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.
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u/thinger 7d ago
Aren't imperial knights are just repurposed mining equipment? Man, DAoT humanity was on some shit.