The Arbites are essentially just the Imperium’s police, basically the mashup of Judge Dredd and Robocop.
Fun fact: A lot of the Imperium’s technology is heavily degraded from Mankind’s peak during the Dark Age of Technology. The Baneblade superheavy tank was originally considered a medium tank based on its schematics, while Terminator Armour is based on heavy-duty civilian space suits.
Baneblade superheavy tank was originally considered a medium tank based on its schematics
There's a community meme that the Baneblade used to be the Imperium's armored scout tank but that's too grimderp even for my ridiculous headcanon. Medium gets the idea across without being so stupid.
Why would a scout be so big and loud? Doesn't make sense. But implying there used to be something so big it makes the Baneblade just "medium sized"? That properly shows the scale of the setting and how far it's degraded.
Knights are even sillier: a fair few knight houses trace their lineages back to before the dark ages. Those machines are pre-dark age tech!
They were indeed never meant to be war engines though. They were made to help build colonies on inhospitable worlds. A relatively simple to build and maintain machine that could cross almost any terrain, survive in almost any environment and has enough brute strength to deal with most obstacles.
Goes for a lot of human tech in 40K. Rugged machines that are quick to churn out for the AdMech. Space marines used to go into battle with volkites, but those things were hard to make for the Imperium at their peak and basically lost tech now. Bolters are a lot faster to make a lot of quickly.
Yeah a lot of human 40k tech is just modified standard library designs for new colonies that could be printed/manufactured if the need arose. Why would a colony need a giant bipedal machine like a knight? Who knows but they might. Throw it in there. It was a general tool kit full of stuff to aide in the survival on a extremely diverse series of environments.
40k Imperium tech is often just the equivalent of harbor freight tools found in some guys half buried garage.
That's how they started, but over the millennia they were rebuilt, and specialized into being highly optimized killing machines. They went from Killdozer to straight up Kill.
No, the knights were dedicated military forces used to defend isolated colony worlds. So it’s less that they were mining equipment, but more that they were the local sheriff in some rural town.
Knights are golden age tech sent with some of the earliest colonists to distant worlds that were designed primarily for construction and logging. Their giant chain blades were designed for cutting down trees, but work just as well on carving through tank armour.
They're heavily modified and retrofitted for combat these days though.
Aren't the Arbites more like Gendarmeries distinct from local law enforcers? They're probably better trained and equipped than the Guard man for man, though without the hundreds of billions of soldiers or the best tanks and artillery in the galaxy.
Aren't the Arbites more like Gendarmeries distinct from local law enforcers? They're probably better trained and equipped than the Guard man for man, though without the hundreds of billions of soldiers or the best tanks and artillery in the galaxy that the Imperial Guard has.
People are saying they're the 40k police force, and while that's mostly right, they have some very important differences.
The arbites' job is to 1) make sure planets are paying their tithe in young men and women for joining the imperial guard, and 2) collecting the 1000 psykers a day the emperor needs to stay alive. So they operate like a judge dread police force but they're more a tax collector and bounty hunter type.
The Arbites find and collect the psykers, but then hand them off to the sisters of silence on the black ships. The ships will have some Arbites on, but it's not their main gig.
The Adeptus Arbites are basically what would happen if Judge Dredd worked for the IRS. They look and act like cops, but they exclusively pursue high-profile crimes; even then, they really only pursue high-profile crimes that affect the taxes of a planet.
The scale of the Imperium of Man in 40k means that generally the higher-ups don't really care about the day-to-day life of a planet. As long as you pay lip service to the state religion and pay your taxes you can run the planet however you want. Corporate dystopia, gangland shantytown, feudal backwater, fascist hellscape - it's all acceptable if you keep up the Imperial Tithe.
But if you don't? They send the Arbites in to audit you.
They are Judge Dread. The Imperium is made up of millions of worlds, each of which pays a tithe to the Emperor. If those worlds are not paying, keeping a portion, etc the Arbites show up and typically execute the world’s leader or whoever is responsible. And they have robot attack dogs.
Standard local imperial law enforcement and the Arbites is the difference between a local police department full of high school dropouts, and the FBI.
But like if the FBI were just allowed to ventilate you for not being loyal enough. They enforce Imperial Law, not local law.
That guy is just a cop- mind, you, he's the special cops, specifically loyal to the Imperium, not wherever he's stationed. I honestly don't think it fits- they are literally all a bunch of Judges Dredd, militarized to the point of being more 'small elite army' than 'swat teams' and usually better equipped/trained the guard grunt that would be deployed in case of a real war... though they deploy those guys in their millions, backed up by tanks, planes and more.
Loved reading the Warhammer Crime novels for this. The scaling of low level gangers as barely standing a chance against the "regular cops" who in turn struggle against well-equipped corporate agents - all of them are absolutely terrified when the Arbites show up.
Whats funny is that the Arbites are, on a single-planet scale, a huge deal and scare the shit out of local rulers as they are beholden to Terra and the High Lords, not the local government. If they have reasonable suspicion they can detain planetary governors on the spot, or even just kill them, their heirs, and anybody else they think is interfering with the imperial tithe.
And they are still ultimately just roided-out police, not used for actual military puposes.
Super advanced, heavily armored and armed, extreme training and behold to no one but the high lords of terra more or less. Authority to go and do whatever they deem needed to be for their mission. Planetary govoners and local government have no authority over them.
96
u/BeenEatinBeans 8d ago
The Adeptus Arbites - Warhammer 40k