I know this topic has been discussed before, but I was wondering how other GMs get around the thorny issue of warp travel in your games? My group is pretty new to the 40k universe, but the maths is starting to unravel! For example, the acolytes just followed a lead to Malfi. In the fluff this is stated as being an 800 day journey, and there are far further extremities of the sector. Now rationalise this with the psyker character having made the journey on the black ships to Terra... it doesn't stack., it's just too darn far. Are there faster warp routes to link certain parts of the Imperium to each other? or am I missing something...

Oh yeah, and the first thing they did after getting off the ship to Malfi was call in 800 days of back pay! They need an Adept just to fill out their expense sheets on a trip like that.

Speaking of 'here we go again' from the old Travel Times via Warp thread at the better site's forums. I suggest ginving it a (re)read before the better FFG site falls apart. :

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From the posted map, that's about a 54,000 light year round trip. Just out of interest, how long would this have taken in the old 'fluff'? Well, from that old 'fluff' we are given to understand that:

T = F*[D/S]

Where T is the travel time (hours), D the distance (light years), and S the "speed" of travel, which varies from 10.4-41.67 light years/hour. F, a factor, is 1 for warp travel time, and varies from 29.22-48.7. Ish.

So, minimum time in the warp would be:

T = 54,000/41.67
T = 54 days

Maximum warp time:

T = 54,000/10.4
T = 216 days

Minimum real time:

T = 29.22 * [54,000/41.67]
T = 1,577 days = 4.3 years

Maximum real time:

T = 48.7 * [54,000/10.4]
T = 10,536 dats = 28.9 years

So, 54-216 days in the warp, while in the outside universe 4.3-28.9 years passes, values which are approximately consistent with the travel times that you mention from the Sanctioned Psyker material from Dark Heresy . That's interesting.

Of course, that's a value that doesn't take into account travel in and out of a system (this used to take around a year for an average ship, but GW seem to have been trying to tinker with this recently), the length of any appropriate stops (potentially months), and so on and so forth. It is also, presumably, for Navigated transit time.

And therein lines another explanation for the increase transit times: the calculated warp jump. Perhaps GW is getting off the fence and actually saying that it is common but much slower than we had previously guestimated. For example, the transit times (above) over sector distances (within 200 light years), then we have 4.8-19.23 hours (warp time) and 5.85-39 days (matterium time). That would mean calculated warp jumps are 20 times slower than Navigated jumps (ish, if the 800 value is correct)...

...That's not too bad.

Kage

Traveller61

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Darth Smeg: Picky, picky, picky! What’s a few thousand light years between friends?!

OK, mea culpa! That’s what I get for posting late at night and trying to use two different maps for my figures.

I have had a second look, this time based only on the map in 5th edition and a quick bit of web research for the distance from Earth to the galactic core.

Distance from Earth to the core = 24,800 light years, I’m taking it as 25,000 as that’s easier to work with.

Distance on the map from Earth to the core = 70mm
Therefore 1 mm on the map = 357.1429 LY

Distance from Earth to the outer marked boundary of the Ultima Segmentum = 136mm = 48571.43 LY

(Ah, not so far out after all )

That gives a revised average warp travel speed of 1.93 (rounded to 2 decimal points) light years per hour.

DW

Wed, 2008 Aug 20, 7:47 PM (CDT)

Subject: Re:Travel Times via Warp

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Hmmn... How does that distance stack up with the old values for a trip of 45,000 light years?

So, minimum time in the warp would be:

T = (45,000/41.67)/24
T = 45 days

Maximum warp time:

T = (45,000/10.4)/24
T = 180 days

Minimum real time:

T = (29.22 * [45,000/41.67])/(24*365.25)
T = 1,314 days = 3.6 years

Maximum real time:

T = (48.7 * [45,000/10.4])/(24*365.25)
T = 8,780 days = 24.1 years

Seems consistent with the old values, more or less. It is just a rather fast trip through the warp, that's all.

Kage

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Wed, 2008 Aug 20, 7:48 PM (CDT)

Can someone post the link to the page/ table Kage referenced in post #2 of that old thread? I can't seem to view in that thread.

thanks!

aethel said:

I believe Kage was refering to something like this (from WHite Dwarf 139):

TIME DISPLACEMENT

.

