The Culture + 40k

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Also dumping cool scfi art.

>>54436096

The culture would wipe the floor with everyone else. Gridfire will completely obliterate any 40k space force, making even the Necrons and hive fleets a complete joke.

Gridfire, for those not in the know, is punching holes in the fabric of spacetime to an alternate dimension of pure antimatter that exists between our universe and the next one over. Gridfire attacks involve making hundreds of such punctures inside of the enemy ship from afar.

This also leads into why they would be a hell of a problem for the warp. The Minds already punch holes in alternate dimensions for quick travel, firepower, or even just for storage. Indeed, one of the things the minds consider high priority is coordinating their efforts so that they can continue to do this without accidentally destroying an entire dimension by having it collapse in on itself from overmanipulation, since the effects of that would be catastrophic (we were using that dimension for shit).

This establishes that the culture, if they feel pressed, can probably collapse a dimension on purpose.

Once they are made aware of the existence of the warp, sealing it away or destroying it is going to be high on their list of priorities.

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>>54436096
http://archiveofourown.org/works/649448/chapters/1181375
I havnt actually read it

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>>54436096
If the milky way isn't flooded with gridfire it will be social-engineered into submission before any of the little powers notice the culture has shown up in the galaxy. Necrons and Farseers might be notified as a courtesy, but they can't do shit.

Like using an excavator to bury a toothpick.

>>54436346
This always gets brought up in culture discussions on /tg/ but from what I remember, only post sublimed races can use grid-fire on a tactical level. All culture-equivalent races have access to grid energy, and make use of anti-matter based weapons, but actually drooping the grid on top of a moving ship seems to be beyond the ability of even a culture Mind. IIRC The only time we see the Culture use it, is to demolish an orbital as part of a scorched earth policy and show of force.

Actual ship battles mostly involve displacing plasma and anti-matter into the enemy ship, while also trying to rape the enemy's AI into committing suicide with Effectors, and avoiding having the same things done to you with the same weapons.

More useful than Gridfire in space combat, Displacement lets you transport missiles directly inside the enemy, and even transport explosions out of you before you get hurt. Effectors are super advanced Electronic warfare equipment, but they seem to be able to do just about anything the plot requires, from light years away even if you don't mind being unsubtle.

>>54437806
Agreed, more or less.

Even without Gridfire, Culture tech is space magic bullshit far enough advanced from 40k tech that even Necrons look mundane.

That, combined with the fact that they mostly live on millions of enormous sentient craftworlds, and I can't really see any other race being able to compete with them.

Worst case scenario, they pull the same shit they did against the Idirans - constantly retreat with their GSVs while maintaining a ridiculous level of battleship construction, and annihilating any fixed structure that is strategically relevant.

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>>54436348
This is really good. Thanks anon

>>54437806
> only post sublimed races can use grid-fire on a tactical level

That's because Culture ships are run by AIs capable of fighting and ending battles in less time than it takes humans to blink, and gridfire takes multiple seconds to spin up.

It'll be fully capable of hitting 40k ships, though, because compared to Culture Minds, they're slow and stupid.

>>54437806
>while also trying to rape the enemy's AI into committing suicide with Effectors

Jesus christ, that seems unethical even for war.

The Culture Minds get corrupted by Tzeentch while their people get corrupted by Slaanesh. The galaxy burns and the Dark Gods laugh.

>>54439227
Now that would be interesting to see. Holy shit, talk about dystopic...

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>>54439227
>>54436096
This, honestly.
Everyone seems to forget that AI are prime targets for demonic possession- thats why the Imperium uses servitors.

This can't possibly be long enough since the last time we've had this exact same thread.

>>54439227
This is what 40k fags always have to fall back on because the Culture is a ludicrously more powerful setting than anything in 40k by the numbers. I don't buy it: the existing races in 40k are not instantly and immediately consumed by Chaos, and the whole way the Culture functions means they are not going to encounter it unaware nor is their entire society ever going to vulnerable to it. Look at what happens in Excession.

Just being clever, or fucking and doing drugs, aren't enough to fall to Chaos - but it is the Good Clean Fun part of the Culture that fits the least in 40k. A mind is a lot more than an AI as >>54439774 calls it, and honestly there's no reason to image the Chaos Gods could even get to the nonphysical bits of a Mind. They certainly aren't in the Warp, and in terms of feats the Chaos Gods seem considerably weaker than what a Sublimed civ is capable of.

>>54439219
The one time we saw it happen, the two Minds involved had a vendetta between them, so I we're not really sure how common it is.

>>54436096
In conventional war, the galaxy gets raped.

The question is whether or not Chaos can corrupt the Culture's people and Minds.

>>54439897
Yeah, the Culture honestly has a pretty good chance of distracting Tzeentch forever with Infinite Fun, turning Slaanesh into a being of gentle BDSM and non-decadent artsy orgies, sending Nurgle to fat camp, and turning Khorne into Whorf if not outright extinguishing him. They have massive populations and incredibly good mental health and social safeguards, so it would be pretty easy for them to reshape the Chaos gods with the mass of well balanced and happy souls guided by self correcting god-machines.

>>54440127
I'm more interested in seeing Inquisitors get slap droned so they can't hurt anyone.

>>54439227
The population would just get tempted and corrupted within like an afternoon. It would be like throwing a very fat, pampered rooster to the dogs.
The minds and SC would have a fighting chance, though.

>>54439219
Some culture warships seem to consider ethics to be nothing more than a common courtesy to thrown aside in times of war.

Like, the Culture talks about ethics and consent all the time. But they are also anarchists and aren't really comfortable with actually enforcing any of that with anything stronger than public ridicule, and force as a very unfortunate last resort.

Unfortunately winning the Idran war gave them a sizable population of hyper-intelligent sociopaths that are just looking for people they can get away with hurting without losing too many friends. When they aren't looking for Space Nazis to punch, they effectively make up the edgy sub-Cultures. The warship in surface detail has it's Avatoid chill in industrial nightclubs, and (pretends to) torture people in order to piss off the less warlike Minds, and also make itself look more attractive to human women who may or may not be looking for a bad boy to replace the Abusive asshole she just escaped from. As far as he's concerned if it all works out in the end, he's the good guy, the people he kills are bad guys, and the people who he didn't kill are grateful, even if they never want to talk to him ever again.

