I've been toying with an idea for a while now.

In essence:

I've developed a heretical magos, once a master shipbuilder for the enclave of mars that, for his love of ships, seeks to innovate new and interesting ship designs. To this end he has come to the Koronus expanse and convinced several Rogue Traders to form a joint venture with him; the creation of a shipyard independent of the Imperium. This shipyard constructs new ships for Rogue Trader's plying the expanse (or really anyone who can pay the money). While these ships are often of classical designs, the magos has created a few new designs himself (which is really his sole motivation for running the shipyard anyway.)

I could blabber at you further details, (the path the magos took to his heresy etc) but they aren't that important. What I'm wondering is what obsticals would lie in the way of this venture succeeding. I'm not that familiar with the lore of 40k, so I thought I would put the question to some ye ol' grizzled veterns to see what happens.

He'd need a pretty massive infrastructure - lots of contacts on different planets willing to engage in large-scale smuggling (or trading, assuming the planetary authorities are in on the whole thing, though that's rather improbable for Imperial planets - but maybe a few of the Magos' RT buddies already have their own) to get him the ressources needed.

He might also be in league with pirates, having captured ships brought over to him and cannibalized for spare parts.

Building ships from scratch is a rather massive feat, requiring a lot of ressources. I would probably have him build a few new ships - mostly raiders/frigate/transports as those are the less demanding in terms of ressources, and providing rpairs, customisation and imporvements as his main activity.

It will also help with the fact that few customers have the ressources available to buy new ships.

The Magos would have to be very subtle in his work. The Adeptus Mechanicus hunt and destroy people like him. If they know where he is, they will no stop until he is dead. This includes bringing in the Inquisition and all the resources they can call. So a Heretek Magos that is building ships for Pirates should be able to hide himself very well or defend himself from any combination of the following: Entire Space Marine Chapters (Including the Grey Knights), the Imperial Navy, any Imperial Guard units near by, the Inquisition and any Skitarii the AdMech has near by.

Not to say it isn't possible. But any "loyal" citizen working with him is also taking a grave risk. Rogue Trader houses have been destroyed for dealing with Heretics and Renegades. Maybe he isn't Heretical, but "Eccentric" bordering on Crazy. I don't think the AdMech have a problem with that.

Quick clarification: am I wrong in thinking that it is heretical for a member of the admech to innovate, or invent things? This is the only respect in which this magos would be a heretic (heretek). He doesn't traffic with the Dark gods or anything. He also tries to avoid making deals with pirates or the like. He builds ships (as often as he can anyway) for "legal" buyers from the imperium such as rogue traders or free captains. Very select rogue traders and free captains.

Totally inviting new technologies/ships: Yes, heretekal.

Innovating: It depends, but in lots of cases, yes. It's only alright if it's officially sanctioned by the Adeptus Mechanicus, but it sounds like this magos won't have that sanctioning, so yea, he'll probably breaking the rules.

Personally, I think of the Adeptus Mechanicus as a Church that worships STC tech. There are heresies that they don't support, AI and Sentient Robots being the highest of heresy for them. Innovation, Creation, Study and the process we think of as "Science" is something they abhor as much as the Imperium abhors any thinking outside of approved "thought". The STC patterns are the catechisms of the AdMech. Any tech not sanctioned or approved by years of vetting is considered heretek.

There are even instances where certain Ship designs are considered foul because the people who use them tend to fall to Chaos. So the AdMech and Imperium assume it is the design of the ship that makes the people turn.

An important thing to remember with "new designs" is there is a reason they are considered heretical: It can be EXTREMELY dangerous. Innovation and new research isn't proscribed simply due to religious doctorine. It became religious doctrine out of necessity.

Most human technology was designed with the AI assistance, which is now unavailable. What's more many of the foundational theories and technologies involved in their design has been lost. Finally, 15k years of Machine Spirit deterioration and chaos infections have left many systems...finicky. Tell your car its a pretty girl in the morning or it will kill you in your sleep finicky. (ok, a machine spirit that far gone would be put down, but you get the idea)

So its like trying to design a modern fighter jet without an understanding of chemistry, metallurgy, or aerodynamics without computers with a mischevious imp living in the factory. Or performing a heart transplant with the medical understanding of a midieval bloodletter.

