Throne Mechanicum
The Throne Mechanicum is a piece of technology used by Imperial Titans and knights that allows them to be piloted by humans.[1]
Overview
A noble does not drive a knight – they merge with it. Using interface sockets surgically inserted into their brain, the noble is wired into the control platform known as the Throne Mechanicum. Once a pilot is plugged into their knight during the Ritual of Becoming, the Throne allows their thought patterns to control the machine’s movements. In return, the noble receives sensory feedback from the knight, allowing them to move with a fluid grace that only the war machines of the Eldar can best.[1] The technology also translates every impact and wound to the user's mind. Pilot and war machine suffer together – the price to be paid for the purity of action a knight can harness.[3c]
Psychostigmatic feedback will mirror any malfunction or injury suffered by the war machine, sometimes lingering for days depending on the severity of the injury. This causes phantom pain to varying degrees, depending on the severity of the injury, that will follow the pilot even after being disconnected from the war machine and subsiding over time. If a knight's leg gimbal seized up it could cause a pilot to be hamstrung in the same limb, or a lost limb can result in a pilot being unable to move the respective limb for days due to excruciating pain.[3c] The psychostigmatic pressure of a lost limb can even result in the pilot's bones in the respective limb breaking.[3a]
A Noble imprints his own personality upon the Throne Mechanicum – traits that echo and are exaggerated in the machine, often lasting long after the Noble has died. However, the mind-link technology also directly affects the psyche of the Noble himself, implanting strong positive associations with notions of fealty, obligation and hierarchy, as well as a deep respect for the Noble’s ancestors. How such technology works and why it was originally installed remain a mystery, even to this day. It seems most likely that the mind-altering feedback routines were intentionally designed and installed during the Dark Age of Technology – a safeguard feature meant to limit the potential of a pilot to go rogue or turn upon those he was meant to protect.[1]
In order to connect with a Throne or Helm Mechanicum an individual must have an augmetic port at the base of their skull, a pre-frontal cranial cortex, in order to control the suit through this interface.[5] Skitarii have augmetics allowing them to interface with a Throne Mechanicum and pilot a knight. All amongst the Cult Mechanicus know an individual must undergo the Ritual of Becoming to fully integrate with their knight in order to pilot it to its fullest potential. However, if a foreign rider is not of the proper house, they must negotiate with the knight's dataghosts, the last vestiges of all of the pilots who came before, and be judged by the knight's own machine spirit, before the knight will allow itself to be piloted.[4]
See Also
Sources
- 1: Codex: Imperial Knights (7th Edition) — The Throne Mechanicum
- 2: Codex: Imperial Knights (9th Edition), pg. 6
- 3: Dominion Genesis (Novel):
- 4: Imperfect Engines (Short Story)
- 5: Assassinorum: Kingmaker (Novel), Chapter 10