This pattern of "Culture Warship Mind is actually a huge asshole." repeats itself over and over. The biggest differences seem to be how well they disguise it, and how ruthless they turn out to be when they let go of everything and become the Killbot they were never allowed to be in polite society. Mistake Not, from the Hydrogen sonata, is probably the best, both at hiding it's own sociopathy, and flipping out and killing things when the time comes. Culture Drones also exhibit this behavior pattern, but tend to be much cruder when it comes to hiding it, and have much more limited weapons.

Minds think humans are cute, but sometimes it's the kind of cute that you could easily imagine yourself squeezing to death. Iain M Banks is a lot more fucked up than anybody on /tg/ gives him credit for.

>>54442867
>Like, the Culture talks about ethics and consent all the time. But they are also anarchists and aren't really comfortable with actually enforcing any of that with anything stronger than public ridicule, and force as a very unfortunate last resort.

That is...deeply uncomfortable.

>>54442893
Society creates fucked up minds. A good society will have those minds put on a mask and daydream about doing bad things to people and allow them only to do actual bad things to people where doing bad things to people needs to actually be done.

>force as a very unfortunate last resort.
This isn't actually true. It's just that minds will stop most actual harm before it actually happens unless all parties are consenting. So if you try to kill someone without a lot of planning they'll probably stop it from happening.

If you do manage to kill or hurt someone nonconsensually, they'll get a drone to look after you so you don't do it again.

>>54436096
>How would a wargame fluff do against the literal book form of nuh uh I win.
Gee I dunno.

>>54442893
To be honest, that kind of discomfort is what makes these books so fucking great. Not many sci-fi books can make you feel like this. And in fact, many of the events in the books can be read as metaphors for the power of literature itself, as well as a critique and vindication of leftism. It's fucked up sometimes, but it's also fun sometimes, and you'll feel better when it's over. People talk about these books, but you can't understand them until you've read them.

>>54442981
That's still a form of Force. Often a field of literal force preventing you from moving in a dangerous manner if you persist in your violent actions.

But this is considered an unfortunate last resort, because it's a violation of the NAP or whatever. Anarchy has to be allowed to be hypocritical sometimes, or it isn't real anarchy anymore.

You are spot on about how society creates sociopaths though, and how the difference between good and evil seems to be how society deals with that "problem." As far as the Culture is concerned, a sociopath is just a weapon for killing other sociopaths which won't play by the rules. (which Sociopaths seem to love anyways, so what's the problem) this is more or less the point behind Use of Weapons. The Culture uses Zakalwe as a weapon, and he's man who grew up in a hostile environment and has a hard time thinking in any terms other than how to get an advantage over other people by any means necessary. For Zakalwe and the culture, it's just coercion and murder all the way down. There is nothing sacred in his life that he hasn't used to hurt somebody with, himself included. But both are allowed to feel better about themselves despite this because they ultimately have a net positive effect on the world around them. In fact, just a tiny fraction of vindication would matter more to Zakalwe than the forgiveness of all the gods worshiped by all the civilizations of the entire galaxy. That's why he can't help but keep fighting even when it's absurd.

If we're transplanting Culture groups (a single ship?) into 40k's universe, I actually think the Culture will be at a serious disadvantage to start, not because of the Warp specifically, but just because physics in 40k is so radically different from either the real world or the Culture's home universe.

>>54443208
The Mind would instantly either figure out the physics or be overcome by Tzeentch. Who would win between the Culture and 40k is a matter of debate but that the war would take any more than few minutes shouldn't be.

>>54443208
To be specific, I think a lot of Culture tech would just stop working in the setting. However, I also think that one of the first things the transplantees would do, would be to initiate a shitload of physics experiments to try and decipher the rules of the new universe.

So as I see it, the Culture would have an "incubation period" where they would be much weaker than normal as they try to understand their new surroundings and rebuild their technology base. They'd probably be limited to a single star system at first, and even after they figure out FTL transport in this universe, they will probably initially stick with the same kind of FTL used by the Tau--which is slower than that used by any other races. Eventually they'd probably construct their own custom Webway just like the Emperor tried to do, but they could potentially be working and fighting defensively for years.

And at least *one* Mind is going to succumb to Chaos, even if only to find out what it's like.

>>54443208
if none of their tech works then obviously they are all going to die pretty quickly.

>>54443237
the minds work primarily by shunting their mental processing into another dimension where they can think at FTL speeds. if they lose that feature then it's pretty bad news for the culture.

>>54443193
>That's still a form of Force. Often a field of literal force preventing you from moving in a dangerous manner if you persist in your violent actions.
Please. If I wear my personal armour that stops you penetrating my skull with a bullet, am I breaking the NAP?

The Minds stopping harm happening by putting a protection around others is in no way a violation of NAP.

>>54441222
Culture citizens aren't weak willed or prone to corruption. What could you possibly corrupt them with?

>>54443237
The problem is wether or not the mind will be able to maintain its hyperspace structure or will most of its functions drop back into its real space shell

If the Warp didn't exist then the Culture would wipe the floor with every race and still have time for lunch.
But since the population is full of degenerate hedonists and the Minds, especially those working in Special Circumstances, are wrapped up in their plans, Tzeentch and Slaanesh would have a field day with them.
So really it all comes down to whether or not the Culture can magic up some Clarketech BS that can protect them from the Warp before their own society does them in.

>>54443306
They will create a warp god of freedom and fullfilling oneself

>>54443296
Yes, and that's why Minds will prefer to do that instead of Immobilize you. But sometimes the slap drone doesn't have that level of control, and has to instead just paralyze you.

The Culture tries to do things with the least amount of force, and Minds accomplish this paradoxically by using the most powerful tools at their disposal. But sometimes you have to make do. And drones Violate the NAP all the damn time, with or without the permission of Minds, who might have to resort to some extreme measures to stop them.

