Darth Smeg said:

The thickness of the milky way averages 2000 light years- pretty far from 2D

Bad Birch said:

True, but the Calixis sector is pretty far from galactic core, and will be much thinner than the average value.
Also, 2000 thick is not so much when you consider the 'horizontal' diameter of 100 000

What the hell happened to the copy/paste function?

I can no longer post tables? Did I miss a change somewhere? I can only paste as plaintext.

Ok, so this is what I have so far. The times displayed are based on average speeds from the WD tables, and can vary +/- 60% of the values listed.

Personally, I think these travel times are too low. I like the fact that a trip to Iocanthus takes a few weeks, rather than an hour.
On the other hand, if it takes months of real-time to get anywhere, it makes less sense to ask the Acolytes to travel anywhere on "emergency tasks". Anyone have opinions on this? Perhaps just stick to minimum speeds, that will inflate travel times by 60%, but I still think that is quite fast.

Of course, increasing these values will seriously affect galactic travel. A return trip to Terra takes between 54 and 226 days warp-time, and between 7 and 30 years realtime. Any increase to the times taken will hit these kind of journeys very hard. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how isolated you want Calixis to be

Perhaps the Brazen Sky was a slow vessel? It struck me as an old cargo ship, not a rapid response military. Perhaps you should keep those times (or increase them slightly) for top of the line vessels and inflate them as required for older, run down ships?

Our rules for warp travel were much simpler.

Space travel takes 1d10 days per square on a moderately well-travelled route. Halve this for well-travelled routes. Double it when going off-piste.

That assumes no navigator and the same amount of time passing in reality and the warp (which saves plot problems). I'd probable divide the travel time by 10 if a navigator was present but I always assumed the kinds of merchantmen acolytes hitch lifts with didn't have them.

And, by the way, should acolytes get paid for real time or warp time?

I seem to remember reading warp travel could randomly affect time (forwards or backwards) or was that just warp storms?

While traveling through the warp can in fact result in people arriving before they left, I think these are the exception to the rules.

It just makes no sense that a galactic Imperium is founded on something so unpredictable that there are no "normal" or "within acceptable parameters" values for travel time. How could you possibly hope to supply hive worlds with food if you have completely random travel times?

An aggri world produces food at a more-or-less constant rate, and ships off massive transports of food regularly. Then it all gets warped up, and 10 ships arrive at the same time, then nothing for a decade.

It just won't work

Darth Smeg said:

This is more or less my take on things as well. While the semi-random time factor for travel may work from a narrative POV, it fails for a RPG. Unless you limit your players to a single planet or system, the established warp travel and longer sublight travel times are just game breakers. How much fun would it be for a party to hop on board a transport to another system, only to take 200 years to reach their destination? They'll either be dead, or the whole point of the journey will be gone.

Now this is not to say that warp travel should be instantaneous, or even a short period of hours. But the current scales are just so off, as to make things unwieldy. Nor is it to say that there can't be, or isn't time issues while travelling iin the warp. As efidm points out, the whole economy of the Imperium would collapse if warp travel was that unstable, or subject to such constant whims. Even in the fluff, while ships do disappear, or become hulks, it is relatively uncommon, given the sheer number of vessels, from Imperial Navy to merchants, to Black Arks, to Rogue Traders out there. So, while you may get 1000 disappearances in a year, it's not all that many if you look at the total number of vessels in transit over that year (Millions for sure).

I think your table of speeds is a bloody good stab at this thorny issue, Darth Smeg. It may seem fast, but you can always take it and add a few modifiers depending on Navigator/no navigator, quality of ship, disturbances in the warp, etc. What this gives my players more importantly, is the chance of a 'genuine' race against time, now they know that should they be able to wangle a fast ship, they may get to Tranch in time to stop the ceremony...

I agree about the need for a bit of consistency in the times- communication can't exist without it, and neither can the Imperium.

Look at it another way, if you have an RPG set in contemporary times, the equivalent of space travel may be air travel. The fluff might say that 'occasionally, planes crash', this may never have any impact on your game. On the other hand, you can use the fact that planes crash... i

Bad Birch said:

Thanks, but I merely applied simple maths to the values presented in the table from WD. Most of the "work" was actually measuring distances on those maps.

