric religion and massive cult. Orks are just Space Junk Barbarians. Tau are the Nipponese Empire. Eldar are humans with a genetic trait for pointed ears and a cultural superiority complex. They could also be like the Spacers of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, having extreme longevity at the cost of having no immune system and germs being quite a health risk to them. Necrons are a bunch of Sand-cultists that have watched the original Stargate movie way too often. Tyranids are just a faction of immoral geneticists and biologists that have no qualms about performing extreme human experimentation... they also have the most advanced medicine.

>>53671893
Post Singularity AI is the catch all for all weird shit in hard scifi.

The warp? Higher dimensional bulk in brane-bulk cosmology that the first AI has repurposed as its subconscious and unlimited processing power, as well as a handy portal into the highly efficient fleshy brains of organic races to squeeze extra computational power out of the 4D brane. Daemons are manifestations of its thoughts and desires. The chaos gods are newer AIs that leech off the comatose first AI in the warp and fight their Great Game to subsume the others. Khorne was an ancient military AI, Tzeentch a strategic planning AI, Nurgle a corrupted caretaker AI, and Slaanesh was most recently birthed by the Eldar in their version of the singularity.

Psykers are simply people with a head line to the warp who can tap into tiny fragments of the first AI's subconscious and use it for themselves. It often backfires as possession or making them a daemonic portal, just like 40k today.

>>53672046
I guess the Emperor would be some kind of fusion of a bunch of mind uploads.

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1MB, 538x369px

>>53671619
>What would a hard scifi 40k look like?
Not anything even remotely resembling 40k?

The "OMG magic old technology" is now simply AI-designed tech literally too complex for a unaugmented human to understand. Could a team of genius engineers reverse engineer it? Sure, in theory, if they had thousands of years and an unlimited budget.

A big ideological conflict could be AI cultists (or left-behind human relatives of people who uploaded) with AI tools; versus the human-supremacists building clean slate tech vs the AI fanboys (and desperate military scientists) building crude bricolage from the scraps.

The other big conflict could be expanding in space vs expanding in time. Human-supremacist types doing laser-launched starwisps, generation ships, or a big wormhole project; while the transhumanists go for faster and faster uploads in AI cities until milliseconds of lag time between data centers is as long a journey as crossing the Atlantic in 1920.

Time scales also give that 'deep history' feel of science fantasy. You might have lived 6 months as a Soylent-fed Roomba repairman indentured to a blockchain-powered welfare Walmart. Meanwhile, the Chinese upload-hive Hong Kong IV has gone through 40 different governments in 3 subjective millennia, reinventing quantum physics twice. A subroutine has rediscovered forgotten dark matter generators prototypes prototyped for baseline reality 600 years ago, and is willing to pay you a bounty in the genetically engineered waifus of your choice to retrieve it from the biowar-destroyed ruins of Brussels.

>>53671885
The whole premise is giving the villains the plot armor instead of muh alliance of light. It was a cautionary parable designed to piss off the moralfags who normally revel in them.

>>53672396

But Space Marines have plot armor too, so is OP actually related even though he said it wasn't?

Really makes you think...

>>53672199
>mind upload
>hard scifi

>>53671810
>No psykers

I think you mean "no psychic powers". You can still have psykers, they'll just be shamans and fortune tellers. In a very superstitious society such could work. Of course the Ecclesiarchy would not approve, but the Adeptus Astrology Telephonetica is an ancient and powerful order, who have as much claim to their "abilities" as the church has for their "faith".

>>53671619
Vernor vinges "zones of thought" novel series basically.

>>53672542
What's soft about translating a series of physical relations onto a different platform? That's what machine learning and nanotech disassembly are for.

>>53674805
>shamans and fortune tellers
market whisperers and AI interpreters?

>>53671619
Three Body Problem

>>53672542
>souls
>hard sci fi

>>53672396
>>53672513
So which Space Marine chapter is closest to the Draka?

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36KB, 475x475px

>>53671914
I personally adore pic related.

>>53682057
Patrician taste

>>53671619
The Emperor is a man made messiah. The warp and chaos gods were a mess made by ancient attempts to make ultratech-based immortality, afterlife and magic systems. They warp uses fuzzy logic to look for lifeforms to interface with.

>>53671914
I recall a shortstory at one point- maybe in a collection called "And the gods laughed"? -where the two 'protagonists' are two aliens in Federation Uplift Service, or something, who are assigned to Earth to ready humans for induction into the galactic community. That means things like "help them establish a one-world government" and "try to get them peaceful and non-violent" and "keep them destroying themselves with biologicals/nuclear/nanite weapons/ecological damage".

The officer is some green-as-grass, fresh-from-the-academy brat who's uncle-equivalent is a major official in the uplift service. The senior NCO is a veteran sergeant equivalent who's actually done this before on other planets in other worlds. They arrive in the wake of a war (long before humans are liable to fuck shit up too badly) and set to work, following the officer's strictly by-the-book approach. Entangle governments, proliferate trade, make it too unlikely and too unprofitable for war to ever be fought and- What's that? Some native ruler got assassinated and all these webs of alliances we set up are actually going to war? Shit, shit shit- Well, surely it'll fizzle out in-

Fuck. Well, it's not too bad, they covered this in academy (the sergeant snorts) there are things we can do about this...
Like, there's this big sea empire that's backing one side, we might be able to get them to calm the fuck down and talk terms if we foster a rebellion in that island next door to th- Geeeze, alright, THAT didn't work. Well, alright. There's this eastern dissident, maybe if we can get him home he can destabilize his country, pull them out of the war, equalize things until they have to seek return to antebellu- Yeah, see, it's working!

>>53685104

And so on, and so on, and every incident punctuated by the jaded NCO trying to teach this academy brat that maybe the manual doesn't hold all the answers and maybe he should take some advice. It ends with him going, "Well, great, they've hit atomics, biologicals and ecologicals and nano-weapons aren't far behind, and they're more unstable than ever (though at least they're no longer murdering each other in the millions, no thanks to you). Maybe you should start thinking about your new assignment when this finally gets fucked up for real- I know you're uncle's big, but if you keep fucking things up kid, maybe the uplift service isn't for you."

I thought that even though it was more scifi than alt-history, it was a neatly fictitious take on history and relatively clever in weaving the fiction 'into' history. I certainly enjoyed it.