#Daemon Engine

[wh40kartwork]

Heldrake

by Vitaly Perevoshikov

[jet-teeth]

BRIBERY.

[plasmometer]

LOUISE VON VALANCIUS!!!

[ladymirdan]

Iron warrior taking care of its Daemon engine M41 colourised.

[titanomancy]

I suspect that today's preview was originally intended to be the big reveal of the Mechanicum Battle Group, but with that preempted by the leak and subsequent official reveal for the re-inaugural Heresy Thursday, there was a distinctly Mechanicum-shaped hole in the schedule.

Which is really just a great excuse to move up the reveal of the forthcoming range of Dark Mechanicum kits. Not quite as degenerate as the daemon engines of the 41st millennium, the brand new Serperos Heavy Stalkers still manage to look fundamentally unwholesome without being completely encrusted in baroque barnacles.

There's some great design direction that ties them in with elements of the Vulturax and Vorax automata (both of which will be available in the Legions Imperialis battlegroup, and are on my short list for future Age of Darkness releases)

As an aside, a lot of what we've seen from the plastic range to date has been broadly of the "early" Heresy aesthetic, when there was little aside from color scheme and insignia to differentiate traitor from loyalist. It's only a matter of time until the really wild late Heresy stuff starts to make its way through. These proto-daemon engines are just the start.

[emethethe]

[wh40kgallery]

The Weeping Legion

by Lewis Jones

[theyeenzone]

Dog

[nightlumi]

Designing a Slaaneshi Daemon Engine to go with the 4th Heretek I'm working on. Built a quick 3D model in Blockbench to figure out basic shape and perspective.

[agentvenom29]

Here are my Word Bearers Forgefiend & Maulerfiend.

[wh40kartwork]

Lord Discordant

by Daniel Batista

[jet-teeth]

Slapped some color on an old sketch …I have many Heldrake Opinions and yet it seems I have not posted any art of them, what the heck haha.

WELL with this one, I wanted it to look more like the Hellblade vehicle instead of just being a "metal dragon." If they are supposed to be warped aircraft, why not make them look more that way?

Detail crop:

[engineer-gunzelpunk]

The Daemonic Theory of Engine Sentience: Introduction

OK, strap yourselves in, Gunzel is now going to posit my own idea of engine sentience within my own TTTE AU universe.

***

This is such a difficult topic that its virtually asking, where does Life itself come from?

Once we get beyond the natural world and the world of humans, such a question becomes kind of dicey. Engines that live shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t have faces and thoughts and feelings and independent wills, but here we are. In-universe, they are definitely alive, not in an illusory fashion, actually independently alive. Exactly why is the question. They have no organs, no nerves and yet they can talk, move, argue, have free will and feel pain.

Victor Tanzig has in-universe in his own AU hsd outlined at least 3 theories of engine sentience:  Biochemical (at some point during the creation of the locomotive, the conditions are created just right that life occurs when the fire is lit and the generation of the process of life is fundamentally material) , Attention (that attention and care from humans to the locomotives grants sentience) and Revenant (the souls of the dead animate the locomotive shell).

I propose kind of an extension of the third theory that posits no material explanation, or psychological one. Rather, I believe the process of First Ignition is a spiritual one.

“Daemon” is the Ancient Greek word for ‘spirit’, or minor deity, from which we derive our word ‘demon’. The spirit, so called, inhibits the shell of the locomotive and the body is awakened by the First Ignition. These aren’t the spirits of the dead as the Revenant theory proposes, but an abstract living “Spirit”.

The catalyst for it seems to be the First Ignition imbuing it with a literal or symbolic fire (in the case of diesels and trucks and cars, etc. that channels the power of the spirit into the material shell of the engine. In ages past, this may be called divine or Promethean fire, phlogiston, or Azoth. 

It's not clear whether it is a pre-existing spirit, or a new fully fledged daemon thus being born in this way that brings life to the shell. All possess a certain individuality and sensitivity that make each one unique. The possible divinity of such a process is inferred by the fact that all locomotives coming to life in such a manner all wake up with fully functioning if inchoate human level intellects, though education is still required and emotionally they may not be all there. This does not necessarily mean that First Ignition can fix or overcome the flaws of a bad build, as the example of Henry Mrk 1 demonstrates.

Nor does the theory suggest that the spirit that animates this shell is separate from it, any more than the presence of human consciousness means that the body is entirely separate. It seems clear that once First Ignition has animated the shell, the mind and the body are one, as is clear from the fact that non-faceless vehicles can feel pain or sensation or feel physical satisfaction and energy from burning coal and boiling water.

Further more, this can be replicated over and over again. But it is not guaranteed that a machine will become non-faceless, otherwise every machine could have a face and be sentient. That trucks and cars and airplanes can also become sentient also complicates things... well, a lot.

Clearly it is very complex. But it appears that certain workshops have the ability to consistently produce non-faceless machinery, or certain people running them have the ability to insure the ritual of First Ignition creates the result needed.

There is no religious dimension to this, the religious faith of the workers or shop owner does not seem to matter. But there does seem to be a correlation between actually crafting the locomotive/car/rollingstock etc. with a human hand rather than machining it with robots…

Not all locomotives are daemonic in this way. Some might be animated by other kinds of intelligent spirits or energies. This is just one theory of many theories of engine animation that has been crystalised.

Within this theory of machine sentience, there are three developed branches: the Hermetic school, the Masonic school and the Goetic school. This isn’t to say that the names given to these schools of thought encapsulate the whole of their philosophies, only in so far as they can be applied to non-faceless vehicle creation.

It is not necessarily that one even has to be conscious of these theories in order to create new non-faceless vehicles. They are merely models that try to explain why different machinery seems to come to life or why they come to life in a certain way and others do not.

[like-tears-in-rain-storms]

Daemon Engines Dilemmas by TraitorJim

[yestheantichrist]

In the warhammer 40k universe they have a ‘Down With Cis’ daemon engine

[emethethe]