Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-176.205.23.248-20140531233700/@comment-6078851-20140612004015

that's a very interesting idea, but changing the ork persona would be more difficult than changing the astartes persona: astartes are trained, drilled, indoctrinated, etc etc, into their mind-set, and breaking that mind-set is a monumentally hard task (only really achievable by another astartes, or chaos gods) but, it can be done. orks, however are genetically coded to have their mind-set, and even if they ended up getting spanked across the galaxy they're mind-set wouldn't change, they'd just construe events to show just how mighty orks still are - for example this codex quote:

"orkses never lose a battle. if we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. if we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!" - commonly held ork view of warfare.

you could be on to something though. if someone somehow managed to find a way to demoralize a large enough percentage of the ork race, their gestalt psychic link could lead to a 'demoralizing psychic-infection' spreading across their species. and in the vein of 'ever decreasing circles' the ork race could eventually believe themselves not worthy of gork and mork, whereupon their reproduction could slow. given enough time this process could lead to the extinction of the orks.

but it's tricky to demoralize a creature who's entire existance is all about a "good scrap". they love fighting astartes. they really love fighting chaos astartes, they really really love fighting chaos daemons. demoralization through violence wont work: that just makes orks bigger, stronger, and more self assured than ever.

what might work though would be force fields (they would have to be new tech though so that's the imperium out of this one). force fields large enough to encompass a planet (i know that even in 40k that's stretching the bounds of plausible), or failing that simply large enough to cover cities, hives, ships etc. force fields exist in plenty in 40k but none are up to the job of demoralizing orks, because if fields are hammered on enough they can be broken. but if a field could be created that was impervious to ork weaponry (which in itself is almost assuredly improbable) then implentation of such fields would render every ork attempt at a scrap pointless - obviously such fields would have to be distributed across the galaxy and across the races of 40k to truely attempt ork demoralization, but if 'good scraps', or any scraps at al, were taken away from orks then they would start to see their existence as pointless....if it wasn't for the fact that all an ork needs for a good scrap is another ork within range :P

it is a really interesting theory but i think orks are here to stay :)