With no networked reservoirs of data? Nothing. Information gathering is utterly reliant on information networks, and in the days before internet, those were networks of people rather than machines, but without some kind of network you just can't learn anything new. Your lore checks presumably represent either things you've learned from such a network in the past (especially for things like occult lore or archaeotech where it doesn't change, so you can learn from a library or university of some sort and that knowledge will remain current basically forever) or your connections to an active and ongoing network that you check up on regularly, even if you aren't able to check up on them right this second (so right now you might be stranded on some godforsaken rock in the middle of nowhere, but you've been checking in with your spymaster regularly and you can roll to see if he updated you about which Rogue Traders have been active in this system back when you are in port, because that's part of your routine and you don't have to roleplay doing it every single time just like you don't have to roleplay brushing your teeth).

So your Seneschal knows a guy who lives on Bastille. That guy has a bunch of spy minions, many of whom are probaly unassuming people like urchins or cabbies or others who can easily eavesdrop on passengers and report anything interesting they hear in exchange for a shiny nickle. Your Seneschal goes to his spymaster on Bastille and asks for a report, and the spymaster tells him everything he's heard, and possibly some inferences or deductions he's made based on that information (i.e. "little orphan Jimmy said that he saw some fancy looking captain asking about your mark two days ago, and Joe the port worker says he saw someone fitting Captain Scarypants' description pull in the same day, so I'd bet he's the one asking around"). Your Seneschal might then be able to make further inferences or deductions based on information gathered from other spymasters who've got networks in other places. The place where you learn about Rogue Traders is a place that's high-traffic with Rogue Traders, like Port Wander, where rumors and legends about the captains will be common amongst any population who works with the infrastructure they make use of (port workers definitely, maybe also pubs and the like). Some information might also come from earlier days when you were an urchin or a port worker and were hearing the information for yourself. This obviously applies to a very limited range of topics, but it can be a great character touch when visiting someone's home world to reference their career before being as big and powerful as they are today.

Obviously there are a few chosen members of the astropathic choir (members who are NOT astropaths transcendent but totally normal astropaths) who are trusted by the scheneschal, he sends coded messages (probably using image and symbols since those codes are not only nearly impossible to crack without a key, but also are very, VERY easy to send via astropath without the astropath on EITHER end being able to understand what is being said). From there, the message is passed onto the other people, then they get it out to the trusted agent in the central location on somebody else's ship. You probably also have spies on other ships, who whenever they get a chance send messages back to a central location from a neutral astropath at every opportunity.

So you're gathering information from a defuse network through symbolic code that is easy to send by astropath but hard for an astropath on either end to understand. Boom. Your communication's network is established between large areas.

Not to mention ships of tens of thousands of people, and they have tidbits of information picked up from all over the **** place, and then brought back to your ship after each and every shore leave.

A: Back on the info topic.

Info has been proven (even in present day society) to also be a commodity as well as grain, oil, ore, water, etc.

So commodities in 40k are controlled by government and guild.

A place might have an intra- net, but that would be monitored by the govt of the area,

and self-policed by the guild (probably ad-mechs) that own the equipment.

And each interchange of info would be confirmed, aunthenticated, and charged for the priviledge.

Inter -Networked data archives or whatever are not going to happen.

Whose neck is on the line if it is discovered that a machine spread heresy, corruption, or sedition?

The logistician in charge, and he will not just anyone "log on to it"

and he will send armed skitari after anyone who abuses it.

=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=-=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=-=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=-=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=

B: Now having said all that:

In our old Rogue Trader 4OK game, we almost always wear armor or space suits,
and we have the tech for helmet cameras, so we can review footage, or show superiors
what we found out in the field, etc.

Also we have an extensive inter-network for our crew, and full modern communication for the whole starship,
with "blackberries", tablets, etc. And a "web site" where crewman can upload videos.

So, we are showing a visiting tech-priest the video from when a Necron Monolith
hacked (via radio) into my tech-marine's servo-arm and made it attack me:

Tech-Marine: see here how my arm's operating lights turn noxious green, same as their gun color.

