Hello again!
I'm trying to picture in my mind what an Auto Quill looks like... Is it basically, like a typewriter? Is an Auto Quill what the Adept in the Adept's Career illustration is using in the core Dark Heresy rulebook or is that a Scribe-tine?
Thanks!
L
Think of it as a typewriter but with one or several mechanical arms holding quills or ink pens that writes sympols on parchment according to which keys are pressed and you wouldn't be far off...
I always pictured it something like this:
I think the artist was inspired by the typewritters from Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
Terry Pratchett describes in several of the Discworld books how the magical AI created at the Unseen Univeristy communicates outwards by a mechanical arm that holds a quill and dops it into ink and scribbles on a long roll of paper with it. That has coloured my picture of an autoquill. But as with most things in the imperium I expect designs to vary greatly between different places and "auto quill" is mosty a way of saying "a thing that helps you write".
Oh, and I tink one of the acolyte models in the Daemonhunter Torquemadas retinue have got a writing aid that might be an autoquill. Look at GWs homepage.
Well, as someone mentioned in a similiar thread in the DH Forum, it could perhaps just be a quel with antigrav, writing what it is told by the person dictating. At least, in it´s advanced forms. If this might be true, the feather in the mouth of the picture of the Seneschall could well be an autoquill
There's a picture in the latest Codex: Imperial Guard where a Commander is surrounded by troops, and some of them are holding onto a ream of paper as it spits out of a machine with various fountain-pens and quills on articulated arms. That's an autoquill (though a very BIG one)! It's a 40K term for "hand-held device that you can write text on." Think of it as a PDA of sorts. Whatever you come up with isn't wrong since soooo much tech of the 40K setting is so advanced by our standards (not theirs) that it often borders on magical.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the input!!!!
L
I've always thought it was the machine that the Adept in the DH book is pictured writing on.
Similar to a typewriter and with two mechanical arms, each holding a quill.
Of course, I like simple solutions
I just figured that an autoquill was, well, a quill (keeping with ye olde writing implements in the 41st millenium) but with an internal reservoir of ink and some sort of feeding mechanism, not unlike a 40kesque pen. Regular schmucks had to keep re-applying their ink every five minutes, whereas an auto-quill user can simply write like a pen.
Yeah, I like to keep my 40k relatively primitive
Look at the adept picture in the DH core rules on the career page. Thats an Autoquil.
I always pictured it as a sort of gothic/steampunk, portable, drafting plotter.
As far as PDAs go, there are dataslates. I imagine those could range in practicality from huge chunky things with keyboards and CRT screens all the way to extremely expensive and rare light-weight touch-screen models. I'd say most would be somewhat PIP-boy-ish.
The Auto-quill could likewise range from a full-on typewriter with HEX-like plotter-quills that requires a huge stand and is far from portable, to something approaching an old electronic Word Processor.
Autoquills have a weight listed as "-" (nonexistant/irrelevant) in DH. I'm not sure how big you guys think these things should be...