I would like to list the different transport options available for different journeys, and if possible their differences in speed/travel time. But I must admit I have no clue when it comes to the different ship types and their chartered routes.

Would Bulk Transports only travel between the major trading planets? (Agri worlds to Scintilla and back?)

I suppose the pilgrim ship follow set routes, tracing the steps of Drusus and others. In which case I doubt acolytes could arrange for a little side-trip 50 light years spinwards

Anybody have some thoughts on this? The final table might be somewhat complicated, but it would be nice to look up "Scintilla to Iocanthus" and instantly see distance, types of available transports (including Availability/Frequency), and their average/range of price and travel time.

Stratigo said:

Feel this would be for a 'Chartist' Warp ship. Navigator driven would and should be a lot quicker. Maybe to a factor of 4 or 6.

TS Luikart adressed this "800 days standard" in a thread at the old forums. He basically said it meant 800 days of travel where "you don't use the warp very much".

Of course, it cannot be all non-warp travel, as that would make it all sub light-speed. In 800 days, at less than the speed of light, you would not even make 3 lightyears. Scintilla-Malfi is about 61,5 lightyears, so traveling sublight that would take alot more than 60 years.

The whole "days standard" is probably a glitch. I can't recall seing it used as a unit of measure anywhere else. Even at the slowest pace from the WD charts , you can travel almost 4000 lightyears in 800 days real-time. (That is, the people in the warp would experience less than 17days travel, but would find that 800 days had passed in the real world when they arrive.

Bad Birch said:

Air travel is a good comparison, but it's a bit more than that IMO. It's a combination of modern air travel and 19th century sail travel. To my mind, a ship in the warp is more like a clipper ship on the open sea. This way, you can have a "direct route" travel time, which can be impacted by storms (go through or go around), which can impact arrival times and transit times. Or if you lose your navigational fixes (stars/sun in RW terms, Astronomicon in GW terms), and become "lost." When looking at warp route maps I almost expect to see "Here there be monsters" printed on some sections.

In my game there is only one speed "plot speed".

When I see those old time tables for warp travel my neck starts to ich. We are not playing Traveller, Transhuman Space or any other hardboiled Hard Sci-Fi Setting: we are playing Dark Heresy. I mean... with those speeds, there would be no reason for the Imperium to take sooooooooo long to rediscover and recover all Sectors after the Dark Age and the Horus Heresy, it would take only weeks or months, a few years in the worst cases.

I prefer to think that no game masters around here spends more time calculating the total surface of a Hive in relation to it´s population that working on an interesting plot.

Warp travel takes a lot of time, Hives are huge, Planets are mostly habitable, there are Huge Diferences in Technology from planet to planet, people wear Skulls and Large Pauldrons and there is War Everywhere.

It´s the fluff guys, dont get lost on the warp mindstorm of numbers and heretical science , just enjoy the game.

Ashen Victor said:

Heh, I actually spent some time last week crunching the numbers of Sibellus. It's huuuuge! Described as 8000 km wide at its base. Thats the distance between London, UK and Dhaka, Bangladesh, or from Houston, Texas to Madrid, Spain.

By comparison, North America is only 3,300 KM across coast to coast.

It's surface area is bigger than Europe

Anyway, your point is well taken. But while warp-travel may very well happen with a nod, wink and wave at the speed of plot, some understanding of the dimensions of a hive is necesary. Is a trip between hive districs a few stops on the tram? Or is it more akin to a trans-continental jorney? These things are not self evident until you actually take a look at some numbers or figures.

Darth Smeg said:

OMFG! 8000 km I think I missed those facts... Anyways, my players had to take a 3 hour trip by commuter trains to reach the Coscarla district in "Edge of Darkness". In a following adventure where they had to follow a Logician´s agent back to his masters thay had to embark in the Tarsus Express, a nuclear plasma powered train, that did the trip between hives (with an small stop in Gunmetal) in 16 Hours.

I think, that my point is, that no matter what, a travel in a planet could not take longer than a travel between interstellar systems.