Fights between minds and humans aren't fights at all. Your gun suddenly stops working, Your knife is displaced out of your hand. Ect ect ect. But a fight between a mind and a drone, or a mind and another mind, can get pretty brutal, even if it happens in ways that aren't visible to human eyes.

>>54436125
The lighting on this is a mess.

>>54443285
They're still pretty drastically smarter than anything going. It'd just shunt their reaction time from microseconds to some other fraction of a second.

This is the warship in Excession:
>It ran a systems check.Totally unharmed, apart from the self-inflicted degradation to its engines.It slackened off the power, dropping back to normal maxima and watching the readouts; significant degradation from here in about a hundred hours.Not too bad.Self-repairing would take days at all-engines-stop.Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose.Plasma chambers at ninety-six per cent efficiency; about right for the engagement system-use profile according to the relevant charts and graphs.Self-repair mechanisms champing the bit.It looked around, concentrating on the view astern.No obvious threats; it let the self-repairers make a start on two of the four chambers.Full reconstruction time, two hundred and four seconds.

>Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds.Hmm; it had felt longer.But then that was only natural.

You cannot win the tech game. Even if you arbitrarily decide Culture tech doesn't work it will take them slmost no time to build tech that does, and better than anything else in the setting. And like, the antimatter would still work. The effectors, the lasers, the plasma. They don't need more than that.

Culture vs 40k comes down to "Does Chaos magically win lol" and that's it.

>>54443285
>the minds work primarily by shunting their mental processing into another dimension where they can think at FTL speeds.

Wow. Yeah, no way that would work in 40k as-is. If they get time to figure the local universe out, MAYBE they could regain access to that technology by combining it with Gellar fields or pseudo-Webways. Using that tech without any kind of protection though, is basically like being an Unsanctioned Psyker.

>>54436346
What if the Warp is just what happens when a dimension collapses from over use?

>>54443470
And that's without taking into consideration all the ways the Minds can get the desired effect without even using a visible show of force.
Gurgeh got manipulated into destroying an entire civilization and didn't even realize it until the end when he finally put the pieces together. The Minds are so far ahead of baseline humanity that they could push a man to crash his ship into a star and have him convinced to the last moment that he had decided to do it all on his own.
NAP really doesn't count for anything when you can manipulate someone so thoroughly that they aren't even aware that they're doing what you want them to do.

>>54443520
Mentally, a Mind is much more powerful than a Chaos God has ever been shown to be.

>>54443530
I've no idea why we're pretending the Culture adhere to anything like modern day NAP thought

>>54443536
I think that might devolve into a "pre-ethical god is cretinous, but Strong" situation. Depending on how you assume things work it might not matter that the Mind is astronomically more intelligent or willful. It might still get corrupted.

Machines are not immune.

On the other hand it might also truly become the Omnisiah, or a better subject of the term than the real one ever was or could be.

Yeah, the Ad-Mech that actually listened to it would be heretics, but their machine god would be much smarter and actually working towards what was actually a very directed, very efficient "divine" purpose of improving things with SCIENCE, and rationality.

If it didn't get eaten by Chaos. I guess it really depends on if it can find some way to harness available physics and resources to use as a defense (probably) and whether it's thought and actions feed chaos. (Possibly not, some things clearly do not, although it's new friends in the Ad-Mech still would with their buzz of activity. The mind is more than smart enough to realize this very, very quickly however.)

>>54443550
I'm just using it as a figure of speech. I think Ancaps are the dumbest form of Anarchism, because they try to pretend it's not hypocritical to make rules. I like their taste in pornography though.

When I said "Violates the NAP or something." I was making a joke about how it's impossible to be an effective anarchist and have rules that you don't sometimes break. And yes, totalitarians and authoritarians break their own rules all the time as well. They just are less honest about it (at least in public).

>>54443550
It's easiest to compare it to the NAP we know because whatever NAP they like to work under is clearly convoluted to the point of lunacy considering what the Minds get away with.

>>54443730
In practice, the kind they teach to humans seems to be somewhere between the NAP and Consent Culture, but also with a few things that might seem really weird to the adherents of either.

Don't rape or murder people, and if you take something without asking, give it back before they notice it's gone.

I am not also sure if they have the same definition of rape as we do. Esp since most sex seems to happen under the influence of many drugs, and lying or gentle manipulation isn't seen as a violation of anything. A better rule of thumb would be "Don't force yourself on her, or give her any drugs she wouldn't give herself under the same circumstances. And call her the next morning if you want to be invited to the next orgy." Is probably closer. Non physical harassment may or may not cause a concerned drone to use it's fields, either to push you away, or just dampen all the noise you were making, but never in a way that a clever human can't find a way around. And when a Mind wants to talk to you, nothing will be able to stop it until you've heard it out. The culture has no problem with PUAs, it just applies evolutionary pressure on them until they become as attractive to you as they think they should be.

>>54443881
>The culture has no problem with PUAs, it just applies evolutionary pressure on them until they become as attractive to you as they think they should be.

Now I'm imagining a Culture Mind devoting a preposterous amount of resources to getting one guy to become an actually interesting person rather than just negging women.

>>54443945
It would probably do this by enlisting the help of the most beautiful woman on the entire Orbital to play hard to get with him. And it would probably be part of an even bigger game being played with other Minds in "The only slightly less interesting times game."

It would in fact, make a great romantic comedy, I can't believe that Banks didn't have enough faith in his own Ideas to write more stories that didn't involve Special Circumstances being dicks. Heck, the framing device could be a human asking the Mind if life on an Orbital was really boring compared to life on a ship, and being told that it absolutely was not, because humans are a constant source of entertainment, even when domesticated by Utopia.

I mean, an unfractured c'tan could beat them.

And the chaos gods could too, If they actually cared

Gork and mork would be fine too

There is little a nearly godlike being could do against actual gods

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What about Culture vs City? The City is nowhere near it's prime but it's got a rather strong implied military, where they give the equivalent of a single detective/drone a gun that can shoot through several km of solid super space age metal on a low power shot and they build shit by siphoning matter/energy from other dimensions.