That is why it takes the ad-mech decades or centuries to test new designs (they DO innovate, despite popular belief to the contrary). Since they don't understand the technology and are lacking the proper tools they can't perform proper testing. They don't know which parts will conflict, or how the machine spirit will react, and the cost of failure can be catastrophic.

If there IS a problem most of their tech-priests would not be knowdgable enough to fix it. A Grand Magos may have the augumented processing power to understand what is going on in a new component, but the vast majority of techpriests will lack the knowledge, experience, and processing power to deal with new and unexpected situations.

So the AdMech has a strong incentive to stick to tried and true technologies and techniques. In short, they are the way the

What I am trying to say is that using "new and innovative technologies" should be a high risk/reward situation. The ways of the Adeptus Mechanus are limiting, but safe. New technologies and innovations promise an edge over the norm, but should come with a cost and risk.

A Rogue Trader Captain should be encouraged to think long and hard about employing "new" technologies. And really, giving their players interesting choices to make is the heart of being a good GM.

Excellent post Riplikash, my sentiments exactly.

Consider. Admech in general like to use a certain reactor for a standard size frigate. Its been in use 12,000 years, almost all ship bound tech-priests are familiar with it and know the basics of how it can be maintained, what it can and can't do, etc. It was designed with the help of AIs, by people who really understood its construction right the way from metallurgy, through to electrochemistry. Its been successfully field tested and has a service record of 12,000 years of reliability.

Magos Jim on the other hand is a genius. In fact he is the smartest guy in the segmentum. Not only that, he has a particular flair for ship building that borders on the supernatural. He designs an engine that is superior to the bog standard plasma drive. Well done Magos Jim.

However, Magos Jim is only one guy. He simply does not have the processing power to run billions of projections, computer models and every concievable theoritical test that he can think of. He also doesn't have 12,000 years of reliable field tests under every imaginably condition. Although his drive is awesome, its entirely possible that he has overlooked one tiny little flaw. 50 years after he builds his engine, the ship it is in happens to pass through a system with some kind of local phenomana that causes this one tiny flaw to fail. The ship is lost, or suffers massive problems.

The ad mech leadership, the navy and so on, would far rather use tech that has a massive record of reliability than new fangled devices, no matter how awesome they are.

Now, maybe Magos Jim follows the clever route. He submits his designs and builds a prototype. It is then tested for over a century, under every permutation the admech leadership can devise. It is then cautiously rolled out to a small number of vessels which are monitored strictly (and at a high level) for another century. Then they make a few modifications to the engine, perhaps fix a few minor flaws and the two century testing repeats. After that, maybe they start to roll the drive out.

Of course in 400 years, there is going to be a lot of tech thats been innovated. The backlog would be massive. This is why it takes so **** long to get new stuff made.

Adding to the problems that riplikash and Gribble talked about; it is actually possible to build physical things that attract the warp entities that are floating around in the background. There are designs that are "flawed" in such a way that the warp has an easier time interacting with people who are interacting with them. The AdMech wouldn't know until the design has been around long enough.

It is hard to hold onto the idea that the Adeptus Mechanicus, in one form or another, have been around since before the Dark Age of Technology. Given all the problems that the Warp, Lack of AI and Lack of background knowledge introduce to their understanding of the universe, it is amazing they function at all.

riplikash, I do have one request for clarification: I was never under the impression that everything had a cogitor. I was pretty sure that Hives, Cities, Ships and maybe larger vehicles had them, but I was pretty sure that most of the weapons lacked them. Given that most of the "rituals" performed on weapons and armor are, in essence, the memorized care manuals for that item. Not asking for "proof" per say, more asking for what thoughts led you to that idea.

@ the OP. I like the idea.

If you wanted a non-heretekal explanation you could also go with an Explorator Magos operating a salvage station near an ancient (or not so ancient) hazard zone or even the site of a vast space battle. That way you could replace a lot of the needed infrastructure with salvage tugs and reclaimator vessels. It might also make for some truly bizarre ship combinations...