Tech-Priest: they turned your own tools against you!

Guardsman: yeah, the clip where it drills into his head got over 9000 hits on CrewTube

A: Back on the info topic.

Info has been proven (even in present day society) to also be a commodity as well as grain, oil, ore, water, etc.

So commodities in 40k are controlled by government and guild.

A place might have an intra- net, but that would be monitored by the govt of the area,

and self-policed by the guild (probably ad-mechs) that own the equipment.

And each interchange of info would be confirmed, aunthenticated, and charged for the priviledge.

Inter -Networked data archives or whatever are not going to happen.

Whose neck is on the line if it is discovered that a machine spread heresy, corruption, or sedition?

The logistician in charge, and he will not just anyone "log on to it"

and he will send armed skitari after anyone who abuses it.

=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=-=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=-=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=-=`=`=`=``=`=`=``=`=

B: Now having said all that:

In our old Rogue Trader 4OK game, we almost always wear armor or space suits,

and we have the tech for helmet cameras, so we can review footage, or show superiors

what we found out in the field, etc.

Also we have an extensive inter-network for our crew, and full modern communication for the whole starship,

with "blackberries", tablets, etc. And a "web site" where crewman can upload videos.

So, we are showing a visiting tech-priest the video from when a Necron Monolith

hacked (via radio) into my tech-marine's servo-arm and made it attack me:

Tech-Marine: see here how my arm's operating lights turn noxious green, same as their gun color.

Tech-Priest: they turned your own tools against you!

Guardsman: yeah, the clip where it drills into his head got over 9000 hits on CrewTube

Part A: Tech Priests are likely not charged for the "privilege" of interfacing with such holy a relic.

Part B: Filthy Heresy.

>>>>Part A: Tech Priests not charged.

maybe not in thrones, but its still a feudal system. the payment might

be barter, prestige, favors, other dues.

>>>Part B: Filthy Heresy.

I'll take that as an LOL

I just wanted to to give my thoughts on the non-topic of canon and IP:

@Lupa: Am I getting this right ?

Your argument is that since for example the warhammer 40k universe is a fictional universe, created by various people, over the course of many years, with branching storyarcs, the inevitable fluff-contradictions, retcons, etc.pp, you and every other individual on this planet gets to pick and choose which parts of said fiction (probably based on your personal preferances) you will iterate upon / incorporate in your personal works of fiction and which parts to leave out.

By doing so, you create "your own warhammer 40k universe" which is equal to the so-called "original".

Therefore, you are well within your rights to say "The Horus Heresy never happened" because in your personal 40k universe it may have never happened.

(Statements like "The HH never happened" are to be seen in the context of talking about a fictional universe as opposed to for example historical facts etc.)

As far as I'm concerned all of that is true - in fact it is a no-brainer - but it's not the end of the story.

Because even if you don't like it, there are the concepts of IP, "original or first party fiction" and "fanfiction" to be dealt with.

You can of course apply the argument from above here and state that - in your personal world there is no such thing as an IP or that it is a slang word which means different things in different communities - therefore has no distinct meaning - ergo means nothing at all (because it can mean whatever you want it to mean) - but taking that stance would be childish and for the sake of this argument I'm going to asume you won't go there.

Do you know the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" written by Freddy Mercury ? (The actual rights lie of course with a record label)

Guess what? The lyrics of the song are all wrong - Freddy Mercury may has created the by some called "original", but I made a new one with different lyrics - and "faninterpretaion" or "cover" are just slang terms with no meaning, therefore, in the Bohemian Rhapsody, there is no line that goes like: " Beelzebub has a devil put aside, for me, for me, for meeeeeeeee!"

Or you may have heard of a version of a book called "Lord of the rings" where at the end the one ring ends up destroyed in Mt. Doom - never happened (in the story) because my equally legit version says otherwise.

Feels a bit odd - doesn't it?

With pieces of art created by one person or a small group, we can, most of the time, easily identify the original - official work - and everything that differs from the original falls into another category, meaning it is not the same.

