Imperial Knights - History: Long before the rise of the Emperor and the birth of the Imperium, during the Age of Technology Humanity reached out to the stars, eager to occupy new worlds and expand its burgeoning interstellar empire.Vast colonisation starships carried eager Human settlers, along with all the resources they might require, and landed on far-flung, often isolated worlds.The first Knight Worlds were founded at the very start of the Age of Technology, when scouts from Terra travelled far through the galaxy seeking planets to use as agricultural worlds to provide food for Mankind's burgeoning population, or as mining colonies to provide the materials needed to fuel their expansion across the stars.Indeed, the Knight Worlds had already been established for thousands of standard years when the Imperium was first founded in the 30th Millennium.When those first Human scout ships discovered a suitable planet for colonisation, gigantic spacecraft were dispatched to settle them. These ships were part of Terra's Long March fleets, named after the duration of their voyage and their destination among the stars.The name was apt; each of the Long March colony starships carried thousands of settlers on a solar decades-long journey to a far distant planet. Upon arrival, the colony ship would land and be immediately cannibalised by the colonists to provide the raw materials needed for their first settlements; there was no hope of return to Mankind's distant homeworld.The struggle for survival on many of these worlds was grim. On some, the settlers found themselves the prey of vicious predators or were attacked by native alien races, which saw the Human settlers as invaders. On other worlds, extreme weather conditions or an unbreathable atmosphere made travel outside of domed habitat-zones next to impossible.However, problems like these had been anticipated, and in order to deal with them, the settlers were supplied with Standard Template Construct (STC) databases and fabrication facilities that allowed them to build powered suits of exoarmour.The pilots of these bipedal walking machines were protected by a hard shell of plasteel and armed with an array of military-grade heavy weapons. The suits proved invaluable: few, if any, natural predators or hostile alien warriors could stand against them, and they could travel through even the most dangerous environment with ease.The towering armoured figures soon became a common sight on the colonies, where they were known as "Knights" by the settlers, after the legendary armoured warriors and protectors of ancient Terran history.Compelled by the mind-altering effects instilled by the Thrones Mechanicum (a control platform that allows a pilot to interface with their Knight battlesuit), over the course of a few generations, these elite warriors gradually developed a society that evolved into the knightly houses.The plasteel plates of the original exo-skeleton suits were slowly replaced with more ornate armour made from adamantium, providing better protection as well as a panoply befitting the wearer's prestige and rank in his society.The more mundane duties that the Knights had once taken part in on the colony worlds -- logging with their mighty Reaper Chainswords, for example, or blasting apart rock ore with their rapid-fire Battle Cannons -- were delegated to those of lesser ranks, allowing the Knights to focus on the arts of war and governorship.Dwelling in tall strongholds, the Nobles strove to protect the lives of their subjects (as they now saw the settlers they protected) and to bring order to the primeval maelstrom on the planets that were their homes.The knightly houses proved to be highly successful at both of these things, and soon became a vital part of Human society during the Age of Technology.