So... The living Metal of the Necrons.. I have have some questions, and have not been able to find any answers to... and also some general questions... I am that there has been quite a lot of change from the Old C'tan slaves Necrons to the newer more freewilled Necrons... But in case there has been changes from from the old codex to the new, i would like to hear both the old and new discribtion... Also i am unsure wether to post this as it has questions about rules, but also largely relevant for the campaign setting.....

1) First of all "what is it" i have heard that is billions of small "nano robots"... But i read (in Dead Men Walking) that if exposed too very high temprature (read hit by heavy melta weapons) it becomes liquid... However The reformed from a liquid silvery pool into a full Necron due to the lords Ressurection orb.. I have also from ertain reading gotten this idea that the Necrons are not Machines per say... But some something else entirely... The Necrodermis like more of a shell around this green energy .

While in Hammer and Anvil they are discribed as more actual machines, using data traference, understadning binary, having fragile components and such...

Am i wrong here? what are the Necrodermis exactly?

2) How are Necrons powered? or Where do they get energy from?

3) how does Necrodermis react to water? Does it float or sink? Can Necrons swim?

4) How does Necron do in Zero gravity? i imagine the skimmers doing just fine, but what about the soldiers?

5) Does the Necrons have the equvilant of Titans?

6) How do you think the Necrons percieve the world? Do the see it as we do or some other way? (any ideas to how they see the world would be VERY helpful )

7) Does the Necrons have a "soul". Various sources seems to suggest otherwise, but did they have one when they were just the Necrontyr? Has it been converted to something else, like that green glow Necrons have?

8) what would happen to the C'tan in case all life died? would the starve and die?

9) I read in black crusade that (at least some) Necron weapons destory souls! Thoughs on this?

10) what is know about the Necrontyr as a race? I read the codex, and i have yet to find anything on how they look/ anything in general them race, other than the fact that their sun was nasty, that they seemed quite spiteful and that they had extremely advanced tech,,,

So... The living Metal of the Necrons.. I have have some questions, and have not been able to find any answers to... and also some general questions... I am that there has been quite a lot of change from the Old C'tan slaves Necrons to the newer more freewilled Necrons... But in case there has been changes from from the old codex to the new, i would like to hear both the old and new discribtion... Also i am unsure wether to post this as it has questions about rules, but also largely relevant for the campaign setting.....

1) First of all "what is it" i have heard that is billions of small "nano robots"... But i read (in Dead Men Walking) that if exposed too very high temprature (read hit by heavy melta weapons) it becomes liquid... However The reformed from a liquid silvery pool into a full Necron due to the lords Ressurection orb.. I have also from ertain reading gotten this idea that the Necrons are not Machines per say... But some something else entirely... The Necrodermis like more of a shell around this green energy .

While in Hammer and Anvil they are discribed as more actual machines, using data traference, understadning binary, having fragile components and such...

Am i wrong here? what are the Necrodermis exactly?

2) How are Necrons powered? or Where do they get energy from?

3) how does Necrodermis react to water? Does it float or sink? Can Necrons swim?

4) How does Necron do in Zero gravity? i imagine the skimmers doing just fine, but what about the soldiers?

5) Does the Necrons have the equvilant of Titans?

6) How do you think the Necrons percieve the world? Do the see it as we do or some other way? (any ideas to how they see the world would be VERY helpful )

7) Does the Necrons have a "soul". Various sources seems to suggest otherwise, but did they have one when they were just the Necrontyr? Has it been converted to something else, like that green glow Necrons have?

8) what would happen to the C'tan in case all life died? would the starve and die?

9) I read in black crusade that (at least some) Necron weapons destory souls! Thoughs on this?

10) what is know about the Necrontyr as a race? I read the codex, and i have yet to find anything on how they look/ anything in general them race, other than the fact that their sun was nasty, that they seemed quite spiteful and that they had extremely advanced tech,,,

Ooookay....

1 ) 'Living Metal' is never quite clear, but a 'soup' of nanotech is as good a theory as any. It would behave like liquid (mostly) unless deliberately trying to retain a structure/shape.