Seems like it'd be a case of quarantine the city off and poke at it to see what the fuck the deal is.

>>54444090
Given enough time the Culture could deconstruct the City down to its constituent elements, and considering the distances they can work from, it would be a serious effort for any of the ground units in the City to stop them.
That being said, if the City has active defenses and some sort of space force, with the tech it has on hand for its most advanced military units, they could put up a pretty good fight. But as far as I know, Blame! never touched on that.
The Devil is in the details and I don't think we have very much of those.

>>54444081
Not sure the chaos gods are anymore "true gods" than a mind is. Labelling something a god is basically just a comparison of the entities ability to affect changes vs a baseline humans. The most godlike things done in 40k would be mass genetic mutation, screwing with passage of time and blowing up planets? None of that seems umreasonable for a Mind to pull off if it wanted to.

>>54444150
Yeah they never really go into details for anything but Safeguard, who are more of just cops/antivirus, but if you look at the level of tech if they had an actual military beyond that it could be able to compete via teleporting an army of those niggas with rifle (compared to the handgun) GBEs and gravitron shields in range to fuck them up.

But for all we know Safeguard (which, to be fair, are able to curbstomp most settings themselves) could be the extent of their military.

>>54444187
Well the chaos gods are like legit snap fingers you're dead gods, it's just that 99.9999% of their power is focused on fighting each other, not on the materium.

And the c'tan fought the old ones, which where an entire race of emperors on steriods

>>54444187
Yeah, Banks is only Atheist in that he rejects the hierarchy imposed by religious though. He seems to have no problem with godlike beings. Even literal heaven (the sublime) and figurative hell (torture simulations)

40k seems to have a similarly cynical take on religion. Gods and demons are just higher dimensional beings of vast power and intellect. And culture Minds are on a similar scale. The biggest problem the Culture would have with them would be being outnumbered and possibly outgunned. But if they last long enough to start mass producing inter dimensional weaponry, they could defend themselves from demons, and if they manage to create a large enough population of happy people (or happy AIs), they could create their own warp entities that could even dwarf the emperor himself.

So it's possible a single GSV might not last very long, but a group of culture ships expecting a fight could easily start gaining a foothold, and even becoming a superpower without anybody noticing. Assuming hyperspace is equivalent to the warp, they probably already have the equivalent of Geller fields that far surpass the Imperuim's dangerously over-rated models. They could be fighting in the warp and only a few of the most sensitive psyckers would notice.

The real horror is what the Culture would turn into after winning the war. If the Idrans were enough to turn them into a bunch of sociopathic assholes, what would happen if they were able to reform the chaos gods?

Slanesh and Tzneech enjoying their new jobs. Khorne and Nurgle rendered harmless. Gork and Mork haven't noticed they're stuck in an entertainment simulation. Emperor and surviving Eldar gods finally allowed to die in peace. Boardgame fluff advancing.

>>54444268
The emperor was the culmination of a bunch of psykers over the course of a few hundred thousand years, and was of little enough power that a big ork could challenge him.

That's less physical brains and brawn than the physical size of New York, if you stacked them together

Culture warships work at lightsecond distances and can tweak your mind from that distance without you even noticing they were there. They've access to energy levels that could blow up stars, and are smart enough to talk people into committing suicide if they feel like it.
Gods? Please. Come back when they actually do something impressive that can't be done with a piece long range modifying equipment and large amounts of energy.

>>54444350
>If the Idrans were enough to turn them into a bunch of sociopathic assholes
Most of them aren't sociopathic assholes. The majority of the ones who did turn into those either toned themselves down, mothballed themselves, or just got PTSD. One of the Minds that controlled a habitat long past the war commits suicide along with an alien assassin because of the billions he killed during part of a war. That's just a number to you, but he was smart enough to know the lives of everyone he was snuffing out.

>>54443945
That's basically what the acceptable PUA community is now anyway. Like that is Neil Strauss these days.

>>54444081
An unfractured C'tan is Tuesday for the Culture. And not even the whole day.

>>54444446
Well yeah, but my point is, the Culture has to live with the guilt of the Idran war, and this sometimes manifests as a slightly higher incidence of sociopaths. Post chaos Culture would be even weirder.

>>54444624
What about the void dragon?
Took two gods at the height of their power to put him to sleep.

Let's not forget the whole complete mastery over machines thing.

>>54444676
Culture might not stand a chance against something of that magnitude. They're strong, but even in their own universe there are entities more powerful than the entirety of the Culture.
Although I don't think the mastery of machinery thing counts in this scenario. Isn't tat because it has a special bond with Imperium technology?

>>54444676
If he can control Minds from a longer distance than they can tag him, sure. If not then same deal.

>>54444736
Well we know very little about the dragon, we just know it took big e and vaul to put him to sleep, and that something has been keeping the imperial technology afloat.

If it was a shard that big e and vaul fought, culture is screwed, if it wasn't and was the full dragon, less screwed but still screwed

Have we all forgotten about the necrons sun gun and Death Star? And that they actually haven't pulled out everything they have.

I know they are hiding titans somewhere

>>54444825
It looks like he has kept things working across the Milky Way.

That's a bit more than a few lightyears

>>54444831
>sun gun
The Sleeper Service reconfigured its engines to extract multiple times the total mass-energy of our sun from the grid. It is roughly the size of Connecticut.

>>54443614
Culture Minds have held their own against probes from elder universes trying to rewrite their thoughts, by going in and putting themselves back together at a similar rate. A Culture Mind already fights by subversion more potent and quick than any corrupting force shown in Chaos' arsenal, and stuff like scapcode would be as much a threat as background radiation. Effectors are electron manipulators that can read and control the thoughts of several planets of people and AI from light years away if not contested by another Mind, and that's the low end of their power.

>>54445088
>Effectors are electron manipulators that can read and control the thoughts of several planets of people and AI from light years away if not contested by another Mind, and that's the low end of their power.

