Hi:

A few newbie questions about life in the 41st millenium:

1.a- Why can't servitors take over the workforce? Are they too difficult to make/maintain?

1.b-Why Servitors seem to be created to perform only certain tasks (looks to me hivers, helots, etc., already have "soulcrushing" jobs, which could be done by these meat-machines in a pinch & without the possibility of let's say, the labor riots that are so frequent... Servitors couldn't be brainwashed or supernaturally dominated by cultists, for instance)?

2.Also... I've looked everywhere for prices if one wants to buy a servitor, even servo-skulls, but found none... This leaves me in the dark, with several possibilities:

a-the designers goofed.

b-servitors are priceless artifacts not for sale.

Could ya help me with this?

3. Who makes 'em? The Cult of Mars?

Thanks!

L

LETE said:

LETE,

• 1a: On many forge worlds, a large percentage of the work force are servitors; though by no means all. But the process uses resources that could be utilized elsewhere. A regular human without cybernetics is more capable of self repair and requires less resources and maintenance then a heavily cybered work force. There are mono-tasked and multi-tasked servitors. Each is typically built to purpose.
• 1b: Servitors can indeed be manipulated by cultists. They can be possessed, hacked and reprogrammed. There are differing degrees of servitor "lobotomization." The more complex their duty, the less robot-like and mindless they may be. In one of the Ravenor novels there is a pilot servitor which expresses its opinion and exhibits fear and desires of self-preservation.
• 2: Look for price guidelines within the Inquisitor's Handbook; pages 141-145. Examples of Servo-skulls, cyber and psyber familiars as well as some of the most advanced examples of the servitor arts in the form of the Janus Simulacra and the Praetorian Battle servitors are detailed therein.
• 3: Typically, yes, the Adeptus Mechanicus produce servitors. There may be some commercial interests which are permitted to produce specific models under direction and instruction of the Tech-Priests; but generally it will be the Ad Mech making the things.

Hope that helps some.

-=Brother Praetus=-

LETE said:

1a. & 1b. Servitor-constructs are pretty much exclusively made by Adeptus Mechanicus using ancient STC-patterns. Herein lies the very problem of the Servitor-use. There is no evolution of technology with them. Lets take a skull-servitor, for example: One could pretty quickly notice that there is very little room for it to carry anything, even though it could be pretty hand if a skull servitor had a little box for keeping documents in and a little manipulative arm to hand out those documents to ist master. Now, obviously this is because the original STC schematics for skull-servitor did not include a box or a manipulative arm. This means that the very concept of using skull servitor to carry, store and sort documents is not in the currently canonical version of STC and Adeptus Mechanicus will not produce such a thing because it might be borderline heretical for them to do so. So, you end up having another servitor, human type with big robotic lobster-claw arms, carrying a case of documents for you and yet another, a small spidery like thingy with manipulators, to sort them out for you.

Multiply the above example with the myriad number of different jobs there is in an average Imperial City and then multiply *that* byt the number of Enginseers it would take to actually control and run all those servitors and you quicly realize why most Imperial organizations hire cheap manual labor by the dozens for jobs that could be done by robots. Besides, its not like the cheap manual labor has any human rights in Imperium anyway... unlike the machines. Remember, if a human refuses to do a job you ordered, Adeptus Arbites will throw him to jail (or just shoot him). If a machine refuses to do a job you have ordered the local Enginseer quickly notices that *you* have failed to appreciate the machine-spirit and have angered it by not observing the proper rights of maintenance. In which case *you* will have to make amends...

See? Machines have it better

And don't forget, people are much more pleantiful then machines or servitors, people are easer to maintain, people are easer to make, and in the end, you need to make a person first before you can make a servitor, so why not cut out the middle-man of the mechanicus and the extra step of turing someone into a servitor and just use that someone in your manufactorium?

Graver said:

I recall an old story, I don't know if it's true, that the Ancient Greeks invented steam engines... but they saw no practical use for them because why invent and build a machine to do something that can be done cheaply and easily by slaves.

Hi again!

Thanks for all the swell input!

I am confused again: I thought at first that Servitors (even skulls) where made from corpses or lobotomised criminals... Now I'm not too sure, after reading about a nasty threat in the "Disciples..." book.

What are servitors made of?

Thanks again!

L

LETE said:

You are in part correct. The Skulls, however, are traditinaly honnored servants of the Emperor/Omnisaih who are allowed to continue serving after their body fails them. A skull is more of an honnor and less of a punishment/repurosing an useless individual. Some servitors are made from vat grown flesh (the Charibs for one) as well, but they tend to also be viewed in higher standing then common labor servitors (the lobotomized unworthies).

Thanks.

So, Servitors aren't corpse-machine cyborgs, they are living flesh?

L

First century AD, Hero of Alexandria invents the steam engine(amongst other things), were it not for the near endless supply of cheap egyptian labour, we might have seen an industrial revolution 800 years earlier.

on topic: Servitors are alive, they use parts of the human brain for information processing. a dead servitor is heretek. a servo skull is different, it contains no living organic matter, it simply uses the skull as a shell to contain the cogitor core and contra-grav units.