So, for example, a 100 light year jump will seem to take from 2.5 to 9.5 hours to a spaceship's crew, but between 3 days and 3 weeks will have passed in real space. These times do not include journey times out to and from jump points on the edge of the star systems. It takes from days to weeks of travel at sub-light speeds to reach a drop from the spaceship's starting planet, and a similar time to re-enter the destination system.

The Imperium is approximately 75 thousand light years from edge to edge. A journey of this length would take between 75 and 300 days in warp time, and between 6 years and 40 years real time.

You can find the relivant article online here . (Thanks to Dezmond for the link.)

That, combined with the 200 ly sector metric is fabulously helpful.

And look at those cute little grids in the Calixis sector map!

thanks.

So, we know a Sector is ~200 LY square. We have a map of the Calixis Sector with some nice grid-lines; ignoring the map frame and just looking at the sector borders as drawn, the length of Calixis along its axes is about 85 grid sectors. That makes each grid 2.35 light-years to a side. If you're concerned with any sort of real accuracy, you're screwed because we don't have a 3-D starmap of Calixis, denying us the necessary Y-axis coordinate to do a proper distance calculation. We'll assume they're all in a plane and the map is a "bird's eye view" of the sector. We're also going to have to estimate because the stars are *clearly* not to scale on our map.

Scintilla to Iocanthos = ~17 LY or about ONE AND A HALF hours of warp travel at the slowest speed; during which time no less than 48 hours of real time have passed. It's possible to take up to a week of real time. It's a practically a commuter hop, if it weren't for all the demons and madness

Scintilla to Solomon = ~47 LY, which would be roughly 4.5 hours at slowest speed of 10.4 LY/hour. This trip would take no less than 6 days, and could go for as much as 10 days, of real time. This is flying from NY to LA with a hell of a jetlag to follow.

Going from one corner of the sector to another corner of the sector is 283 LY. THAT'S about 27 hours of warp travel. During which they'd enjoy at least a month of real time passing at your destination.

Does this fit with your plot? If not, you'll need to recalculate any number of assumptions.

Honestly, if you want to make Warp Travel more like sea travel than airline travel, you can make the slowest speed 10.4 LY/day rather than 10.4 LY/hour.

ARRRGH. My kingdom for an edit function!

The 10.4 LY/day figure works for in sector travel, but really screws with the Black Ships and Imperial Navy, who travel inter-Segmentum, rather than just in-sector. One fix might be to make it 10.4 LY/day for Chartists and calculated jumps, and 10.4 LY/hour for Navigators.

cappadocius said:

That sounds awfully fast to me.

cappadocius said:

I'd imagine that speed would also depend on the Warp Drive being used, and the quality of the Navigators. I can't imagine that the major organisations get anything but the best in terms of Navigators, for example. It would be bound up in vast and ancient agreements and traditions with particular Navigator Houses.

There's also another factor I tend to consider, though it isn't necessarily canon (though it has been implied by various sector- and subsector-level star maps) - charted routes and uncharted routes.

A charted route is observed regularly, and as a result of continual use (given the Warp's psychomalleable nature), tends to be relatively stable (as stable as the Warp gets). Chartists and un-navigated ships tend to use these routes primarily, because they're safer. Anyone with enough clout to own their own ship would be able to get access to the required charts, even if that does cost a significant amount of money, and I imagine that the Navis Nobilite are the ones who keep hold of such information (as part of their monopoly on interstellar travel - even if a ship relies on calculated jumps, the captain still needs to secure the raw data for those calculations from a Navis Nobilite representative). Looking at the Calixis Sector maps in the front and back of the rulebook, the lines linking various systems would represent charted routes.

Uncharted routes are more dangerous, and risked only by Navigated ships in situations of great import because of that risk and difficulty, or in situations where no charted routes exist (such as attempts to explore uncharted territories, or sectors once cut off by Warp Storms where the old charted routes may no longer be regonisable or even present). The Warp is more uncertain along these routes, but this uncertainty can result in shorter journeys (with a charted route, the Warp has had order and stability imposed upon it to a degree by the passage of material objects and human minds; this is not the case with an uncharted route), if the ship's Navigator is sufficiently skilled - this is not just because the route is less subject to 'borrowed' material laws (a factor which increases stability but decreases speed), but often because such uncharted routes are not so circuitous as the standard charted routes.

There's also the matter of Aethyric Turbulence - Warp Storms, which will impede or even prevent warp travel through the vicinity and greatly increase the risks involved.