That's definitely POSSIBLE, but I wouldn't call it the low end of their power. More like over clocking the system in ways that are only possible with a highly advanced model, and also making a lot of noise that will be visible to anybody in hyperspace.

Again, a lot of Culture wank seems to confuse the super awesome thing a modern Equiv Tech warship could do under optimal circumstances if it really wanted, with something that's easy enough for anybody to do.

>>54444150
They mention but never go into detail about something called "Gravity Furnaces". Considering The City is large enough that it should have collapsed into a black hole by now, it's safe to assume that if you broke it/them/enough of them the entire city would become a black hole.

>>54436096
The Culture would either succumb to Slaanesh or win with little effort.

>>54445180
part of the problem is that the Culture theoretically could spit any given super-science project from every GSV, but doesn't in the books because its not on a war footing. For example, The Sleeper Service >>54445071 mentioned, is a retired civilian Ship that slapped its oversized engines together while its minders were distracted. The other example I used, a drone successfully resisting the Excession, just temporarily, is what's relevant to Minds resisting the gods of Chaos. The other bit was less thought out, and I tend to go off the general capabilities of a GSV, not a warship, but I admit its contingent on being uncontested and in essentially optimal conditions.

>>54444831
>Sun Gun
During the Idiran-Culture war Culture ships would hide themselves by sitting inside suns.

>>54445305
Slaanesh will succumb to the Culture. The Prince of Pleasure demands excess and strife for perfection, the Culture enjoys proportion and ease of grace. The cult's sadomasochistic ritual orgy is really blunted when reduced to the tuesday sex, wine, and cheese party.

>>54445180
Pretty much any Culture ship with a Mind could use its effectors like that though. I mean the warships are honestly just the general purpose ones with Minds more suited to military action.

>>54444831
the celestial orrery and the more exotic weapons might be surprising to the Culture, but only as physics experiments. I'm straining to think of a way for the Necrons to strike at a Mind, let alone really damage a ship. Culture ships slam around at several thousand times lightspeed, I don't know how fast inertialess drives go.

>>54445750
Lineguns are supposedly really good at killing Minds, they fire linear singularities, and are really hard to stop with most fields. And they can even be man portable (provided the man is big enough)

The hard part is hitting anything with them. The projectile only travels at relativistic speeds in a straight line. A bunch of them in a small enough volume of space probably make for great area denial weapons though, and IIRC they have scored kills, both during the Idran war, and during simulated wars with other equiv tech powers.

>>54445750
The other problem is like, you use your superweapon to kill a Mind. It works. They figure out how it works...

>>54445826
That sounds pretty similar to the GBEs from Blame!, and as relativistic weapons they're essentially daggers when fighting a Ship. Their standard method of projecting force onto the enemy is FTL teleportation, so staying well away from and ahead of a Linegun or GBE while maintaining an attack shouldn't be much trouble.

I'm still of the opinion that Slaanesh would grow a billion times if the culture showed up.

>>54445750
Back when they were a thing, inertialess drives were able to 'cross the galaxy in the blink of an eye,' GW has since realized that this makes necron victory inevitable and retconned them, with only a rogue mention in the Shield of Ba'al books since 5th Edition.

>>54446329

Actually, that's one place where 40K wins hands down, in that the Imperium, who have shitty warp technology, can manage 9 megalights. The Culture considers 200 kilolights to be pretty quick.

>>54446143

Yes, but because the Chaos Gods are influenced by mortals, the sheer volume of happy, congenial souls caused by displacing the entire Culture might well make Slaanesh a very tame pleasure god by comparison.

>>54446565

Yep, cultureverse is slow-slow-slow.

Shame they only have to find one helpful eldar ranger to get the webway, and then they have the necron solution down pat.

>>54436096
Ends badly for everyone. 40k can't compete with Culture tech. The Culture can't survive with an injection of grim-dark.

>>54445750
I'm of the opinion that inertia less drives exist but they act as they would in real life, only allowing necrons to reach C

They let necrons turn on a dime though, but they still have to use the web way if they wanna get anywhere fast

>>54446601
Problem is Culture FTL isn't limited to long distance travel.

>>54446684

I.. know? I am saying this single strategic disadvantage (almost not worth mentioning because any single culture vessel can destroy the entire imperial navy) won't last anyway.

>>54443306
By 40k standards they're already corrupted and decadent.

>>54443536
Sure, but being mentally strong doesn't necessarily correlate to psychic strength in 40k. Necrons for example.

My plastic dad can beat up your transhuman dad.

>>54447058
Nuh huh, Star Wars totally beats Star Trek.

Implying the 40k universe isn't a simulation being run by a mind in the background while it works on something important

>>54447154
>not even a Mind can progress the plot

>>54447132
B-but Firefly beats them all!

>>54446579
This isn't quite how Chaos Gods work.
Close but not quite.

All the Minds would get corrupted.
It'd be an enormous shitshow.

>>54447682
Pretty sure thats how they originally worked before becoming sapient in their own right. Now instead of beimg made of X they derive power from X.

>>54443349
They could go for total blanking of their population and covering al the Minds in nullification fields. Though it will cut them from warp FTL or at the very least severely restrict it.

There are though other methods. At the very least what Tyranids do. Though it is hard to say why it is so rare. There may be some unpleasant caveats.

>>54436346
The Culture is the Mary Sue of space, uh, cultures.
Which is sort of the point.
The problems encountered in the books are of the kind that can't be solved with brute force.

>TheScorpiusEquation.jpg

Rank your Culture waifus boys:

1) Vyr Cossont
2) Diziet Sma
3) Djan Seriy Anaplian
4) That one sexy mountain princess from Inversions also those shepherdesses, holy shit
5) Mawhrin-Skel

Genar-Hofoen is literally worst girl.

>>54448052
There are no waifus because all the Culture women are sluts and the non-culture women aren't even human, and xenophilia is bestiality.

>>54444350
AIs don't seem to count for warp influence in 40k. You have literal souls there. So an AI is like a piece of dead matter. It doesn't have protections of the blank and it also doesn't have any warp influence like normal people or psykers.

