Archeotech
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- – Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible
Archeotech (known by other spellings) is a term from Warhammer 40,000 which refers to any of the vast array of mysterious ancient technologies developed during the Dark Age of Technology, which the Imperium of Man still digs up and uses for its own purposes, despite not knowing the slightest bit how they work or how to rebuild them, and often misunderstanding what it's for in the first place. It's unclear if you pronounce it "ar-KEE-oh" like archeology or "ar-KAY-oh" like archaic. Both would be fitting.
Typically speaking, Archeotech tends to be insanely advanced even by the standards of the setting to the point where anyone or anything short of a Necron Cryptek or Jokaero would scratch their collective heads at how it works. Archeotech also tends to include highly advanced materials which cannot be replicated by any faction in the setting (i.e. Eldar, Dark Eldar, Tau, etc), and are so complicated and sophisticated in design that trying to understand the inner workings is an act of madness.
Examples of Archeotech include:
- Archeotech Pistols that were available to the highest ranking officers during the Great Crusade. These are the most common Archeotech that shows up. Fluff depictions differ but in the 30k Horus Heresy rule books they have stopping power that sits between a Bolter and a Plasma Pistol. Only Rogue Traders and a few named characters seem to have them by the 42nd Millennium.
- Strange and hyperlethal guns of all sorts and sizes that could obliterate their targets in all kinds of ways. Some would just vaporize their target until only atoms remained. Others would turn their targets into pure explosive energy. There were even a few that were basically man-made versions of Necron Gauss weaponry.
- A ship with a gun that causes targets to telefrag themselves with a version of themselves from a fraction of a second in the future. It cannot miss, not because it is so accurate, but because it rewrites reality so that it has always hit the target and brings that result backwards in time. Though it did miss once, thanks to Eldar psychic powers, reality was rewritten by the gun so it had never missed in the first place.
- A cure-all Panacea that uses quantum certainty/uncertainty to predict diseases that will form and can instantly adapt itself to cure any disease that it encounters.
- Hyper-intelligent Abominable Intelligences with godlike power and brains so massive that they shine like tiny Astronomicans in the Warp.
- An entire race of AI that turned rogue, ended the Dark Age of Technology and nearly destroyed the human race, something no one else in the setting has even come close to achieving, despite having the potential to do so.
- A titan so advanced it was capable of running, sprinting, jumping, and climbing, despite being bigger than any other Imperial Titan. It also had a Gatling Gun that shot Vortex Shells, though after it fell to chaos it shot Daemons as ammunition .
- A bomb that dropped living green flame that would move across the battlefield to hunt down victims, and seek out weak points on vehicles and buildings to get at the soft meat inside.
- A device that, when activated, shrouded the battlefield in a strange energy that made it so that the enemy couldn't see through an inky blackness even with Autosenses or Preysight while also making it seem bright as noon for the army that used it.
- Weapons that simultaneously atomize corporeal beings, and unmake (IE true death permakill) daemons and other denizens of the warp with ease. The destruction is such that some even sear their victims from memory itself. These can vary from Exterminatus-grade shipborne weaponry, down to small arms. Alone of the rest of the Imperium (the only exceptions being the Talons of the Emperor), the Dark Angels have a fuckhueg reserve of such kit, but as its use can only be authorized by the Lion himself (only the Dreadwing possesses limited authority to deploy some of it until he wakes back up), much of their most valuable gear has been collecting dust for the past 10,000 years. Which is a real shame for a multitude of obvious reasons, but not least of which being that recent fluff has revealed that the Dark Angel's collection even includes planet destroying ordnance capable of permakilling entire worlds engulfed in chaos or warp storms, phages for every enemy or occasion, and FUNCTIONAL MEN OF IRON.
This technology is obviously cheesetastic nightmares. Everyone should be thankful that the Imperuim can't mass deploy such artifacts.
Oh, and for these seemingly space magic powers such as causality-changing guns and quantum medicine, keep in mind that at the time humanity thought of magic powers as an interesting phenomenon but didn’t really know how to use it. THIS IS ALL PURE SCIENCE.Please, disregard the fact that the more advanced archeotech looks nothing like human-made, but closely resembles some ancient Xeno relics. How much of it was actually invented and not just stolen from the Akashic Records is also unclear.