I think Malfi and Scintillia are 800 days of realspace travel. Either that or the warp between them is really wonky.

Remember the warp isn't a mathmatical function, its magic. It relies on currents. The current between Scintilla and earth might be really really fast but between malfi and scintilla its just really slow.

Stratigo said:

If this is realspace travel, as you suggest, then the ships are traveling faster than light. That isn't right either. If the warp connects some parts of realspace better than others, then you need to redraw the shape of the Imperium and ignore relative position. If Terra and Scintilla were in fact 3 weeks apart, and Scintilla and Malfi 800 days apart, then the relationships would utterly change.

I like the 'road less travelled' idea best. The more you travel a route, the more stable it becomes. I think I will ignore the whole 800 days thing, it just seems like a red herring.

When Joss Whedan was asked how quickly the Firefly ship Serenity traveled, his answer was something to the effect of "at the spead of plot".

While it is good to have a basis to determine travel times - especially for npc ships - one should not allow the story to suffer for solid numbers. The warp can be an unpredictable thing and as such travel times can vary based upon how long you need the pcs to take for the story. Don't let yourself be shackled by a chart, if the chart doesn't give you an answer you care for.

Please note that even with the older material that these travel times derive from there is room for interpretation. For example, there is no differentiation between the travel times of Navigated and Calculated warp times. One can therefore argue that the times presented Navigated jumps. For Calculated jumps? Well, just multiply at least the relative travel time in both the matterium and the warp by a factor of 20. Problem solved.

Not so. The values were derived from not only the 'fluff' from WD139/140, but also earlier sources. At least in that earlier period travel times had not changed from the tabulated travel time and the earlier descriptions of how long it would take to warp jump over the Imperium.

The Calculated warp jump offers the way out of this, putting the Navigated warp jump as something special. The exception, rather than the rule. Depending on your view on just how common travel is (or Navigators) this might be appropriate... or not.

Then again, my own interpretative bias slips in here. I believe that Navigators offer a significant strategic advantage to the Imperium. Same as the Astropaths.

This is similar to the premise of the "stable warp pathway" and the chicken-and-egg scenario of whether the warp route occurs because of use, or whether use creates the warp route. It's river-based travel all over again.

For me, though, the question of Charter's is more about economy, but there we go. The term "charter" refers to a binding document, rather than a map. Again, for me.

Although we are also running into a bit of wargame-ism, or the idea that you have to go through one place before you can get to another. Obviously (arguably) the warp allows that the idea of "borders" or "battle lines" to be somewhat... unnecessary?

While the "speed of the plot" argument obviously has some traction, the original background material suggested that the concept of the "average" travel time is not entirely null and void.

Indeed. Exceptions are always great. At the same time, one hopes that the suggestion is not to pull some random figure out of the 'ole bottom because of... laziness?

Kage

My impression of the "Warp Travel" thing is that Navigators are rare, rare enough that every ship does not have them. Thus some ships would have to do warp travel without an "active" pilot. Along warp safe routes, travelled path or Chartered Routes. Also, Navy and Rogue Traders have to have Navigators as they "go off the beaten path" so to speak.

In regards to in system travel time, something that isn't mentioned in 40k Fluff books, but is in alot of Sci-fi stuff is, is the fact of "Jump points" regular places where ships jump in system, and it is possible that, using Blackships as an example, the psyker tithe is taken to a "jump point" (Likely to be a secret one) so the the "blackship" does not have to travel in system, thus cutting the in system travel time for such vessal to a comparative nil.

Just thoughts

Kage2020 said:

I imagine that, given the age of the Imperium, most stable routes will have existed for such a long time that nobody remembers any significance to them. They'd probably, IMO, be the original routes of the Explorators or Crusade fleets (all Navigated ships) as they moved through that area of space, reinforced by supply lines to already-conquered worlds - the path already travelled being the one that people follow for centuries or millennia to come.

Kage2020 said:

Oh, I agree... but interstellar travel requires more than blind faith and luck. This is more an issue where two largely unrelated terms are spelt and pronounced similarly, than anything else. Any ship - with those operated by Chartist captains being the most common - will require some kind of information about the Immaterium along the intended route, whether for his Navigator (if he's lucky and wealthy enough to secure the services of one) or the Astronavigation cogitators of his ship. Star charts - referred to as the Navis Prima in the Inquisitor's Handbook, and the end product of the astrocartographer's craft - would be the primary means of obtaining this information. And, being the Imperial authority on interstellar travel, this information would be obtained through representatives of the Navis Nobilite (if you have a Navigator, then it's just that easy - the Navigator himself secures the star charts from his House as part of his contract... if you rely on calculated jumps, then you have to obtain them seperately).

