Warp travel is obviously important to the imperium, and I am trying to make it seem so in my game. I've come up with a couple of thoughts to do this, I wanted to hear some of your thoughts and to see how this lines up with the canon.

First, tracking ships through the warp.

When a ship shifts to warp space I assume that there is a certain amount of latent energy (of some sort) left behind in real space to signify this. I also assume that the energy would slowly fade over time. Given these two facts a ship with the proper sensors could determine how long someone had left the system.

I am also assume that a ship could follow another vessel through the warp. This should be extremely difficult, and even dangerous due to the volatile nature of the warp. The ship would have to stay very close to its target and constantly make challenging if not hellish sensor sweeps to keep track of it. On the other hand I think it would be easier to stay under the radar due to the fact that the same checks would have to be made to find them.

Second, hauling things through the warp.

The hermitage space station was dragged through the warp to its current location. I'm assuming this means that any vessel or station (heck even asteroids if desired) can be hauled behind a vessel in the warp. The Trader would need specialized equipment (stabilizers for the cargo, powerful void tethers, and strong anchor plates for the tethers). With the right tools they should be able to haul things through the warp. The drawbacks would be that smaller ships would suffer a significant strain on their engine initially and their maneuverability would be almost nill.

For anything difficult to do with the warp, it should certainly involve a navigator.

Navigator Power, Tracks in the Stars.

Depends on the size of the thing you want to transport, I guess. A Ramilies takes like eight ships and seventeen senior navigators to transport.

mwagner626 said:

It's described in the novel Farseer as a Probability Wake, and I've imagined it since then as an uncontrolled expulsion of warp energy that 'leaks' past a ship translating into or out of the warp (imagine equivalent to a Psychic Phenomena - which in itself is an uncontrolled expulsion of warp energy - but over a much larger area... it's one of many reasons why it's dangerous to translate near a planet). Detecting them is the biggest sign that a vessel has entered or left a system (except in the case of the Eldar - entering or leaving the Webway leaves no Probability Wake and thus cannot be detected in this way)... but I don't see it as being particularly viable to track a vessel using it - sure, you can tell that they've arrived or departed by its presence, but tracking it within the Warp requires a mastery of subtler senses, talents typically possessed only by Navigators.

That's make for another half-decent reason you can't/shouldn't drop out of warp in the middle of a system. The immaterium miasma that leaks out could mess with the populace of the local planets, causing nightmares at a best case, inciting riots at the worst.

I completely forgot about trails in the stars. That is the answer to my tracking questions, I knew there was probably a way already in the rules.

So to tow a space station it takes multiple ships? that makes sense. Though to tow another ship I'm thinking it would only take one, kinda like tug boats towing large ships. Though it should cut their speed down to 1/2, or maybe 1/3 in warp, and probably down to just their speed bonus in void travel.