Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-25618639-20150426193759/@comment-6078851-20150430143726

i like the notion of a galactic-scale dyson sphere :)

yeah, no species in 40k would be beyond a type 3, especially since every species is confined to a single galaxy, with the sole exception of tyranids, and so no-one even has access to the energy of other galaxies. type 4 civilisations may exist in the 40k universe, somewhere out there, but are beyond the ability of our races bound to the milky way - i would discount tyranids from being a type 4 since, like the eldar, they're nomadic. and type 5 is for gods, or genuine god-like entities that would make the chaos gods look like 'primordial ooze' :)

i wouldn't say the realm of chaos was a civilisation though, more of a by-product of civilisations: remember, they only began to exist after the old ones broke the immaterium, and their sole source of energy-intake is from sentience, which isn't the most efficient as the loss of that intake will destroy them, so without 'realspace' civilisations they cease to exist. it's definitely possible that the immaterium is universal but the gods aren't - if the immaterium's universal the old ones broke only a tiny portion of a miniscule fragment of an infintesimal speck, and the gods are very much tied to this galaxy and the sentience therein. but for the sake of debate, if they were a civilisation, locally or universal, i would put them at a type 1: as mentioned they have a very poor selection of energy sources - 1. this scale is about the ability to harness all sources of energy, efficiently, and the chaos gods aren't great on this scale. come to think of it though, tyranids don't actually have many sources of energy-intake either - as far as i know they can't harness the ambient power of a star, and they certainly havn't built dyson spheres. i think tyranids have to be downgraded from a potential type 3 to a type 1 :( they are the best at what they do, but they are very limited in where their energy comes from.

but as mentioned, this isn't a great scale to measure 40k by, as everyone will come up short for a variety of reasons, and while there are those on par with type 2's and 3's, on this scale most would end up being a type 1. maybe we should come up with a 40k-civilisation-scale :)