As an explorator and a Magos or Arch-Magos, he has quite a bit more leeway and so long as he's not obviously insane or corrupted he's likely to be left alone if he's this far out. Especially if he offers sanctuary and assistance to explorator fleets passing through. Heck, even if he did some limited trading with xenos it might be overlooked, so long as he didn't trumpet it around too much. In fact, he could be empowered to learn about xenos tech with the expressed purpose of learning how to counter it.

As an Explorator of high rank, he is basically empowered to deal with xenos and other unusual situations as he himself warrants. The Imperium is very good about exterminating threats, but it is still a fairly practical government. And as someone mentioned, if he's one of the AdMech elite puttering around with his own designs is also within his bailiwick...again, so long as he's not trying to make his ships sentient or doing other truly forbidden things. Innovation is not so much forbidden as it is reserved for those of the highest rank and the greatest access to the AdMech's current knowledge of STC designs.

Nalroth said:

Man, I would have a hard time tracking down the places I got it from. It is an idea that has been around 40k for a VERY long time. It comes from a lot of things.

You basically have two schools of thought on the subject. The first is that ad-mech rituals are just ritualized care instructions and "angry machine spirits" are just an ignorant way of refering t o broken technology. There are some problems with that though.

For instance bolter weaponry has been indicated to have a machine spirit beyond the purely mechanical, able to "bond" with certain marines, or assist in targetting and avoiding friendly fire. Las weaponry from "corrupted" STCs have been known to "turn" on their users at particularly innoportune moments, as have grenades and power packs. There is also fluff to indicate that many of the "rituals" involved in maintenance are not mechanical in nature, and yet seem to be necessary regardless. And of course there is the infamous land raider performed geurilla raids to avenge its dead crew.

There was some other fluff too, but as I search online I can't seem to find it.

So the second idea is that golden age of technology humanity utilized AIs much the same way we use processors today, in everything. It was the foundation of their computational technology.

Today we have simple circuits in almost everything, form toasters to refridgerators to cars to bycicles. Simple "AI"s may have been the equivalent in the golden age of technology. Everything networked and "learning". Not TRUE AIs, certainly, but ones with an animal or insects level of intelligence.

This makes sense for them for the same reason it makes sense for us, networking is powerful. A general could know exactly how much ammo each division had, murders could be tracked, engines could be tweaked on the fly for adverse conditions, and shippers could know exactly how many lightbulbs were broken in a given city, how many were about to go, and get an average of how many had burned out over the past ten years. Ships reconfigure their own systems when new parts are installed. You get the idea.

So everything is networked with "dumb" AIs. Or lets just call them "learning algorithms".

Then there is the Iron Man uprising. Half the AIs go crazy, many are isolated (see: imprisoned) for repairs. Human empire falls, 5k years of darkness (and festering AIs).

THen the emperor returns, but Horus turns against him. The Dark AdMech rises and Mars erupts into a civil war with both sides unleashing horrendous viruses (both traditional and Daemonic) on each other, and many of the "isolated" AIs are brought back into service. Ok, that crisis is over.

Of course now most of the technology on Mars proper is corrupt. Mars needs to isolate and repair all the damaged "machine spirits", but of course they can't because humanity is fighting for its survival (plus hardly anyone knows how to anymore). 1/3 of general Markus's tanks have "faulty machine spirits", but he is fighting the orks and can't spare them for repairs. So they make do. Some items require special "attention", so it is codified into rituals as a safety measure.

So the admech spends all of its time looking for "pure" STCs, and will get back to repairs and research when things settle down.

And they never do, for 10k years, and the "Machine Spirits" continue to fall into disrepair. What were once stopgap measures have become religous law. And after 10k years it is hard to tell which machines have true "machine spirits" and which ones don't, and which ones are corrupt and which ones aren't, so everyone just treats EVERYTHING like it has a machine spirit, and like it might go AWOL at any moment.

Obviously you see this trend ESPECIALLY in large and powerful ships like space vessals. Certainly a "rebellious" machine spirit wouldn't have been tolerated back in the day, but the Imperium needs every ship it can get.

So not everything has a machine spirit, but who can tell? And where do you draw the line?

It's like the classic question, "What is a computer?" Ok, that thing on your desk, but what about a microwave? Probably. A calculater? Yes. A Scale? Hmm. A refridgerator? We incorporate "processors" of some sort into so many things today that it is hard to draw a line.