Kage2020 said:

Of course, but then, the military (having access to skilled Navigators) aren't bound to the standard routes. They might use them for routine voyages - patrols, supply runs, etc - but in situations that demand it, an Imperial Navy, Astartes or other advanced military craft can go direct if needed. Similarly, Orks, Chaos raiders and other warp-capable adversaries won't know (and probably won't use even if they do know, unless they have a target along one of those routes) the stable routes, and will just go by whatever means are most appropriate. Eldar won't even do that - they don't need to, thanks to the Webway.

Stable and mapped routes, then, are a concern primarily for non-military voyages within the Imperium.

Thanks for the ideas everyone, there is some great stuff that I will be using. I think my 'get out' will be the navigator/no navigator disparity to either speed up or slow down the party in the warp- whatever is required by the plot or bad juju. It seems to me that fast travel has to exist for the Imperium to function, and sometimes this mode of travel will be available to the acolytes. They may not be world conquering space marines but they are agents of ordo Calixis, therefore they may well be required to travel around the sector. If they get to Malfi, and the heretics took the capital a year and a half ago then the inquisition doesn't really work, does it?

I think it would be useful if we could compile a table of typical journeys in the Calixis sector, showing travel length, the average time taken as well as cost (from Inq. Handbook), perhaps also showing the most common means of getting there, perhaps detailed with number of jumps, etc.

Eg, for some routes there might be no stable warp-path, and so a high-class transportation with navigator is the only option. This would likely speed things up, and drive the cost up too.

Anyone up for some colaborative effort? I'll see if I can't at least post some example trips with distances sometime today

cappadocius said:

So, I worked with that, but it gives very different results from those gathered from the chart-maps from the start and end covers in the book.

Some slightly geeky measurement and maths explanation:

I used the digital versions of both the chart-maps and the starmap found online.

I then measured the distance between destinations by checking the number of vertical and horizontal pixels between them, and using pythagoras to work out the straigh-line distance (in pixels). I then calculated a value for Light years / pixel by measuring the dimensions of the grid-boxes.

Comparing results from both sources show some inconsistancies (most notably between Iocanthus and 41 Pry, and between Scintilla and Iocanthus), but for most distances the results were fairly consistent.

Using the key from the chart-maps (with their 10x10 Ly grid) I worked out that the dimensions of the grid on the starmap are about 3,5 x 2,5 Ly (The boxes are not square).

Anyway, the results look like this:

Adding the Warp-travel times from the tables provided should be easy, once we've settled on "the right" values for these distances.

Note also that these are the straight-line distances, while the warp-paths on the chart twist and turn. We should estimate a std. value with wihch to inflate these figures to reflect the warp-routes length. This might not be relevant for navigated jumps, though.

I've not looked at the maps, (Perhaps i should) but could those discrepancies be put down to the non-existent Z axis?

(Praying for the day we get a really cool 3d map, like those in you got in the Elite/ Frontier games)

Perhaps, but the actual shape of the galaxy is pretty flat. Sort of like a CD, but with a bulge in the middle.

So even though space is certainly 3 (or more) dimensional, you'll find most stars and their systems distributed on a more-or-less 2D plane. As for the discrepancies I don't mind so much. Mapping these things is a complicated and mystical pursuit, and nobody really understands it anyway

I have a question about the relative speeds of the different craft types in the IH.

From the chart showing the travel times we can expect a range of speeds from various vessels (and/or circumstance) like this:

Effective speed as experienced in the Warp: 9,92 - 41,67 Light Years / Hour
Effective speed as experienced in the real world: 0,21 - 1,49 Light Years / Hour

But can we list the following vessels in order of speed, or do they all traverse the Warp at comparable rates?

Tramp Freighter
Void Jumper
Passenger Ship
Pilgrim Ship
Bulk Transport

Darth Smeg said:

Don't know for certain, but i believe there is such a thing as a Sprint Freighter.

Also, i think i have read something about a Mass to Warp Drive ratio. But that might be me thinking of Elite again...