With large IPs that have been around for decades and have spawned all kinds of "official" products and due to their popularity and fanbase have spawned all kinds of unofficial products it is not so easy anymore.

Fanfiction can become part of the original IP if beeing officially incorporated, former official fluff can become obsolete (squats) etc ... but if you work with ideas, someone else has had (which in the cases of Star Wars and Warhammer are highly succesfull ones) and you don't own the legal rights to those ideas - everything you create is unofficial (fanfiction) unless stated otherwise by the IP-holder.

Here we are on the official fantasyflightgames forum in the RPG / Rogue Trader section (not the fanfiction section), so it is relativly safe to assume that people here are talking about the official fluff (that can be bad or contradictory etc.) and state otherwise if they are talking about their own fan interpretation of the 40k universe.

And since (as far as I am informed) we have no hard evidence to believe that the HH did not happen (in the official fictional 40k universe) and the events of the heresy are often referred to in official warhammer 40k products (with varying details and informations from source to source) the claim that it did not happen has no foundation.

To iterate on the nonsensical argument that neither anything concerning Star Wars nor Warhammer ever really happened because all of it is fiction is just silly.

We are in a forum dedicated to a fictional universe, so we talk about fictional history as well - anyone who does not understand / accept that fact probably wound up in the wrong place.

Of course do I understand the problems with fluff, fanfiction expanded universes, alternate histories etc.

The fans are the lifeblood of every franchise, they dedicate their time and creativity to certain IPs, are invested in stories (and expand upon the universe) and most of all (in regards to franchise holders) they bring the money, so of course there are hard feelings when unpopular changes are made,fans feel like they have been betrayed or a new product is just a moneygrab and of course their is fanfiction out there that surpasses most official stuff in terms of quality, but there is still (most of the times) a clear destincion between fanfiction and officially aproved material which should be kept in mind - for the sake of a discussion where all people involved are talking about the same thing.

with regards,

MrMonstro

in your personal world there is no such thing as an IP or that it is a slang word which means different things in different communities

No. I have never said this. I almost stopped reading here because you're already putting words in my mouth and I am beyond sick of people doing that, and it was literally the very first thing you did after establishing what you didn't disagree with. If the fundamental root of your entire counterargument is that a statement I made about the terms "canon" and "fanon" also applies to "intellectual property," you're not off to a spectacular start. The intellectual property of Warhammer 40,000 is protected by governments whose members and supporters physically exist and will enforce their laws, therefore while it's a step or two removed from being physically real it isn't inaccurate to say that the intellectual property is a real thing. There are actual real world consequences to misinterpreting what is and is not part of that intellectual property.

However, that intellectual property claims both that orks have green blood and also that they have red blood. Contradictions are not resolved by IP law, all IP law does is dictate who is allowed to sell new stories about these things for profit (we will not get into just how incredibly vague and complicated that is here, because it doesn't matter). The Warhammer 40k IP does not say that orks have green blood, or that they have red blood. It says that the 2e Ork codex (claiming orks have green blood) and the video game Space Marine (claiming they have red) are both copyrighted to Games Workshop, who have the right to print and sell that material. IP law does not care at all that there is a contradiction in the claims between these two properties, and it wouldn't care even if those claims were made about the real world. Do you believe the claims in Mein Kampf because they are copyrighted? The copyright on Mein Kampf is not any different from the copyright on Warhammer 40k, because copyrights don't make any claims about whether or not the contents of a book are correct, only who can print them. Also: Please do not bore me with spurious accusations that I'm making comparisons between 40k and Mein Kampf. I'm not. I'm comparing their copyright status, because for some reason you thought that was relevant, not the works themselves.

Or you may have heard of a version of a book called "Lord of the rings" where at the end the one ring ends up destroyed in Mt. Doom - never happened (in the story) because my equally legit version says otherwise.

