Yeah you're right Magen, I too doubt that the Eldar have
no written information. They've clearly got a written language. What I was thinking is that it would be unlikely they would have written technical and historical information. If you're race is functionally immortal via reincarnation, has an eidetic memory and can share information psychically (which as we know from Astropaths can reach across the stars), and is so arrogant and sure of their position as unconquerable the simply isn't any need for actually writing stuff down in any medium so people can look at it later
Technically, there's not a massive difference between that idea and the idea of a sort of 'psychic internet'. It's like a psychic internet, where each individual node connection and information repository is simply another eldar. If you need to know something, you just psychically reach out and ask the eldar who has been an expert on that for millennia.
Recorded media is only useful if the information could otherwise be lost somehow. Which considering they're immune from time (reincarnation with memories intact), immune from forgetting (eidetic memories) and immune from invasion (or so they believed) there's no actual motivation to. Perhaps the only ones who did were the mental (although sadly right) doomsayers wandering around shrieking about how the end is nigh, and eccentrics whose obsession led them that way...
These 'great libraries of knowledge' would simply be other eldar who know this stuff
people don't tend to invent stuff that solves a problem they don't have (or rather, only businesses do and then try to convince you that the invented problem is real via advertising...).
Absolutely with you on the idea that there are varied technological developments between the eldar factions (including between craftworlds). I like the countries analogy because while it suggests that they might unify against a foreign aggressor, they're still frequently in competition.
For instance, what do you think would happen if Ulthwe seers predict that if Orks win a particular war 10,000 Ulthwe eldar die and if the Imperium wins then 10,000 Saim Hann eldar die. That sort of conflict which could easily blow up into being a martial one given the stakes is a really interesting situation
I wonder if that sort of thing (perhaps not that direct, or on that scale) happens all the time...
Tons of opportunity for realpolitik there
I like the explanation for slow R&D development there
if it's only really the Bonesingers at the end of their path (or older Eldar who have travelled a number of paths) that do any actual inventive work then their pool of research techs is really rather slim.
Hey, here's an idea. What happens when a Bonesinger gets stuck on their path? Do they just keep bonesinging exactly like they used to...or do they compulsively create one or a few favoured devices over and over and over and over?
If that's the case then there's an even narrower band of research techs sitting inbetween the inexperienced guys and the living factories who obsessively produce nothing but targeting systems for shuriken cannons day-in day-out...
Perhaps it's not as cut and dried as that with bonesinger-exarchs, but if we're taking the idea of an exarch to be someone who is so locked into a singular way of thinking that they cannot escape it and that singular way of thinking is 'make things' then I can see them easily becoming obsessed with making one thing over and over until to them they get it right. Hell, that happens in people...
Does mean they'd still be useful though. If you get a bonesinger get stuck on producing swords, those swords are going to be the best swords in the whole galaxy given that you've got an 800yr old rather intelligent being spending most of his waking hours perfecting how to make them
would nuke genuine imaginitive research that's not to do with swords from him though...
Haha I like the idea that Harlies have all this information and just choose to share it via interpretive dance because it's
funny 
both grimdark and funny
Don't blame you Saim Dann
pretty sure I'll give myself carpal tunnel from typing these out, but hey ho it's interesting
I think you've got it mostly right
conceived Eldar today would be entirely new souls. Pre-Fall, Eldar were able to reincarnate with their memories intact (the fluff suggests through natural birth, but could easily be some technological process that's ill-remembered).
Cloned Eldar I wouldn't imagine would keep their memories, although I do wonder on that actually. If a Haemonculus' cloning tech is based around growing a new eldar around a sliver of another's soul (the payment they take for their services, which I believe is what drives the cloning vats of Commorragh), I wonder if those cloned eldar come into the world with sort of shattered and disjointed memories of their previous owner so to speak...
Also, by and large the craftworlds don't use clones. Either they don't have the technology (it was the Haemonculi who invented it), or they find it so distasteful that they're driven not to use it (would work if it involved chopping someone's soul up and regrowing it as a number of other eldar), or a combination of both such that they know it's possible but don't research it because the methods are just horrible.
Slightly confused by the fact that my Craftworld do use clones
that's more me making it 'their thing' though. In their desperation after an Iyanden-style extinction event they went to the Dark Kin and struck a bargain to replenish their forces via the cloning vats.
I've tailored their whole mindset and history based on that pivotal moment. That sort of change would butterfly effect into a whole host of other societal and psychological changes in the population which I've been having great fun in plotting out what they would likely be
Hence the reason I've made them warlike and belligerent, and don't really care if their soldiers live or die. If you can simply grow more of them, why bother? Coupled with that is the growing idea among my craftworlders that cloned eldar aren't true eldar yet until they've been through this baptism of fire, and a whole sort of underlying backlash against that similar to the real-life slave trade
Stuff to keep my mind from melting at work at least