Also clones, copies and similar creations meet a fast end and tend to have a lot of problems before that. Probably connected to the fact that souls exist.

40k universe has vastly different rules that only superficially resemble our or Culture realities.

>>54448076
Only 1 of those is really a Culture woman, and only 4 are even women.

>>54448031
>solving the labor calculation problem
>solving the labor calculation problem: this time on the social plane
>not brute force

Sufficient intelligence is merely another form of brutality. The Minds literally brute-force simulate play universes for their primary entertainment.

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>>54448052
>Meatfucker and those xenophile Elench Ships that went with the Excession for interdimensional adventures with their crews
spaceships are best Culture waifus

>>54443158
>the literal book form of nuh uh I win.
As someone who's not very familiar with 'The Culture' as a series, it really really comes off as such sometimes. Them and the Xeelee.

>>54448052

Better game: Best ship names boys.

Hardmode no POV ships
Dante must die no ships from that chapter of look to windward

>Lightly seared on the reality grill
>Just the washing instruction chip of life's rich tapestry
>Death & Gravity
>No more mr. nice guy
>Sleeper Service.

>>54448423
They fuck up plenty, its just that they're hard to beat in a VS debate because they're something close to an accurate kardashev 2-3 civilization. They fight on a cosmic scale and control for everything they have the option to, and generally make human operators irrelevant, so theres a lot of fanwank and butthurt when comparing them to something like starwars. The Culture's canon norm is something close to the peak fanwank of the galactic federation, and the peak of Culture wank makes them out to equivalent to the Xeelee.

>>54448523
>stood far back when the gravitas was handed out

>>54443500
>Culture vs 40k comes down to "Does Chaos magically win lol" and that's it.
It's more like "Does Chaos pull 'HAH I WIN!' bullshit out of its ass and declare itself the victor' or "OH FUCK THE ORKS GOT THEIR HANDS ON A CULTURE SHIP AND FIGURED OUT HOW TO USE ITS WEAPONS!!"

That being said, the latter scenario is much less likely since Orks controlling everything (while a sort-of goal for Gork and Mork in the grand scheme of things) sounds good, it'd also be extremely boring to them.

>>54448724
> "OH FUCK THE ORKS GOT THEIR HANDS ON A CULTURE SHIP AND FIGURED OUT HOW TO USE ITS WEAPONS!!"

>looted culture warships
I had no Idea how much I wanted this untill now, and I'm a culturefag.

>>54448724
>"Does Chaos pull 'HAH I WIN!' bullshit out of its ass and declare itself the victor'
getting metaphysically violated and reshaped by the Culture to the point of tolerability might count as this, the Chaos gods would insist they were in control even as the Minds turned them into sanitized mascots.

The incredibly powerful AI ships that were built with no warp protection or concern of any sort would shortly be possessed by daemons and handily exterminate all life in the galaxy and aboard themselves. The echoing and empty warp, now devoid of emotional input from the lifeless galaxy, would gradually give rise to new and strange gods based on the scraps of demonic personality clinging to existence inside the mechanical minds of the culture ships, as well as the drives of those ships themselves.

Beyond this it is hard to predict how things would go, for the galaxy's very laws would have changed so much.

>>54448767
Culture Warships would line up to get looted, just stop off on a planet and take some spores, even grow your own from scratch for custom Orks. It's not as if there are control consoles for a Ship's Mind or weapon clusters, but it could whip something up for the Orks to pull triggers on for fun, and give them a semblance of a navigation console to suggest routes. The Orks might not even notice that their space hulk is any more reliable a transport than any other, but the ROU its built around is enjoying a long sabbatical as a galactic game warden before returning to give lectures on the Whaaaag.

>>54448790
>getting metaphysically violated and reshaped by the Culture to the point of tolerability might count as this, the Chaos gods would insist they were in control even as the Minds turned them into sanitized mascots.
Meanwhile Gork and Mork are just chilling at the local warp pub and for this shit to blow over while their boyz keep fight... well, everything else in the galaxy as usual.

>>54448910
>The Orks might not even notice that their space hulk is any more reliable a transport than any other,
Let's just hope the Culture warships can survive ramming other ships (since that's a tried and true tactic among Ork fleets).

>>54448910
I want to read this badly.

>>54448892
If we're saying Hyperspace is the same as the Warp for this, they have tons or redundant anti-subversion protections, and Minds are shown to combat mental corruption with capacity greater than any force in 40k by so large a margin they could reliably subvert daemons, not the other way around.

If Hyperspace isn't analogous to the Warp than the Minds are as alien to the Chaos Gods as the C'tan are, and they could expect as much luck influencing them. The Minds do most of their computing in Hyperspace, and if that's not connected to the Warp they're essentially as distant from realspace as the Gods are. Just as the Gods can stay in the warp indefinitely and avoid threats in realspace, Culture ships can just lurk in Hyperspace indefinitely, body and mind entirely aloof. Like the Chaos gods, a Ship need not emerge from its higher dimensional realm to attack, but the gods need their worshipers, and the Culture can exist and wage war entirely from Hyperspace.

>>54448910
>After being properly introduced to the concept of more dakka Minds revolt from human rule and embrace the Waaaaaaah
>Culture ships become physical embodiments of dakka, minor Waaaaagh gods in thier own right.

>>54449066
>>54449130
40kfags, please take your hurt feelings and go

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>>54449066
breaking too hard in shallow Hyperspace can tear up planetary bodies and Culture Ships use stars as light cover. If they're worried they'll put their fields up, but they ought to punch through the adamantine and granite of an Imperial ship like the superluminal bullets they are.

>>54443536
Considering that the chaos gods are insane spirits that as often work against themselves as for, they really can't even be called sapient on any level we recognize. When you get right down to it, the Chaos Gods are almost simple animals that exist only to do things that fit their domains.