No. Lord of the Rings is a specific work which physically exists and regardless of what other works you physically create, it is still factually true that the books and movies both depict the destruction of the One Ring. That you create another story which is mostly identical except for the ending does not change the fact that the book itself claims one thing. Likewise it is factually true that the 2e Orks codex published 1992 claims that orks have green blood, and that Heir to the Empire published in 1991 depicts Grand Admiral Thrawn as the major antagonist of the New Republic after the death of Emperor Palpatine. These works physically exist and continue to physically exist regardless of whether other works published by IP holders make contradictory claims as to these fictitious events, an action which has exactly as much effect on the physical copies of the books and films as any fiction you or I write: None.

If you said that the One Ring was destroyed at the end of the War of the Ring, you'd be wrong, because there was no One Ring and no War of the Ring to begin with, but you aren't talking about the fictitious events, you're talking about the contents of an actual, physically real object. Likewise with Bohemian Rhapsody. That is the title of a specific song, and that song has specific lyrics, and if you write new ones you have written a cover, which is a distinct work from the original.

Now, the argument you're implying with all this is that fans should consider themselves bound by the version of events as portrayed by people who own the copyright, but you never actually make that argument. You just make the blindingly obvious statement that the people who own the copyrights own the copyrights. Now I'm aware that a lot of fans do consider themselves bound by the word of IP holders even when they dislike what the IP holders are doing with the property, but what you have failed to actually make an argument for is why on Earth this should be considered a good thing. Far from a benefit, this perspective stymies creative storytelling and is poisonous to the marketplace of ideas, strictly limiting the number of people who can make "legitimate" retellings or reinterpretations of a story and demanding that people who are building on existing stories, like GMs running games in an existing setting, build only on the ideas produced by IP holders, and not only that but only build on their most recent ideas, and that GMs are required to abandon ideas the copyright holders have abandoned regardless of whether or not the GM and his players like them. This is an insane and deeply harmful approach to storytelling.

The only relevant fact to the Horus Heresy is that not it happened, because it did not, nor that the IP holders declared that it happened, because while that one does at least manage to be true, we don't have to and should not care. What matters is that it is very likely that any given GM's audience likes that story and wants to see that story built upon rather than excluded. And the important distinction here is that this is not true of talking Necrons and centurion armor. Some fans like talking Necrons, others don't, a large portion don't especially care, so even though Games Workshop has declared that talking Necrons exist just as much as the Horus Heresy, it is very importantly true that audiences are pretty undecided and you can absolutely build on non-talking Necrons. With centurion armor, the audience response has been pretty much across the board "**** you," so it would actually be a bad idea to try and build on that, because so much of the audience has rejected it so hard. Unless you are actually producing licensed work for Games Workshop, it doesn't matter who owns the copyrights or what they say. What matters is whether or not an audience will follow you if you build on certain ideas.

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

Ok so, we've appear to have gone so far off the rails we need a Navigator to know where they are, and arrived somewhere containing sphincters, if you get my drift. Perhaps take a moment to consider whether the last page-and-a-half of discussion has been in any way fruitful or is likely to go anywhere bearing fruit. If the answer is no then it's probably best to let the whole thing drop.

So that my own post isn't totally off topic.

@Misanthropic: The general gist/tone of the setting suggests that most important information intended to last is more likely to be written rather than electronic. Even the Ad-mech are often depicted with big piles of scrolls and books despite all their techy body horror level implants and communing with machine spirits and such. In addition so much information is forbidden or controlled, and the idea that people could use it anonymously to disseminate ideas or information would terrify the powers that be, that it would likely be quite unlike the internet that we know.

Not saying it's impossible. Many things happen out there in the vastness of the Imperium, but I feel it certainly wouldn't be the norm.

@ Spatulaodoom

You are of course absolutely correct and therefor I'am going to create a new topic to keep discussing the present offtopic.

Sorry for the derailment of the thread but my initial impulse to respond was to strong ^^

@Lupa

I recognise and appreciate your trolling skills, and i'd like to keep up the discussion, maybe my first post was a bit to dense.

