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Imperium

24 (77.4%)

Chaos

7 (22.6%)

Total Members Voted: 30

[Tack]

While orks love humans, they've also been fairly clear in what communications there have been that orks consider everybody else un-orky, and therefore not worth listening to.

Paint an Ogryn green

Not sure if Ogryn or Orcs are dumber.
Would an Ogryn baby in Orc society become a part of it? I think maybe...

[Frumple]

Re: the point about Chaos have some populations of relatively stable, free humans (by 40K terms): So do the Impies. On a vastly larger scale.

That's the thing people forget when they talk about the Imperium. You hear about Tomb Worlds here, genestealer cults there, Ork incursions fuckin' everywhere... because that's what makes for "exciting" plots. The Imperium is fucking gigantic. For every world that's being shit on, there are scores or hundreds that are at relative peace, where the citizens 'only' have to deal with the generic problems of the bureaucracy.

... generic problems of the bureaucracy that can and do regularly kill people, often horrific living conditions, backbreaking and often lethal labor, regular conscription/press gangs, corruption everywhere (that kills and maims and impoverishes and etc.) even when there's not chaos/genestealer/etc. cults, so on, so forth. For a lot of those so-called free humans, a daemon world wouldn't exactly be a downgrade, especially with some nice chaos blessings to offset the various issues.

Chaos can't really sustain itself in the long run against such forces as the fully awakened Necrons or the Tyranids in full force, since either of those would destroy or scour clean the Warp.

Neither can the impies :V

Hell, they're reliant on the warp and the astronomicon -- that's a whole 'nother point of existential failure, right there.

Though hell dude, the 'crons and the 'nids could straight up take everything else in the galaxy except the orkz if they got their shit together. Chaos not being able to manage it solo doesn't say much, heh.

Not sure if Ogryn or Orcs are dumber.

Orkz are actually pretty damn smart, they're just operating under a different paradigm of what reality is -- and them being them, they're right in relation to orkz. Humies and whatnot are the idiots in relation to orkyness. And the reverse isn't even true, since there's plenty of boys that can actually work with and reverse engineer non-ork tech and methodology. They just don't, 'cause the orky stuff legitimately works better from their point of view (which is, again, fully accurate in regards to how orkz work and what their goals are).

It's not really idiocy when stuff like painting yourself purple to turn invisible ('cause oo evah 'erd of a purple ork?) actually works.

[Xantalos]

Chaos can't really sustain itself in the long run against such forces as the fully awakened Necrons or the Tyranids in full force, since either of those would destroy or scour clean the Warp.

Neither can the impies :V

Hell, they're reliant on the warp and the astronomicon -- that's a whole 'nother point of existential failure, right there.

Though hell dude, the 'crons and the 'nids could straight up take everything else in the galaxy except the orkz if they got their shit together. Chaos not being able to manage it solo doesn't say much, heh.

But even if the Astronomican is destroyed humanity'll survive - if the Warp is sealed off/scoured clean/whatever, Chaos just loses since everything is basically an extension of the big four, who'd get killed if that happened.

[Loud Whispers]

It's not really idiocy when stuff like painting yourself purple to turn invisible ('cause oo evah 'erd of a purple ork?) actually works.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For a while the Brit SAS found that pink gave excellent camouflage in the desert: And so was birthed the Pink Panther. Orks do that naturally. They're idiots, but they're idiot savants, it's programmed in their DNA to be good at waagh. Much like how an ant is clever, despite lacking much in the way of cognitive capabilities.

[mainiac]

Ants are clever?

In high school I did a project on ant pheromones for finding food which I kept a colony of ants around for a few weeks to do.  The space I kept the ants in included some exposed tape.  The ants would wander onto the tape get stuck and die.  To my horror as I kept this colony for weeks the ants never learned.  They would crawl over the corpses of their sisters, climb over the writhing bodies of their those who got stuck just before them and then get stuck themselves.  There was nothing on the other side of this tape, mind you, I was just taping stuff together inside the container and it left sticky surfaces exposed.  They could have gone around the deadly trap quite easily but no amount of ant corpses would deter them...

So if orks are as clever as ants it's not cleverness but the law of large numbers that leads to their successes.

[Xantalos]

Yeah, that's orks for ya. Weight of numbers generally carries them the day.

[Flying Dice]

Re: the point about Chaos have some populations of relatively stable, free humans (by 40K terms): So do the Impies. On a vastly larger scale.

That's the thing people forget when they talk about the Imperium. You hear about Tomb Worlds here, genestealer cults there, Ork incursions fuckin' everywhere... because that's what makes for "exciting" plots. The Imperium is fucking gigantic. For every world that's being shit on, there are scores or hundreds that are at relative peace, where the citizens 'only' have to deal with the generic problems of the bureaucracy.

... generic problems of the bureaucracy that can and do regularly kill people, often horrific living conditions, backbreaking and often lethal labor, regular conscription/press gangs, corruption everywhere (that kills and maims and impoverishes and etc.) even when there's not chaos/genestealer/etc. cults, so on, so forth. For a lot of those so-called free humans, a daemon world wouldn't exactly be a downgrade, especially with some nice chaos blessings to offset the various issues.