>>54449144
>please take your hurt feelings and go
>implying as a 40kfag I'm not having a laff at this entire potential scenario
Seriously though, I have no idea on the dimensions or durability of a Culture warship so I have no clue how much it would take if the Orks tried to ram their way through an entire Imperial fleet with the thing.

maybe you had better make this thread a fourth time today just to be sure

>>54448423
They're mighty in many ways militarily, but the series (as far as I can tell having read Consider Pheblas and Player of Games) focuses more on ideological conflict, and it in no way paints the Culture as the de-facto good guys.
They're anarchists but not above manipulation to get what they want, and if they decide that a civilization is too abhorrent they will step in and put pressure on them until changes are made, or they'll just outright annihilate them.
They destroy an entire species in CP solely because of ideological differences despite the species hardly being enough of a physical threat to justify it, and in the process condemn trillions(?) of individuals to death on both sides of the war, as well as destroying massive works of stellar engineering just to deny the Idirians any sort of advantages whatsoever. The protagonist of CP despises the Culture even before all of this comes to fully pass, and is never shown to be entirely wrong about them.

>>54449248
>how much it would take if the Orks tried to ram their way through an entire Imperial fleet with the thing.
It wouldn't break at all.

>>54449248
they range from 100 meter long cylinders consisting of engine, mind, and weapon pod to several hundred kilometer long Plate class GSVs with multiple Minds, shipyards, and more engine mass and weaponizable material than entire Imperial fleets. The standard ships of the line are GOUs, and they are about ten kilometers of clarketech and nanomachines, son, in a case made of metamaterial superstructure, with a goofy name to distract from the fact that it looks like a bumpy dildo and could fuck stars to death.

>>54449103
>they could reliably subvert daemons, not the other way around.

Indeed, that narrative still ends with the chaos gods being replaced by wholly new culture-influenced beings, after they find the bear sitting in their rabbit trap.

I'm pessimistic about the minds being able to resist literal supernatural possession, this being a wholly different thing in my opinion than the sufficiently-advanced technology they're kitted out for. Madly rewriting your own programming faster than the cunt three dimensions up can manually flip your bits with his electron probe to stop him from corrupting you is one thing, and it's one hell of an impressive thing, but dealing with your central processor growing a mouth and babbling mad blasphemies at your radiation sensor until it gets scared, grows legs, and skitters off into a corner to hide is something else. No doubt they could learn what needs to be done relatively quickly, but that doesn't mean defenses can be implemented quickly. Sacred rituals, applications of warding runes, and installation of grey matter circuitry are all things that take specified amounts of time. Preparing even the vastly less complex and tempting automated systems of imperial warships for their first boot is a lengthy and involved process that, while obviously possible to greatly optimize, can't be compressed into a couple of femtoseconds.

I just don't think it matters much. The culture so vastly outclasses the 40k galaxy that being able to possess them isn't enough to save them. They would mostly just be removing their own ability to beg for mercy.

>>54449435
Yeah, I'm getting that impression from what others have posted.

Orks + Culture Warships = GAME OVER MAN! for everybody else.

>>54449221
I can see Thraka taking a Culture Ship and repeatedly breaking too hard in shallow Hyperspace around the Tau homeworld of T'au. Never enough to rip it apart outright, but enough times that the planet simply comes apart after the 11th time he does it or something.

Why?

Spite purposes of course.

>>54449248
They'd ram straight through one ship, realize they're moving so fast that they can't even see the Imperial fleet anymore, and decide "fuck it let's Initial D this shit FTL DRIFTING GO"

>>54449681

Except the orks wouldnt get any near of them and its game over already without them.

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>>54449681
you could just do laps around the system fucking them with gravity waves and exotic radiation, and they wouldn't even understand what was happening until you teleported them blackmail grots.

>>54449747
the Orks would get aboard a Culture ship the same way they get everywhere else, by being the most entertaining faction in a grimderp galaxy.

>>54449942

>the 40kid grasping for straws

>>54448179
Fair point.
Either way, I found the books incredibly dull and the fans more annoying than my face.

Whenever the culture is brought up the 40k fans say chaos makes any AI unstable, meaning the culture and their ships will essentially self destruct.

So by default the imperium win.

>>54450000
>Culture Ship wouldn't pick up a couple shouty green ogres from the galaxy they're exploring and listen to their bickering just for kicks.
Minds have a known fixation on self destructive fools, they can never get enough.

chaos will probably be the one faction that gives the culture trouble, since... well... they operate on such foreign rules that despite their ability to win straight up fights, they'd probably not be able to function within the eye of terror due to it not obeying the rules of physics.

>>54450150
Didn't we establish that the void dragon could mess up a culture ship?

The Culture is the ultimate SJW wet dream.
>people don't need to work
>manipulate and brainwash other civilizations to be like them
>still somehow claim moral high ground even when discovered
>women still get to complain how much worse they have it despite their every wish being catered to

>>54450083
There is a reason that culture minds are not called AI.

>>54450217
>But they do anyway
>Not always portrayed as being a good thing
>defining feature of the series is that nobody from the culture has been able to fully hold their own in a philosophical debate on the subject.
>when they come from non-culture civilizations. Culture women are, in general, past giving a shit.

>>54444016
>I can't believe that Banks didn't have enough faith in his own Ideas to write more stories that didn't involve Special Circumstances being dicks.
He died before he ran out of ideas for stories. (Damn cancer.)

>>54442867
>Iain M Banks is a lot more fucked up than anybody on /tg/ gives him credit for.
Well, was. :(

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>>54448910

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>>54436096

Oh look. It's this fucking thread again.

>>54451015
There are plenty of savages in the series.
The target civ in Player of Games has an exclusive set of TV channels accessible only to the political and military elite that consists entirely of civilian women, men, apices (the third sex of their species) and children being raped, tortured, mutilated, and abused, all for the entertainment of the social elite. One of the channels was so bad you don't even get a description of what was on it, but it was enough to traumatize the protagonist. And a common outcome of the game their society revolves around is the forced castration and/or rape of the loser if the winner so desires.
And in Consider Pheblas there was an isolated tribe stranded on an island on an orbital that made a habit of devouring people who landed there. The head honcho had a special set of teeth designed to flay the flesh from the bone, and he starts with the fingers. And when he's finished, he sits on you until you suffocate (he's fatter than Papa Nurgle).