If you would be so kind as to read my post one more time (especially the lower half) and (in the new thread i'm going to create) share your sentiments and (obviously strong) feelings about the concepts of "fanfiction" as opposed to "original IP fiction"

To get a better understanding of your point of view, may you would be so kind as to tell me what (according to your views) is included in the warhammer 40k intellectual property or basically - what is warhammer40 ©

Regards MrMonstro

I find the Disney Wars comparison very apt. Used to love Star Wars, and whatever it's labelled, I have no respect for the brutal handling of the EU, as I was close to the top 10% of that material and don't want it replaced by cartoons.

They were of course not the creators of the original canon anyway and the sole motive of a clean slate is the quickest route to marketing content to the next wave of children. Also it's about getting the Disney logo all over Star Wars product, which looks so wrong to me I can't even buy some of the FFG product.

So, at least we don't have that problem with 40k!

Also I should reply to the original question. Whilst not an expert, I find mention of connected whatever and wireless access points for public use to be off genre.

Even the elite users of technology do not understand it. The metaphors are religious, a dark ages mentality to lost knowledge.

How can people look things up? I don't know but if they can they would not be aware of how it works, at least in my campaign. For a better behind the scenes answer, sorry I can't comment but wanted to mention the genre!

Another question would be, why do we need to know? It could be a mixture of access to recently to ancient stored information, technically or physically connected. It should not matter in my opinion.

I have no respect for the brutal handling of the EU

Offtopic: And was it really brutal? Renaming EU into Legends and that's all? Just two quotes from George Lucas himself

"There's my world, which is the movies, and there's this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe—the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don't intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don't get too involved in the parallel universe. " ©

" I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. ©

What's more - LucasFilms never considered themselves bound by any of EU material (and they had rewritten it several times - first when the New Trilogy was done, then with the Clone Wars animated series), so nothing changed here, really. Contradictions between canon and the EU existed even prior to Disney taking control of LucasFilms - as an example, most EU material state that Jango Fett was a mandalorian, while it was not the case according to Lucas himself.

I find mention of connected whatever and wireless access points for public use to be off genre.

Since WH40K universe do in fact include alternating timelines (Space Marine game, yes) it could be safe to assume that many interpretations of it may be all true....

Back on Topic:

info would be treated as just another fiefdom:

Here is a data-crypt, it is your responsibility. only let me or my family use it.

raise up sons to safeguard it after you and I are gone.

only use the info to serve the needs of the emperor.

There would be networks for cogitators. They would exist in-house, or on-board a ship.

Every entity with a PF would have a network for its own data. IE Nobles, PDFs,

Convents, Guard units, Governors, Chapter Houses, Guilds, Traders, Chartists, Navigators, etc.

Those nets would hardly ever talk to each other, and not be "internetted".

But would be safely intra-netted within the organization.

40k is a feudal society, and the engineers especially so.

Access to info would be given either by command, or in exchange for privileges or money.

Somewhere on the network is going to be a machine spirit, to combat corruption,

and corroborate access.

If your org needs info from my org, you're going to have to ask for it personally,

and probably negotiate for it. your tech will talk to my tech, and the info,

{the techs also may have their own negotiation separate from that of their masters.}

if deemed permissible to share, it will be copied in some portable format, not "downloaded by browser"

Well, it is wise to split the question into 3 distinct sub-questions:

1) Is there an "Imperium-wide internet" akin Star Wars universe's HoloNet? Most likely, it is simply impossible due to the nature of astropath's "connection" (even if we use Abnett's vision where astropaths are capable of sending digital data, "bandwidth" is still extremely limited) and scarcity of astropaths themselves.

2) Is there a "one size-fits all" cogitator network akin to modern Internet that is both for general populations and the imperial Adepta or the ruling nobility? Most likely, no - info is valuable if not outright holy (as it is with the Adeptus Mechanicus), and it least AdMech would have a completely separated intranet for their own use solely.

3) Could there be a planet-wide (region-wide) cogitator network for general public use (intertainment, social networking, etc.) ? IMHO, that depends on particular world's culture and level of technology and there could be Imperial worlds with such network(s) available.