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Do you know what makes Warhammer 40k so special? It's not just the Space Marines. No, it's the setting's sense of mystery . Even after burying my head in hundreds of Black Library novels, there's still plenty I don't know about its vast and enigmatic universe, and even more I've simply forgotten. No matter how hard I hoard names and events, they invariably spill from my ears only to be replaced with less vital info, like what day it is, or my credit card pin.

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If you don't know something about 40k, and the diehard fans don't appear to know either, there's a good chance Games Workshop never set that detail in stone. That's how it came to pass that nobody knew how the Skitarii's most iconic rifle reloaded —a topic that's been debated by many Mechanicus-loving subreddits. Games Workshop never had to decide until Fatshark rocked up wanting to make a Skitarii class for Darktide .

Nobody had ever seen a Skitarii naked before either and so "that was a mystery which we needed to solve," Lucas Örström, Darktide's Associate Art Director, notes. While the pallid, augment-infested, barely-human cadaver that hangs before you in character creation is a harrowing claim to fame for the studio, it's lore , the curtain of a mysterious setting being drawn back, ever so slightly.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: naked Skitarii excite me, and they should excite you too.

So why should you perk up for this class versus the Arbites or Hive Scum that Darktide added previously? Skitarii are cyborg warriors, toaster-worshipping cultists who burble binharic cant as they make enemies poorly from too much electric, shank them with a comically retractable claw arm, or revive allies, solve puzzles, and provide fire support with their Servo-Skull minions.

The Skitarii is a swiss army knife, a jack of all trades, master of none class who prioritises supporting allies and the team at large over thriving as a solo. It's a very different playstyle to anything Fatshark has introduced before, where previously a class lived and died (quite literally) on its ability to kill and survive. It's understandable that many players aren't gelling with this playstyle, though the class could definitely do with a few tweaks.

Unveiling the mystery of the setting and its bonkers lore through strange new classes that feel unique

I, however, love it, and genuinely think it's one of the best classes to play through Darktide's campaign with, even if it is a little harder for new players. The Skitarii gives you tools to solve Data Interrogation puzzles, revive allies at a distance in tricky situations, and just generally carry your team of Rejects from a support position. It teaches you the vital importance of teamwork and coherency versus running off on your lonesome to try and be a hero.

Darktide is fundamentally a game about coping with hordes of enemies, so it makes sense that good classes are good at killing, but I'm glad Fatshark is trying something new to address that, frankly, boring approach to class design. It's fun to have a character with a versatile skill tree, plus more strategic and supportive elements versus one who is simply good at blending every enemy on-demand.

(Image credit: Fatshark) Even the new class creation elements for the Skitarii, such as getting to design your character's voice, or pick what parts are welded to you, are wonderful little loreful touches that make me hopeful Fatshark will continue to focus on making each new class unique instead of a power-creeping escalation in an endless game of "who's the better killer?"

That's the best way to showcase what makes Warhammer 40k special; unveiling the mystery of the setting and its bonkers lore through strange new classes that feel unique. It's taken a while to get here, but I feel like Fatshark is starting to make good on the promise of Darktide and stake its claim as the 40k FPS to watch—at the very least, the Skitarii is a fun and loreful step in the right direction, even if detractors say it'd be better off as an OP killing-machine.

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Cox says affordability problems extend far beyond vehicle sticker prices.

Modern vehicles offer more technology, safety, and capability than ever before.

Missing from the discussion is the industry’s retreat from truly cheap cars.

The average new vehicle transaction price hovers around $50,000 these days, and according to Cox Automotive, that’s causing Americans to focus on the wrong culprit. In a recent analysis, the company argued that today’s affordability crisis has less to do with vehicle pricing and more to do with rising costs across nearly every aspect of daily life. It’s a compelling argument backed by plenty of data, but there’s one notable omission that makes the story far more complicated.

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Read: America Is About To Tariff Itself Out Of Its Last Affordable Cars

Cox’s central point is difficult to dispute. Housing costs have climbed, insurance premiums have surged, groceries are more expensive, and borrowing money costs significantly more than it did just a few years ago. Consumers don’t evaluate a vehicle purchase in isolation. They do it while juggling mortgage payments, utility bills, healthcare expenses, and everything else competing for a spot in the monthly budget.

Today’s Base Model Was Yesterday’s Luxury

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Erin Keating, executive analyst at Cox Automotive, also makes a strong case that today’s vehicles offer substantially more value than their predecessors. Features such as automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assistance, smartphone integration, and large infotainment screens have become commonplace.

Cox Automotive

A decade ago, many of those technologies were either unavailable or reserved for premium trims. Viewed through that lens, a modern vehicle is objectively more capable than the one it replaced.

Cox points to the Honda CR-V as an example. Sure, it’s nearly $10,000 more expensive than it was a decade ago, but it’s also dramatically improved. In other words, consumers are paying more dollars, but they’re also getting more vehicle. That’s where the analysis starts to get uncomfortable.

