Yes, it’s time for another crazy theory, and this one is getting big! Star Conflict may have a lot of bad press now, but just wait until patch M31 rolls around - team killing enabled, every faction bar the Empire being nerfed to the point of useless, and your account gets banned if you say you’d rather play as Fed.
But how do we know this patch is coming? Because Warhammer 40,000 exists, and it’s our future! How can this be? Let’s look at the evidence.
First, the Warhammer setting describes how, in its ancient and long forgotten past, navigation between star systems was very slow and dangerous. It was not until the Navigator Gene was discovered that true galactic expansion could begin to take place. This brings us to our first point - we don’t know how big the Star Conflict universe is, but it’s likely quite small. Sector Conflict uses the term “Sector” over and over, but unfortunately it has three different sizes - Sector 1337, which is split into Sectors WX-01 to WX-36, and then there are individual Sectors within those Sectors that players fight over. The “battlefield” sectors appear to be cubes of about 50,000 km3. That’s small. Very small, in fact.
To give an idea how small, let’s take the fastest ship in the game - the Recon. At full Microwarp, a Recon can cover 15,000km in about four seconds. That’s 3,500km/s, or 12,600,000km/h. Again, sounds big… but it isn’t.
Let’s consider the distance to Alpha Centauri a moment. How far away is that?
4.11992064 × 1013 kilometres
Where a ship to travel at the top speed of 3,500 kilometres per second non-stop from Earth to Alpha Centauri, it would take 373 years to arrive. That’s an insanely long time, but it does explain why there are 1,000 year old ships like the Hercules still being used by mercenaries in Sector 1337 - it takes far too long to get any replacements.
Even if we shave that horrible time down by making even faster ships, we’re still looking at a setting where space travel is, on a galactic scale, painfully slow going. So how does this link in with Warhammer again? Well, we never did discover where the Navigator Gene came from. Perhaps this is a gift from the Precursors; the ability to reshape the Human Genome and produce a breed of people who can perceive the Warp and allow faster than light travel to take place.
Not convinced? Well how about the fact that Jericho are the Adeptus Mechanicus? That proof enough for you?
Again, for those who don’t follow Warhammer 40,000, the Adeptus Mechanicus worship the Omnissiah - a sort of “God of all technology”. They see technology as sacred, and they quest across the stars to find lost knowledge of a bygone era. They also pack the most advanced technology in all of Humanity.
Now, compare that to Jericho. The Jericho are almost certainly a technocratic religious state, and unquestionably have the most advanced ships in Star Conflict. Wait, what was that? A technocratic religious state? Yes, dear pilots, the Jericho worship technology!
Here’s the proof. The Jericho people came into being sometime after their exile from the Direktorium, which occurred in the 27th century. They were banished on prison ships – vessels intended to fly out into the void for ten years before returning control to their crews. 800 years later, they have succeeded in cannibalising and retrofitting their prisons for mining and industrial processing, locating raw materials, extracting them, processing them, building better tools and machinery and unleashing an upward spiral of design, development and implementation that gives them tech the Empire and Federation can only dream of by their return to known space.
That accomplishment requires a massive amount of drive. It requires singular vision – a people united in thought, purpose and action. As history has shown us, nothing unites a people quite like a wave of religious fanaticism.
But the Mechanicum angle doesn’t end there. Consider the “iconic” image of the Priests of Mars: cybernetically augmented men in robes, often displaying a fondness for the colours red and black. Anyone looked at the Jericho artwork lately? Cybernetticaly augmented humans with a fondness for red and black!
Lastly, consider the most iconic technology of the Adeptus Mechanicus. No, it’s not plasma; it’s shields. From the Inquisitor role-playing game to the Fire Warrior videogame and the God-Machines that dominate the tabletop during a game of Epic, everything the Mechanicus touch seems to be shrouded in shields. One of the reasons for this, on a personal level, is the Techpriests themselves are often quite fragile; the flesh is weak, after all, so they strive to remove the weakness of the physical form as much as possible and replace it with pure, perfect technology.