Eh. Still seems to be trading one raw deal for another. The only difference in practice is that the ways in which you are horrifically violated, mutilated, and tortured aren't always the same. And, again, the Imperium has the potential to improve; Chaos doesn't. Chaos by definition cannot win (and thus, there is no hope EVER for humans living under Chaos to someday see improvement on their conditions). The Imperium does have a victory condition of sorts, in the sense of "Empie comes back," which both directly and indirectly will result in quality-of-life improvements across the board. Not fast, probably not on meaningful levels for centuries at the least, but unlike Chaos there is still a tiny, faint glimmer of hope for a better future.

If we're just going to go with "Well what's good for me right now if I live on an Imperial world?" in which case the answer is either 'suicide', 'Tau', or 'situation normal'. Because hey, at least the ways the Imperium fucks with you are comprehensible to mortal minds and will eventually end.

[Loud Whispers]

Ants are clever?

No, ants are not clever. But one can be as clever as ants - group intelligence. A herd of buffalo can cross a crocodile filled river without losing a single buffalo while a herd of zebra loses many. The zebra are far more intelligent, the zebra even plan and try to find the shortest and safest route before even entering the river. The buffalo just run into the river and get pushed in by the previous buffalo and swim around the river until some of them find a bank they can climb. And with the sheer number of buffalo, that is not long.
Clever as ants.

[Bohandas]

Ants are clever?

In high school I did a project on ant pheromones for finding food which I kept a colony of ants around for a few weeks to do.  The space I kept the ants in included some exposed tape.  The ants would wander onto the tape get stuck and die.  To my horror as I kept this colony for weeks the ants never learned.  They would crawl over the corpses of their sisters, climb over the writhing bodies of their those who got stuck just before them and then get stuck themselves.  There was nothing on the other side of this tape, mind you, I was just taping stuff together inside the container and it left sticky surfaces exposed.  They could have gone around the deadly trap quite easily but no amount of ant corpses would deter them...

Hmm... That does sound a lot more like the Imperium than the Orks.

[Frumple]

So if orks are as clever as ants it's not cleverness but the law of large numbers that leads to their successes.

I'll say it again: The deal with the orkz isn't a matter of cleverness but radically different paradigm. Reality literally doesn't work the same way for them as it does everything else. Orkz are clever about being orky, and some of them are that plus more. Thinkin' an ork is stupid is a quick way to get a choppa' stuck in yer gob. They just fundamentally think differently than other sentients.

Well, at least the sentient ones do. The squig-forms actually are pretty stupid, assuming one of the more tinker-minded boys hasn't done something odd to it.

Mind you, that can actually manifest as behavior like those ants displayed -- if orkyness was about getting stuck in tape, they'd all get stuck in tape, forever, and the weight of their desire would warp the firmament of reality to make sure they have a sustainable tape-sticking situation, forever. It would seem stupid by the human perspective, but... you can't really call it stupid if the metaphorical ants are getting exactly what they want (a mighty struggle followed by death, repeating into eternity for their entire species). You can call the goal stupid, but their methodology is solid as hell based on their characteristics.

They do have hella' large numbers, though. Ork biospheres and biological matter probably make up a fairly substantial portion of the 40k galaxy's organics by raw weight.

[i2amroy]

Of course, if their desire was for all of them to die, then once a significant enough portion of them were dead their ability to warp reality would decrease, leading to less deaths, leading to more of them, leading to them dying more, leading to...

[Xantalos]

They don't actually warp reality all that much, otherwise they'd never lose. They just get some minor/subtle buffs, like red stuff going faster, yellow things exploding bigger, and sometimes when they're firing guns and forget they run out of ammo, they don't. Stuff like that.

[i2amroy]

Well on a single ork level yeah, but as people have pointed out before, it's totally possible that because as a whole of the orks believe that the conflict of WH40K shouldn't end, then it won't. It's like how their warping powers get stronger when you get big bunches of them going on a WAAAGGHH together, alone they aren't that powerful, and they aren't ever united into large enough groups to be undefeatable, but if as a whole they all believe something then there isn't really much in the universe that could stop it from happening (at least in some of the older versions of the lore, I must confess that I haven't read all of the latest stuff).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It should also be noted that the orks don't particularly focus on not losing, they focus on finding the best fighting. And the Waaagh field effect is also involuntary, hence why Commissar Yarrick keeps coming back from the dead, can use a power klaw, and has that weird green tint to him out of the corner of your eye.

[Tack]

Yeah, the legitimate effect is the Waaagh, which is localized. Again with the 'red makes it go fasta' or 'purple is invisibl'. They didn't stumble on it, they just believe that it is and the little bit of collective psychic potential that all orks have (called the Waagh) makes it so.
It's also why Orks can make cars and guns which SHOULD NOT WORK in normal situations, but because the orks are so hopped up on waagh, they do. But if a guardsman were to try to use it, it would probably immediately explode.

I guess in some slight fashion this might exist as the imperial 'power of faith' thing too, where blessed and sanctified things work a little bit better. That one is a little bit more dicey as it hasn't actively been explained in lore (I think).
So maybe if they gathered the entire ecclesiarchy of mankind together and had them all praying and Truly Believing that something cool and miraculous will happen - it might.
We're not ant-smart enough to try though. We're all free-willed and doubtful.