>>54451130
I feel like you either misread or misquoted my post.

>>54437806
Gellar Fields and Void Shields prevent Displacement from working.

>>54451498
If 40k shields that prevent interdimensional incursions work on Culture methods or teleportation and telepathy it ought to go both ways. If voidshields keep displacement out forcefields repell daemons and chaotic corruption, can't have it both ways.

>>54440127
>>54445501
>The Culture's so powerful it can change the nature of the Chaos Gods because they're just that GOOD, guize!
Of all the culturewank in this thread, this is the worst.

>>54446579
Except the Chaos Gods are emotion in their most extreme manifestation. They cannot EVER mellow out, any more than the sun can be dark and cold. Khorne is anger taken to its end: the destruction of everything for no reason. Slaanesh is pleasure taken to its end: the final stimulation, flooding all of the senses forever. Nurgle is the will to live taken to its end: life, death, and rebirth drawn into horrible singularity. And Tzeentch is cunning taken to its end: a million plans crafted for the sake of crafting them. The Culture could have infinite "moderate" souls and they would not change this.

>>54451498
this

>>54450217
Eh, in a lot of ways i hope we can become a little closer to the culture.

It's basically the culture option of absolute equality, or being slaves to a cabal of the elite.

>>54452063
Cannon disagrees with you, it's been stated multiple times that Chaos reflects humanity and visa versa. Improve humanity and chaos becomes nicer.

>>54451061
It's really a shame because 40k and the Cultureverse have a lot in common in terms of being super huge exotic universes with lots of shit going on. They just explore similar themes from different angles, and neckbeards gotta argue about dumb shit they haven't even read. I actually started reading Consider Phlebas around the same time as the Eisenhorn books, and enjoyed them both.

>>54436096
seems like 4ok declares war on them as a matter of course.
gets its shit rek3d by their tecno-bullshitery.
then a sub sect of their children sit around saying that everything would be better if only they had the god emptor of mankind to give them purpose and what the galaxy really needs is a good crusade...

>>54439897
>b-but MY setting is most powerful!
pathetic

>>54452972
And yet it isn't pathetic when WH40Kids claim "my factions wins because SPECIAL RULES AND POWERS THAT GET MADE UP"?

The Thing, the most virulent, telepathic, hardy, and dangerous organism ever conceived, is stopped by "tyranid mind magic". This is literally a claim WH40Kids made.

>>54453061
Great post, too bad its not an argument. Just because there are faggots on your opponents side does not mean the faggots on your side get a reprieve. the point still stands. In addition, can you source this happening? ever?

So, the best point of reference we have here is the Culture-Iridan war.. and the losses incurred.

"Total casualties amounted to 851.4 ± 2.55 (0.3%) billion sentient creatures, including Medjel (slaves of the Idirans), sentient machines and non-combatants, and wiped out various smaller species, including the Changers. The war resulted in the destruction of 91,215,660 (±200) starships above interplanetary, 14,334 orbitals, 53 planets and major moons, 1 ring and 3 spheres, as well as the significant mass-loss or sequence-position alteration of 6 stars."

And the galactic community considered it a small war between two races on a very similar technological footing.

>>54453734
sounds like the dark age of technology desu

>>54453734
In the Imperium, that's called "Tuesday"

>>54453911
I'm a fan of both settings, but it just isn't. Remember, this is a setting where a million Marines is a viable force and 21 demigods had at all a significant effect on the galaxy. That's The Howling levels of destruction right there, even if not many planets were actually destroyed, and I'm not sure the Imperium actually even HAS 91 million starships.

>>54442867
>>54451015
>>54451130

Iain banks basically writes wall to wall torture porn across everything he's ever done. I mean maybe he can write a semicompetent space opera somewhere in the pile of books he's crapped out, but I've never gotten more than five pages without running into someone pointlessly drowning in feces or getting acid-jizz raped to cyberdeath.

>>54448790
>the Chaos gods would insist they were in control even as the Minds turned them into sanitized mascots
Sooo....the actual changes to GW's portrayal of the setting over time?

>>54444150
They have gravity furnaces and casual interdimensional travel. I'd say that in Blame!'s universe they finished science, so either the City goes to Cultureverse and gets ridiculously more powerful or the Culture goes to Blame!verse and gets nerfed hard.

>>54443306
One of the biggest "problems" of the Culture utopia is boredom, followed maybe by maintaining your status. One guy basically sold himself into black ops work just so he could publically beat a child prodigy at a strategic game.

Chaos could lure Culture citizens over just by giving them the chance to hurt and fuck over other people. The return to a sense of struggle would be deeply gratifying for some of them.

>>54451936

>when the 40kids start screamin about powerlevels

Yes, they ARE actually that strong.

>>54458204
> One guy basically sold himself into black ops work just so he could publically beat a child prodigy at a strategic game.

ok man, gergei might not have been so great on the decision making front, but that's not the most fair description.

>>54451039
>Suddenly the ship starts driving the way the Orks want it because they believe they're the ones driving it and Waaagh! field
You're probably just better off playing space bus driver and promising the Orks you'll let them take over in combat than let them have anything resembling flight controls. It's better (and more entertaining) for everyone involved.

>>54458204
People in general need... something to do. You can't be idle forever. On the plus side you'd generally have the freedom to do whatever you want. From simple crafts, to writing/making music, being an artist, creating 'entertainments' like theatre, tv or films, to having what we might call a business (iirc, culture cities are established as having shops, cafes restaurants, all operated by citizens rather than AI) to just staying in education forever.

All of which are established activities within the culture.

Hell, if you can convince a ships mind and enough like-minded people, you can probably become a space pirate.

I guess you can call it idealised socialism.

>>54458204
Player of Games generally shows pretty well how cultureniks wouldn't be outright immune to corruption.

>>54459380

>this retarded headcanon surfacing again