Look at any Jericho ship, and you’ll see this pattern. Despising the frailty of their starship hulls, the Jericho seek to produce the most powerful shields they can and fit them to everything. Not by accident do all three of Jericho’s primary classes rely on shields as their special module – the Metastable Field Generator grants temporarily invincibility, and the Diffusion Shield and Phase Shield of the Command and Guard respectively both provide massive boosts to standard shield efficiency.
Are we done yet? You wish we were done! We’re going to go back to the war to end all wars, the conflict that shattered the galactic domains of Humanity and brought about the Age of Strife. We’re going for the Golden Men!
Again, some context. The “present” of Warhammer 40,000 is the 41st millennium. Ten millennia before, in M31, the Emperor united Terra and began a Great Crusade to reunite the stars and the lost realms of Man. Even this time period is all but mythical for the people of the Imperium, remembered only by high-ranking officials with access to classified data-vaults.
Yet before that, even less is known. Even the most knowledgeable 40K fan will struggle to tell you more than this: that at some time around the 15th or 20th millennium Humanity, known as the Golden Men, were all but destroyed by a servantile race known as the Iron Men, who are often assumed to be sentient machines. No-one knows the truth of these events, which allows us to postulate that this legendary war, known of only in the most vague of terms, is the cumulation of the Star Conflict setting and the end of its narrative.
Imagine, for a moment, that the Empire and Jericho endure beyond the war for Sector 1337. Imagine they survive for centuries, living side by side for thousands of years. The Empire expands, pushing outward with the aid of Precursor technology and the newly-discovered Navigator Gene. Imagine now that, at their height, Jericho attacks. This race of cyborgs – men who augment themselves to the point where they appear to be men of “Iron” rather than flesh – deals a blow so crippling that the Empire shatters. In the long and bloody war that follows, Jericho is all but lost. Their holdings are isolated and forgotten, with their only sizeable base of operations being Mars, a planet taken from the Empire and held despite Earth’s efforts. In the wake of this long war, the Empire and Jericho are in ruin; neither can claim to be an inter-galactic power now, and the worlds that were once theirs are effectively alone, left to their own devices.
Thus, the Age of Strife begins. Biding his time, the Emperor waits for the dust to settle, for Jericho to wither and die and degrade into a sad, twisted parody of its former self before acting. He rises up again, uniting Earth once more under the Aquila, creating the Imperium of Man.
Want another curious factoid? The Aquila is a golden two-headed eagle. If you were to combine the Empire and Legion icons, you’d notice each has its head facing different directions… producing the Imperial Aquila. Another fun fact? The force the Emperor used to unite Terra were the Thunder Warriors, which were replaced with the Legio Astartes when he started reconquering the galaxy. At the birth of the SC Empire, there was the Legion. At the birth of the Warhammer 40,000 Imperium, there were the Legio. Coincidence? The Emperor doesn’t believe in coincidence!
The last little thorn in this vision is a political one – why would Jericho ever join the Empire? Well… they don’t. The Adeptus Mechanicus might work for the Imperium, but they are autonomous. They are a nation within the Imperium, bonded to them for mutual gain; a bond that doesn’t always work smoothly, and sometimes leads to conflict. Jericho would never bow to the Empire, but if they were beaten down hard enough they may agree to an alliance of convenience to avoid destruction.
So there we have it. Star Conflict may not look like it has much of a story on the outside, but what you see is just the tip of the iceberg; the starting point of a deep and complex universe filled with Daemons, aliens and so much Grimdark they need to invent new shades of black to describe the morality scale it uses.
So remember, pilots; in the grim darkness of Sector 1337, be it in the present or the far future, there is only WAR!
Next week: Sweet rolls cure cancer by causing different cancer! Learn how!
