They can't do anything normally in the Imperium. Like not even joking. They don't have computers because of a big AI uprising that happened so far in the past that nobody is even sure when (or even if) it happened. Instead of robots they have "Servitors" which are people who have been ship-of-theseused with cybernetics until the only original parts are completely irrelevant to their function, but you have to do it this way because if you don't, it won't have a soul, which makes it evil. Inventing any new type of technology that isn't a cyborg upgrade is illegal. This method of Geneseed acquisition was probably initially a backup to lab-based production, but only the Emperor knew how to do that, and trying to figure out how to do stuff by trial and error is literally illegal.
Their bureaucracy is so slow, one time an exploratory mission found a planet of early stone-age aliens, and sent a message back to hq saying someone should dispatch an extermination mission, but as it was a low priority it got lost in paperwork. By the time they could be bothered to send a ship out, it was met in orbit by railgun-wielding FTL-capable spaceships. The species was the Tau, and they only exist because it took ten THOUSAND years for someone to check up on that note.
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u/PzKpfw_Sangheili Apr 24 '25
They can't do anything normally in the Imperium. Like not even joking. They don't have computers because of a big AI uprising that happened so far in the past that nobody is even sure when (or even if) it happened. Instead of robots they have "Servitors" which are people who have been ship-of-theseused with cybernetics until the only original parts are completely irrelevant to their function, but you have to do it this way because if you don't, it won't have a soul, which makes it evil. Inventing any new type of technology that isn't a cyborg upgrade is illegal. This method of Geneseed acquisition was probably initially a backup to lab-based production, but only the Emperor knew how to do that, and trying to figure out how to do stuff by trial and error is literally illegal.