Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-27890440-20160528074640

Slug gunner fan wrote: Kriegsman wrote: Also I don't know what Culture is capable of in the ground (If they even need to use ground forces) The Culture doesn't have a true planetary military, they don't care about planets enough to really bother with one (most of the organic population live on starships, space stations or megastructures). If they actually decided to fight on a planetary surface for whatever reason it'd be done by combat Drones and/or or Special Circumstances agents, who have some pretty crazy equipment available to them like Gelsuits.

When required we've seen the culture use combat hardened drones, knife missiles and the terror inducing thing we see deployed aginst the chelgrians in "use of weapons" amongst many others.

It's not just that they don't care about planets per se (although they don't, at least as far as holdings or assets of their own), it's more that any civilisation that still thought in terms of planets as a resource or fighting conventional ground battles simply wouldn't be an opponent.

We see in use of weapons that SC agents have access to small arms that match titan level firepower and they are considered outdated as a paradigm, not just in the specific.

Frankly a large part of the way the Culture novels are written revolves around the moral questions arising from the use of absolutely overwhelming capabilities and that requires them to be written in a way that the Culture is pretty much unthreatenable so as to remove self preservation as a conflicting motive in most cases.

For those who aren't aware of these books suffice to say there is pretty much nothing in the 40k universe that could threaten the Culture in any arena. Their ships are completely autonomous characters in their own right in many cases individually posessing power beyond the entire IoM and all it's various branches combined. The technology available to their average civilians is WAY beyond anything the eldar, or likely DAoT humans, posess. Their human agents are part of an organisation called Special Circumstances whose personal kit often includes self aware weaponry that could easily annihilate Space Marine legions, Primarch included, without being even put in any credible danger.

Again, this isn't fan wank competition, merely a literary device. The IoM is portrayed as being under constant threat in order for the setting to work. The Culture is portrayed as being largely beyond threat precisely to allow the characters to explore the moral questions raised without being motivated by self interest.