Necrons are indeed not machines but are pretty close. They're in some ways more like BSG cylons - a human-ish awareness 'downloaded' into a body, which can be modified as needed. The higher ranking a necron, the more sentient they are, and the less tied to a single frame - one infamous lord, Trazyn the Infinite, can jump from body to body whenever he feels his current frame is being threatened. Much to the detriment of the junior lord who finds themselves reconfigured into and overwritten by Trazyn, I must add.

C'Tan are literally a living metal bottle with a bit of a god in it.

2 ) Errr.... don't get too far into questions of what powers warhammer 40k technology, because even Imperial stuff falls over pretty fast if you think about it for too long. Certainly 'science too advanced for man to understand' and probably - because it matches up to the rest of their technology - something to do with manipulating space time. If you really want an answer wave your hand vaguely and mention words like 'miniaturized singularity' or 'zero point energy'.

3 ) One gets the impression from references to necron artefacts people get their hands on that living metal isn't that heavy but it's still metal - they're going to sink. Note that some necron variants - like wraiths - can float like land speeders and jetbikes and could certainly 'swim' (if that's the right word for something without legs). Something like a monolith could certainly operate underwater, too.

4 ) In zero gravity? Not a lot. For the sake of sanity, though, I'd assume the warrior form (and equivalents) has some sort of analogue to mag-boots built into the design - be it micro-grav generators, nano-claws (like a gecko), actual magnets, or whatever. Essentially, however sophisticated humanity things they are, the necrons are actually more so, and walking along a corridor in zero gravity shouldn't be a problem for them.

5 ) Yes and no. They have super-heavy engines which fight like titans (the obelisk, for example) - but are more like baneblade/shadowsword superheavy tanks. The biggest thing we've seen is a tomb stalker - a centipedal super-tomb-spyder - but nothing really 'titan scale'. That's not to say they couldn't, and a suitably egotistical lord could certainly have a body-form made on a similar scale to a warhound just to prove a point.

6 ) The best source I can point you at is the book Hammer and Anvil. A fair amount of it is written from the necron's point of view. Essentially, yes the 'nobility' are sentient and have a sensorium not a million miles from ours, but they're also continuously linked to a sort of 'mental internet' by which they can issue commands to the minions, access knowledge, and/or escape (or remotely trigger a phase out) if threatened.

7 ) The necrontyr were living beings so presumably had them. The process of becoming the necrons, however, destroyed them (specifically, the C'Tan supposedly 'ate' their soul essence). The necrons have been repeatedly and specifically stated to be 'soul-less'.

8 ) No. The C'Tan originally fed off stars before the Necrontyr found them and presumably could go back to subsisting off them. Living sentient beings are just tastier.

9 ) Largely hyperbolae, but at the same time, necron technology includes things like the tesseract vault and exile ray, which shunts you out of space time completely, and other suitably outre weapons (even by chaos standards!). The key thing to 'killing a soul' - if you have a weapon that can achieve it - is that if a person so killed is killed, they are dead, dead, dead and cannot come back in any way (intervention by/resurrection by the gods, for example). Equally, such a weapon would destroy, not merely banish, a daemon - one of the few ways to do that.

Such a property certainly shouldn't be applied to common things like gauss flayers, though. It's more a narrative thing.

10 ) That's about all we know. We assume they were a similar size and shape to the basic necron warrior, since Ghost Arks could carry both, and that their skeleton vaguely looked like it since the warrior is an idealised representation of death. But we don't and never will really know what they looked like.

If I recall, their planet had a higher gravity as well. The higher gravity would make them shorter (suck it Ogryn! The Squats had it right) and the sun would make them dark. Also, short lifespan implies fast metabolism implies smaller body (if I recall my biology correctly; its been a few years). I think someone out on the internet conjectured something else along those lines.

Also, just because the necron warrior is a symbol of death and whatsuch, I wouldn't feel safe assuming the size correlated to the Necrontyr. It seems reasonable to assume a humanoid frame, however.

Funny thing about that last point, the implied reason that the major races in the galaxy are humanoid is because they were made in the image of the Old Ones. Kind of ironic that their greatest enemies were also humanoid.