Such it may be with "machine spirits".

I'll keep my eye out for the supporting articles. Can't find them for the life of me right now, and I have a campagin to run in 2 hours.

Found one of the essays I was talking about. As with all 40k lore it is as true of false as you would like it to be. Your milage may vary:

The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-fall. Mars is an anarchic nightmare shithole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometres of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is ******. The databases are fragmented over the entire surface to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit. And they are not.

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find ****, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to **** the mind. Then came the Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet in the Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on Terra, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you.

If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn't, it's probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently ****** with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a ******* grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The ******* Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seek to kill you.

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better ******* please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day ****. Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Lard Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the manufactorum before they can be killed.

This is also why the Adeptus Mechanicus insists on cargo cultism. It's because when you are dealing with things you barely understand because everything you knew about them was destroyed it is the safest and most reliable option. The rituals do not exists for mysticism, they exist because they are the most practical means of building, repairing and maintaining the equipment they have with the knowledge surviving. You don't understand why pressing that button makes it go, because the manual tried to take over your brain and the copies are all unreadable and the research base that would let you reverse-engineer it does not exist and cannot be built.

Why are the Tau doing so well with their technology? Because they had peace. Eight thousand years unmolested by any enemy and they were helped the entire time by the most advanced biological race in the galaxy. Give the Imperium eight thousand years of peace and I can guarantee you it will be harder than it was during the Great Crusade.

This is why they do not like ANYONE ******* with technology, because it is so rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to **** with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. Pressing buttons to see what works is fine in a 21st century computer, but it is a very stupid thing to do at the helm of a 410th century starship with the destructive power to end solar systems. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall ****** everything up and the Heresy double-****** it. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up. They don't have the time, and they never have.

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire ******* military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

Since some some still don't get the idea, try this.

Build a library, fill it with all human knowledge. You take it elsewhere when you need a book from it, but the book is only a simplified copy. You don't understand the real book, and you don't need to. Nobody takes the rea lbooks anywhere because why would you, when there's a whole library there?

Now that library goes rogue and the maintenance machinery starts killing everyone any-*******-where near it. Where the **** did they all come from, you swear to god there weren't this many, and there weren't because they're using the library's information to fight their war. The government fights a battle that destroys the planet against these robots and tears apart the library to stop them using it, only to be destroyed in the process. The library is leveled, cast into flames, every book burned and every computer virus-laden.

Then comes a man who worked there. He talks to the few surviving library workers, assembles their information, and starts rebuilding a city around the library and expanding it as the librarians find little scraps of paper and fragmented bits of files that stuck together just right read something. They rebuild a library from scrap on the ashes of the old. It isn't a shadow on the glory of the old, but it is all they have.

Then the city turns on itself, kills its master, and the librarians turn to rage. Half of them kill the other half and destroy the remnants of the library because where they're going they won't need science. Everything burns, and the city is left to a scattered few survivors, walls open to the world, with the hungry predators circling.

The Adpetus Mechanicus is the sole surviving librarian, desperately scrabbling through the ashes of paper and splinters of hard drives for anything to help him and the city he needs to survive just a second longer.

The Imperium isn't grim because things suck by choice and could be fine if a sensible person came along. That sensible person wouldn't survive fifty seconds of the reality. The Imperium is grim because every single **** decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a **** life in the worst conditions imaginable, is the absolute best that can be done. It is a study of the worst happening to everyone and what part of your humanity must be sacrificed today just to stand a chance of survival, and all it asks is whether or not it would have perhaps been better to die.

Although i love the atmosphere you conjure with your last post Riplikash, especially the analogy of the library to the IoM, i'd dispute that the IoM is the absolute best that could be done. Indeed if you look at the way the Imperium works, there is huge room for improvement. The realm of Ultramar for instance stands as the kind of place imperial society could be if sensible heads predominated.

Not that this would be easy of course.

On technology, one of the key problems is that progress is very very hard to make, not because no one understands the tech, but because no one understands the very idea of understanding the tech. The Admech easily has the resources to begin a ground up exploration of technology with a secular attitude that could restore in only a few centuries, millenia worth of technology with real understanding. It doesn't happen because this idea simply doesn't occur to the admech. Its not even an idea that makes sense under their paradigm.

