Hi fellows,

I planned for a little Mission aboard a Space Hulk. According to the Board and Card Game, Tyranids are the common threat in such an enviroment. Now I simply ask myself: why?

From my understanding a Space Hulk is litteraly a huge mass of merged space ships which had the bad luck to get lost in the warp. At one point this amalgam just falls back into real space. Wouldn't I expect a lot of daemons on board which made it? But why Tyranids? Are they able to survive in the immaterium?

Or are the Genestealers on board of a Space Hulk just a WH40k fact which superscribs any logic?

Cheers,

-- TechVoid.

Living things don't automatically die in the warp. Sometimes they…change, like the once-human mutants encountered in the Bloodquest comic. Or are resistant to the warp. Generally tyranids are relatively resistant to chaos corruption.

Orks are also very common, since as Decessor said, they are resistant to the effects of the warp. You could also use some kind of Chaos cult.

Interesting.

I always thought the Gellar Field to not only protect against the daemons of the warp, but also against the … warp.

Aren't their some descriptions in some novels where people simply die because they are exposed to the warp. And that means simply 'in contact' with it and not killed by any fiends. Like entering the immaterium but with no Gellar Field.

Cheers,

-- TechVoid.

When creatures die from just exposure to the warp, it's usually because their hearts stop with fear, or their minds are incapable of comprehending the sheer madness they perceive. Walls melt, colors become sound and flavor, reality literally becomes unreal and frighteningly surreal. It would be like sneaking up on a sleeping new-born infant and roaring loudly directly into its ear; the shock of the stimulus could cause heart failure, certainly a lasting trauma caused by fear of the unknown or unexpected. Even with a Gellar Field in place, people that have looked upon the Warp have gone blind, eaten their own fingers off, or completely lost their minds, becoming catatonic.

In many GW, BL, and FFG passages you can read about how Tyranids seem inexplicably immune to the effects of the Warp. That's not to say that Warp energy couldn't boil them to explosion, or abrade their flesh from their bones, or crush them into tiny balls of super dense mush. Genestealers are the most common creatures specifically referred to in these passages. They are also completely immune to exposure to the void, have no need to breathe, are immune to disease and almost every natural toxin they encounter, and can willingly enter a suspended animation/hibernation. One person on an expedition into a Space Hulk that gets implanted by a Genestealer is all it takes to bring utter ruin to an entire planet. And it only takes one Genestealer to start the whole tower crumbling. Being immune to the pandering promises of Chaos entities and the babbling lesser beings makes hibernation a little less noisy.

Now, regarding the Warp and Genestealers…what would happen, say, if a creature that were gestating a 4th-gen, or Pure-strain Genestealer, but prior to spawning the vile thing was exposed to the mutating effects of the Warp? Would the Warp then somehow mutate the embryonic Pure-strain, through the mutation of its host, possibly causing the birth of a Warp-mutated Genestealer? What would that creature be able to do over and above that of its "normal" kin?

I think Tyranids are as inscrutable to Chaos as Chaos is to humanity. There's really no "mind" there for the Ruinous Powers to manipulate, control, or turn toward their adulation. The Hive Mind has one overriding impulse, one objective, one imperative…devour. Chaos' agendas are divided among different spheres, and none of them really approach their areas of interest and influence with quite the singularity of purpose as the Tyranids.

Thanks very much for this detailed explanation. That' s something I can work with!

Cheers,

-- TechVoid.

TechVoid said:

They survive better than most other species because 1) they have no souls to attract daemons; 2) they are not subject to Insanity; 3) they are highly adaptable to hostile environments. At least that's my take on it.

Also Genestealers are on space hulks because of their legacy from the Space Crusade era of GW gaming, where squads of marines (not in terminator armour) would have to fight Chaos Space Marines, Gretchin, Necrons and Genestealers aboard space hulks. I think going forward from this GW decided that the marine vs genestealer combat was the most tense and so that became the premise for Space Hulk.
You can add as much justification from newer canon sources as you wish, but basically Genestealers are nasty buggers to be fighting aboard a space hulk.

Kasatka said:

Yeah, that's what I called a 'WH40k fact which superscribs any logic'.

Cheers,

-- TechVoid

Kasatka said:

I think Space Hulk actually pre-dated Space Crusade by about a year or so, not the other way round. I seem to recall some fluff from either Space Hulk itself or White Dwarf that Imperial scholars were puzzled by the presence of Genestealers aboard the hulks so they suggested a theory that the genestealers were using the hulks to drift through space to infect other worlds or passing ships which could carry the infection onwards.

I've been on-and-off interested in 40k since the mid-80's. (I bought the first edition of WH 40k Rogue Trader in 1986 or whenever.) I recall Space Hulk being published sometime around 1988. I was friends in high school with some well-to-do kids whose parents could easily afford GW products, so they always got the new stuff! They introduced me to the game, which was really fun. I always though that SH was inspired by Aliens , as the Colonial Marines blasting xenos in the movie's dystopia was a natural fit for 40k.

The Genestealers were their own thing, having the cults, and not really Tyranids at least not in canon. In fact I don't believe the Tyranids (as they are now) were actually an IP until much later. If I remember right, they were evil aliens with an insect-like society and "zoat" slavers and that was about it; certainly not the hive- intelligenced, galactic locust-like death like they are now. I prefer them thus as they its a nice analog to the Black Plague (of Middle Ages Europe) in the medievalian WH universe.

This could all be wrong. I still have 1s Ed. stuff, but I haven't opened it for over 14 years.

I've been on-and-off interested in 40k since the mid-80's. (I bought the first edition of WH 40k Rogue Trader in 1986 or whenever.) I recall Space Hulk being published sometime around 1988. I was friends in high school with some well-to-do kids whose parents could easily afford GW products, so they always got the new stuff! They introduced me to the game, which was really fun. I always though that SH was inspired by Aliens , as the Colonial Marines blasting xenos in the movie's dystopia was a natural fit for 40k.

The Genestealers were their own thing, having the cults, and not really Tyranids at least not in canon. In fact I don't believe the Tyranids (as they are now) weren't an IP until much later. If I remember correctly, they were evil aliens, with an insect-like society, and were also "zoat" slavers and that was about it; certainly not the hive-intelligenced, galactic locust-like biblical plague like they are now. I prefer them thus as they its a nice analog to the Black Plague of ,medieval Europe; the obvious inspiration for WH 40k

This could all be wrong. I still have 1s Ed. stuff, but I haven't opened it for over 14 years.

EDIT: Oops, thought I was in the RT forums! Oh well, carry on!

The Warp doesnt neccessarily effect the whole hulk, gellar fields and other such tech is usually scattered through, protecting regions of the ship and thus protecting the creatures within, Genestealers like them because they are basically scouts for the larger swars, picking out vulnerable targets by sneaking into Imperial territory and sneaking into hives and such, Space Hulks go everywhere, and though there are a lot of Genestealers around, they arent the most common thing on hulks, Daemons are but also a range of other monsters