Warhammer 40k Tabletop Thread XLIV - "Take a Shot of Paint Water"

[LCP]

I like the idea that you'd look at something that gets really into the weeds of like, the Great Man theory of history, and whether at a big enough scale the actions of individuals can meaningfully change the future, and decide that that's what makes Warhammer 40K stupid. Not the Tolkien fantasy races in spaaaace, not the galaxy-spanning empire whose main use for its kilometre-long FTL ships is to ferry people to the surface of planets so they can reenact WW1 or have chainsaw sword fights, not the literal wizards. Like if you don't enjoy genre fiction playing fast and loose with wacky ideas like that, why would you touch any of this stuff? There is real 'hard' sci-fi out there you can read.

Particularly in this particular subgenre of galaxy-spanning military fiction, it's funny, because FTL travel already massively messes with causality without any need for Doctor Who style time-travel. You want to make sure everything checks out 'logically' in a setting that has FTL travel, you need a whole new theory of relativity to still live in a universe where cause comes before effect. Explanations like star trek FTL drives or 40k warp travel don't do that, they just give you an painted exterior behind which you can imagine that a complete explanation (that would require a doctorate to understand) lies. It's exactly the same depth of technobabble that justifies time travel in other fiction, it just takes a bit more maths to see how big a hole it's papering over.

As a physicist myself I don't see any problem with this. This is one of the interesting and entertaining things science fiction can do with respect to real science, to ask 'what if things were different'. Obviously 40K isn't doing anything particularly deep with its particular mish-mash of 'what ifs', but why would you let that spoil your enjoyment of it all the same?