There are so many forces of conservatism in the IoM that getting anything done except in the time consuming inefficient way its always been done is nearly impossible.

Nobility want to stay on the top of the social pile, advancing the rights of the common man makes no sense to them.

The church wants to stay in power, advancing secular understanding and enlightenment makes no sense to them.

Inquisition know exactly what is out there and want to keep everyone ignorant of the terrible secrets, advancing education and reasoning makes no sense to them.

Space marines live to war, with the exception of the Ultramarines and a few of their successor chapters, improving governance and the plight of the common man makes no sense to them.

And so on and so forth.

wait......how did we get here on a discussion of shipyards?

Ok, something on the shipyard idea. A rogue magos could make shipyards MUCH more efficient by replacing the old labour heavy means of production with much better automated means and could utilise all kinds of funky new tech to make the shipyard more viable. Who knows what fun arhceotech he found in the Expanse that could help him.

I would note that that is NOT my writing, it is just one of the articles written by someone else that has inspired me in the past.

I don't like things QUITE that extreme, and do believe there is room for improvement.

However, I also tend towards believing that people are basically intelligent and trying to do there best, and that the Imperium of Man is the way it is for a reason, not just because they are dumb.

Certainly there is corruption, lust for power, and wasted resources, but I prefer to think of it as a symptom of the situation humanity finds itself in rather than the primary cause.

In the end most people and societies act the way they do for "good", understandable reasons, not just because they are dumb.

And like I said, it is just one of many theories on how and why the Imperium works, and likely the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In the end it comes down to flavor. Do you see the Imperium as basically competent, or basically incompetent. Do you see the AdMech as competent or incompetent There are lots of supporters both ways, and both are valid ways to play.

There's a serious amount of incompetence - or at least shortsighted and self-centered peoples around to seriously mess things up. Most of the high ranking officials seems to a be far more concerned with their personnal or familial benefits than the Imperium as a whole. And the admistratum doesn't help, with completely ossified procedures which must be followed to the letter long after they became irrelevant.

A rather striking example of that sort of things is mentioned in the description of the Callixis secotr : a whole system devoted to teh Admistratum which is on the verge of exploding into civil war. Because they're running out of storage space for their archives and one part of the staff wants to make some room, while hte other doesn't want to dump any shred of paper....

If that's representative of the Administratum's operation, things are definitively messed up and it's hardly surprising that the Imperium is crumbling appart.

Could he get away with 'rearanging the deck chairs' so to speak? He's cutting away bits of old freighters, retooling them for different uses. He's using designs that have just gotten cleared from the Admech labs but have been stimied by the local governements for funding. Basically he's on the 'in' with some Admech higherup who's been itching to get the new legal stuff out into use so he could be running more tests on it. So rather than bucking the system, he's become a backdoor project to test out the new 'legal' prototypes? Imagine having hundreds of Admech folks crawling over the place, praying, testing, calibrating, etc. The whole whole he's new designs are getting built, even though they're minor or functional improvements.

mostlyjoe said:

If he is a Magos or a higher up, there is very few people who call tell him what to do or not esle thena higher up magos which at some point is getting rarer and rarer (i.e. one or two per sector and most of them are not really hanging around watching their underling but deep within their own techy stuff, warp dabbling, xeno artifact studying, etc.)

There are factions within the Adeptus Machanicus like there are in the inquisition (in the rogure traders, churchs of the emperor, the Astartes, etc). Some are more open minded some less, some heretech etc.

Some astartes have taken to themself to modify STC produced equipment (Bhaal Predator for example), some Adeptus found this to be heretical yet the modification is accepted by the Blood Angels and reused (anyway who would go a tell Sanguinus: "no you imbecile it's not a flame trowing tank!")

So there is a level of latitude allowed depending on who you talk to, the power you have and the amount of power you can throw at the Adeptus punitive fleet...

"Magus I believe this other Magus is doing modification of the Titan Lance, this is heretech!

- We know but he as 200 of them trained on our battleship right now and he is actually offering us to bless the design with a free refit to our own fleet and the last battleship to have had it done form the (X Chapter) is saying that this world is under their protection...

- But this is here... arrghhhh

- Well I doubt you will mind becoming a ammo servitor for the new more efficient Lance design, you will be able to monitor them from much closer."

