or perhaps we should say not native to the way we have been taught?
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At one point in the development of organic/biotech computing devices, it was necessary to provide indicators of their internal state for their operators.
The resulting bioluminescent demi-fungus was named, inevitably, “blinkenlichen”.
…he said, torturing the cultural translators some more.
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The Orc MadBoyz that work for Eye-In-The-Flame did invent the squig-gat, which does fire hordes of angry squigs via a Gatling-style system and a teleporter. Because nothing is more hilarious than filling up every cavity your enemy lives in, including their lungs and GI track and bowels with angry, hungry, homicidal and possibly explosive (and/or all four) squigs.
Might be a couple of issues there, one being an existing policy against warcrimes-in-a-box, but more important and a problem with hiring anyone from the 40K 'verse in general is a tragic insistance that people actually know how their stuff works.
(The original rat-gat concept, incidentally, from Sam & Max: Freelance Police.)
40K tech-if I had to make a guess-is what happens when you have post-singularity tech all over the place, but building the AIs needed to run said tech causes you to have crazy AIs and/or AIs taken over by your local Eldritch Abomination From Beyond Space And Time almost immediately. The work-arounds get…weird in a “Lovecraftian Horror” manner very quickly.
(Seriously, DAoT Humanity was probably only surpassed by the Old Ones, and maybe the C’tan. Even the Necrons and Eldar are “first among equals” to DAoT humanity.)
And I also suspect that if Eye-In-The-Flame got ahold of 40K Orks they’d be going “this is amazing, this is wonderful, burn them all immediately!”
To clarify, the problem is that Ork tech (to an even greater extent than AdMech tech) is entirely a case of following the recipes without having any clue as to the underlying principles that really make their stuff work.
Which makes having the inventors useless, so far as they’re concerned, because they can only produce blackbox widgets. They can’t actually give you any information over and above what’s already present in the blackbox widgets, so you might as well just “acquire” some widget samples and send them straight to the Probable Technologies technical exoarchaeology labs for analysis because that’s what you’d have to do anyway.
Usually, capturing the oppo’s engineers is useful because they can explain their stuff to you; these are the rare cases where that strategy comes up null.
(I’m reminded of a Gawdawful British 80s sci-fi comedy, Morons from Outer Space, in which the interrogator asking the aliens how their ship works is very frustrated to get an explanation along the lines of “this pedal makes it go faster, this pedal makes it go slower, what do you mean how, it just does”.)
An analysis of 40K Orks is likely to have people shaking their heads and saying “Y’all built a completely uncontrollable bioweapons system. This is another classic example of what happens when you succeed at the easy part and epic fail the hard part. Good job, dead people.”
(In much the same way that any moron can splice anthrax into rhinovirus, but it requires serious bioengineering chops to make rhinoanthrax that will reliably kill only who you want it to kill, quietly shut itself down and go extinct when it’s done, and never, never, to within ridiculous nines of never ever, go rogue under the stresses of environmental mutation.)
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In an earlier and somewhat excessive draft of this post, I added a note on financial regulation, which in our world tends to come mostly from various supranational bodies and nations creating it via treaty powers and then backfitting the result to domestic law.
There, contrariwise, financial regulation tends to be sourced from three places:
- established meta-policy of Gilea & Company and the First Mercantile Bank of Ólish;
- the operations manual of the Imperial Banking & Credit Weave; and
- the monthly dinners of the High Guild of Coin and Credit.
These notably being places that love the principle behind money and the integrity of the financial system far, far more than anything else. (Princes and peoples, powers and policies, they come and go. Money is eternal.) And all of the most senior responsible people are undenotres of the Court of Courts, so what they come up with can be relied upon to have the full backing of the Empire.
(They are also, for the most part, part of Gilea Cheraelar’s clientele, so it can be safely be assumed that little escapes the watchful eye and gold-clad fist of the Old Lady of Coinclink Lane.)
But what of the rest of the Worlds?
Well, technically, every sovereign polity can make whatever financial regulations it likes. However, in practice:
- the Empire has a Presidium seat and is one of the powers that architected the Accord on Trade and the Plexus Free Trade Alliance in the first place;
- it still takes a great deal of interest in the Galactic Trade Association that that Accord created;
- in galactic banking, Gilea & Company and the First Mercantile Bank of Ólish are kind of big deals, and hold the ends of a lot of strings;
- likewise, the Seranth Exchange is the biggest marketplace anywhere;
- the most universal payment rail in the Worlds, the Accord Exval Transfer Network, in practice differs from the Imperial Banking & Credit Weave only in primary denomination, and is run by a great many of the same people;
- the Galactic Financial Documentation Standards are very heavily cribbed from the Hundred Precise Protocols of the Integral Accountant;
- etc., etc.
All of these, of course, are perfectly voluntary institutions to join, standards to use, and so forth. If you want to get out from under the Old Lady’s eye to practice the kind of bullshit up with which she will not put¹, you can do it.
But much like applying vigorous and strict economic sanctions to yourself, doing so may not work out ultimately to your credit.
- She won’t help you, though. Enforcement is your own problem, and the Old Lady doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with people using overweave-encrypted protocols to do covert banking with Enth Cryptic no matter what the local yokels have to say about it.