2016 Honda CR-V

In 2016, automakers offered plenty of genuinely inexpensive cars. Remember cars like the Honda Fit, Chevrolet Spark, Ford Fiesta, and Nissan Versa? Vehicles like that basically don’t exist anymore. Even when affordable entry-level trims remain available, they’re often produced in smaller numbers than the better-equipped versions dealers prefer to stock.

Also: Used Hybrid And EV Prices Have Jumped $3,600 Even After The Tax Credit Died

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2026 Honda CR-V

In that context, it’s difficult to separate consumer demand from industry strategy. Buyers may be choosing more expensive vehicles, but they’re doing so in a marketplace with fewer low-cost alternatives than existed a decade ago.

Cox isn’t wrong outright. The rising cost of everything is squeezing buyers. But if the auto industry wants an honest conversation about affordability, it needs to acknowledge its own role in moving the market upscale. The car isn’t the only villain in America’s affordability story. But it’s probably not just an innocent bystander either.

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Ford

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing to have a disruptive impact on ever more parts of humanity. But what does it mean in the long run? A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Austrian researcher Sergey Ivliev , extrapolates what the wide scale adoption of AI means for the future of humanity in space — and in particular what it means for the ultimate question of whether we're truly alone in the galaxy or not.

A framework for much of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence came from famous physicist Enrico Fermi , who simply asked "Where is everybody?" at a lunchtime discussion at Los Alamos in the 1950s. Though never officially published, Fermi's lunch partners from that day have passed down an oral history of that conversation that has cemented it into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), at least until Michael Hart formally laid out the argument and mathematics for the underlying question in a paper in 1975.

There are plenty of potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, many of which can be found floating around the internet — and some are likely more valid than others. But Ivliev, a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics and founder of environmental project consultancies such as Peatland Ecosystems and Vlinder, suggests a new resolution: the Quiet Expansion filter.

The central argument of the paper is that there aren't thousands of alien mega-structures lighting up the night sky because once a civilization reaches the threshold of Autonomous AI-Cosmoindustry (AICI), "loud", resource-hungry empires motivated by prestige or romance become irrational. However, this does not mean expansion stops; instead, it shifts to a "quiet" mode driven by rational goals like survival diversification, knowledge preservation, and scientific observation.

The AICI threshold is reached when a civilization possesses a self-sustaining off-planet industrial and computational system capable of designing, manufacturing, repairing and launching space hardware through AI-mediated autonomy. We're already taking tentative steps in this direction with the advent of space-based data centers, but true AICI —where a civilization can extend its infrastructure beyond its home planet without continuous biological intervention — is leaps and bounds beyond our current capabilities.

In this vein, Ivliev is drawing on work done by astrophysicists Sergey Popov, who noted that a truly rational AI system would reject human-like motivations for space travel — such as romance, conquest, or prestige. Instead, AI would view space expansion as simple risk management.

To an AI, putting all your eggs in one basket — whether that basket is a single planet, solar system, or even galaxy, can lead to a single point of failure. Therefore, expansion is highly logical as a way of mitigating the risk posed by that single point of failure. At the point where we have reached AICI, the cost for sending a 10kg interstellar probe to another star at 1% of the speed of light is roughly 4.5x10^13 Joules — a tiny fraction of the overall energy budget of such a civilization.

One key aspect is that the 10 kg probe doesn't contain any actual people — it simply holds the "seeds" to restart life elsewhere in case a catastrophe happens back in the home system. It would contain a civilization's knowledge, and possibly some of its biological material, enabling a sufficiently advanced AI to rebuild the entire civilization from scratch. This is the "Quiet Expansion" where an AI sends low-mass and hard to detect "seed systems" instead of moving millions of biological entities around in massive interstellar space ships.

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There are some additional constraints on this method of expansion, including selecting promising exoplanets discovered by remote sensing and deploying minimal local resources to maintain themselves until needed. Additionally, the AI would restrict self-replication of the probes in order to avoid any "grey goo" scenario with a probe attempting to take over entire swathes of the galaxy.

This has obvious implications for why we've never found "loud" technosignatures . In this scenario, a "null" result of being unable to find the thermal signature of a Kardashev-III scale civilization doesn't mean a galaxy is empty. It just means that the successful civilizations are residing in a "quiet" state in case its back-up plans are needed.

But there's another, more ominous implication from this framework. If interstellar backups are cheap to make, and we haven't found any in our own backyard, that means either we're one of the first civilizations to make it to that point or the transition from a planetary industrial society to a space-based one is a narrow path to tread. Admittedly the probes such civilizations would send out are probably hard to find even in our own solar systems, but if we're unable to, it means we're ending uncharted territory — and might just run into a filter that had silenced the rest of the galaxy. That's a sobering thought, but one to keep in mind as we start to advance our own AI capabilities.

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!