On the other hand:

"This world is modifying holy STC! RAMMING SPEED, ALL ORDONANCE MUST BE LOADED AND UN SECURED!

- My Lord Magus are we need going to blow up our self too?

- To serve and Protect the purity of the MCahine GOD is Anathema! Do you refuse!

- No my Lord (sniff, sniff)" KABOOOOOOM!

In other words, it just depends on how nutters the Admech you're dealing with is...

Thanks riplikash. I am not sure I will totally buy into the "Everything has a Machine Spirit" idea, but I will say that most things might. I will probably take a middle road when it comes to machine spirits and the AdMech.

I am not sure that I will totally buy into the "They are trying their best" idea, but I will say that they have lost a lot of their understanding of most tech. They have had time to create new tanks and some other weapons, but perhaps those were newly discovered STC.

Again, thanks.

Bladehate said:

I find this idea most plausible. I also think that the Admech probably establish outposts which allow them to relay info and which can be returned to for serious repairs. If your fellow were the Archmagos or whatever at one of these posts, he would have access to excellent facilities to do his work in. He might even be "stranded" on one for his possible heretical views of tech.

I believe another reason new designs are not implemented, and I agree with all the rest, is that "it worked for the Emperor so its good enough for us" excuse. What do you need new ideas for, when the old ones are tried, trusted, and true (for the most part)?

Back to the OP.

So if you want to keep the notion of a Rogue shipyard for story reasons, perhaps you can follow something like this.

Explorator Darlahan was a legion among the shipwrights of the Lathes. For three centuries his fleet skimmed the expanse looking for technologies of the lost Golden Ages to expand the Machine Gods knowledge of ship design. When he return two hundred years ago, he was heralded as a hero. For with he brought a design that all the Mechanicum wold praise. For he bore the schematics for a massive battletender. Few of these vessels survive to this day, many rendered down to spare parts for vast orbiting shipyards. So upon his triumphant return he was granted on wish. He could have stood with the Head Magos on the Machine Temple on Mars. Instead he requested to right to build this magnificent machine. For the next 100 years he drove the dedicated shipyard over Hess to near ruin to complete this creation in record time. It was a massive ship, able to expand to maintain an Emperor class Battleship. It also have the capability to mine nearby moons and asteroids for minerals to facilitate the repairs. However as the massive vessel neared completion rumors of secret, unknown systems began to surface. Of repair bays that operated without human or servitor. Of machine spirits that would organize and optimize repairs with little input from the crew, and of materials that were beyond the understanding of even the Lathes metalurgist. Gossip spread of that perhaps the Explorator had seen too much exposure to xenos during his time in the expanse. But the desire to have such a grand example of the Machine God would not allow the Magos Council to cancel the construction of the ship. When its maiden voyage finally came, even the serfs slaving on the ground of Hess stopped to watch the launch, since the massive cylinderic ship cast a shadow from orbit. Explorator Darlahan was at the helm overseeing the test flight, which was scheduled to only orbit the three Lathes and return to the orbit of Hess. As the ship moved out of Hess orbit, it began to accelerate away from the Lathes, gathering speed at an unexpected rate. Mechanicum system defense ships manuevered to the key warp jump locations. But the battletender did not attempt to go to the standard warp transition points. Instead it continued to accelerate away from the Lathes system using an unknown propulsion system (during construction the Explorator stated it was the standard warp engines on such an ancient design.) When the defense ships maneuvered to engage they could not sustain the required accleration to intercept the fleeing vessel. To complicate matters further, the Explorator transmitted a holo message to the Magos Council stating distain for their inability to accept that all technology was viable in the eyes of the Machine God, and their failing was to accept that grand, pure technology was only created by man. With the ending of the broadcast a the construction crew of the vessel turned on their fellow techpriests and began a civil war upon the construction dock that ended in the destruction of the station by orbital defense batteries. To this date the details of this rebellion have been seal by Magos Council order, and deleted from the mass populaces storage nodes. The Cult of Sollex and the Myrmadon orders have been actively searching for Explorator Darlahan and his crew. This record requires a 01 clearance code. Restricted even from Inquisitional knowledge.

Enjoy.

Salcor