Inaugural Post

Well, I was going to start this journal off with a long post about narrative predetermination in games, but I've just come back from out of state and that's too much like work. So instead you get what I'm sure will be a recurring feature, a hopefully amusing musing from my various geekeries.

In the Warhammer 40K setting...

It occurs to me that some of my readers may not know of the glorious madness that is Warhammer 40,000. For those people, a short description...

It is the year 40,000 A.D., and the universe is a horrible place. Humanity has had its ups and downs over the eons, and right now it is so down that it is presented as the Holy Roman Empire... iiinnn spaaccce! Between now and then, there was a period called the (Dark) Age of Technology when humanity reached dizzying heights of science and engineering, but there have been a couple of declines and falls since. Most of the knowledge has been lost, but the tech was durable and idiot-proof enough that quite a lot of it is still in use thousands of years later. Also, humanity is beset from without by many horrible alien enemies and from within by heretics, madmen, and traitors. The Imperium of Man maintains a vast and poorly-coordinated military to fight these threats. It is largely a pastiche of features from 2000 AD Magazine and is presented both straight as a horror setting and as a knowing parody of itself.

Where was I? Oh yes...

In the Warhammer 40K setting, the most common weapon in use by the human military is a thing called a Lasgun. As its name implies, it is a gun that fires a laser beam. The weapon is not especially effective, but it is very economical as it needs no ammunition. Like all things of value, the Lasgun was invented in the Age of Technology and most of how it works is now forgotten, but the factory-cathedrals keep making them and the soldiers keep shooting them and getting new ones when they break.

A Lasgun draws its power from a power pack, and when this pack runs low on juice (after 20-30 shots), the beam ceases to be strong enough to burn, but can still be used to dazzle enemies and signal allies. The power pack can be recharged in any number of ways, from leaving it out in the sun, to putting it in a campfire, to shooting it with another Lasgun. That last one is the problem, because apparently shooting a Lasgun with another Lasgun will fully recharge the target, providing energy for 20-30 more Lasgun shots and violating the law of conservation of energy pretty badly.

Now, given that this is a setting where people fly spaceships through the afterlife, you might think I'm taking this a bit seriously. Bear with me.

What if what the Imperium calls a Lasgun isn't a weapon? What if the power pack is nuclear or similar, and doesn't actually need recharging? What if it's just a signal flare, and the things they do to the power pack to 'recharge' it just overheat it so it has to vent power through the signal beam, incidentally weaponizing it?

That would make a terrible kind of sense, in a 40K sort of way.

It would also explain a lot of the weapons of the Imperium of Man, if they were all hilarious kludges of better but non-weapon technology. I mean, the Plasma Gun tries to kill its user roughly once every six times it fires, so I suspect it's just a power conduit that got drafted at some point. Chainsword? That's a highly-advanced hedge trimmer. Meltagun? Microwave.

The best part is that even though WH40K humankind is reduced to fighting with overclocked antique kitchen hardware, they're remarkably competitive with the actual weapons used by the various highly advanced alien species that they have to fight. So where are the actual weapons from that era? How bad-ass must that stuff be?