I am not sure of this topic has been discussed before but I was curious to know the 40k community's thoughts on extra-galactic locations. I am referring to the extended local group beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way Galaxy. There are small globular galaxies closer to Terra then the galactic center just some 25,000 light years away containing an estimated billion stars.

I would imagine that if humanity reached the Eastern Rim they could have easily visited and settled these areas as well. In addition the Halo margins extend nearly a hundred thousand light years themselves.

From the background information the Humans that dominated the Golden Age of technology could have easily went out into those extra galactic locations up to and including the Greater and Lesser Magnalenic Clouds.

Just curious to know everyone’s thoughts as it may open new areas for adventure and plunder.

Ever hear of the Halo Stars? As in where all those nasty xenos Halo Devices come from? The "halo" is the galactic halo. So, there is definitely some contact between the Imperium and the galactic halo, though all the fluff mentions that they are mostly dim, old stars, and very poorly explored.

As for globular clusters and the Magellanic Clouds, there is one problem: There is a whole lot of nothin' between there and here. 40K starships do have a limited range (due to fuel / food / water running low). While humanity has spread across the whole Milky Way, it didn't do so in one big jump. It was more a bunch of little steps, reaching out from existing sectors and going a short ways into the unknown. 25K light years at one jump might be too much.

Oh, duh. I'm forgetting the most obvious limit: the Astronomicon. The light of the Astronomicon doesn't reach the eastern fringes (Terra is in the galactic west) so that puts a hard upper limit on the distance you can safely travel. The halo stars in Segmentum Obscurus (where the Koronus expanse is located) are relatively close to Holy Terra. Perhaps that's the only reason they can be reached at all?

Cheers,

- V.

There's fluff that some Rogue Traders have filled up their ships and headed Out, but nobody has heard from them since.

And, of course, Tyranids originated Out There....

Vandegraffe said:

Humanity colonized the galaxy before the Astronomicon existed. The lack of the astronomicon dosent prevent warp travel, it just makes it much more dangerous. Light-year scale jumps instead of kiloparsec scale jumps. That is the real limit. If it were a week a jump, and 10 Ly per jump, it would take about 300 years to reach the Large Magellanic Cloud.

korjik said:

Yes... far more slowly and far less consistently.

korjik said:

Which is far, far longer than any conventional vessel can sustain its crew.

That's not to say that nobody has tried... but as far as we know, only one being has ventured outside the galaxy and returned to tell of it - Szarekh, the last Silent King of the Necrons, who ventured into intergalactic space over 60 million years ago when the rest of his kind were retreating to the Tomb Worlds after the War in Heaven and the Shattering of the C'Tan... and returned c744.M41 to unite his people against the impending threat of the Tyranids whose hunger threatens to destroy everything the Necrons seek to rule, only to find that they are not as active or awake as he had anticipated.

As far as i'm concerned anything goes when it concerns other galaxys. Tyrranids came from there but for all we know they're being chased out by a great human civilisation there that was founded by colonist from the Dark Age of Technology.

Honestly: i don't think it's to big a leap to assume that humans went to other galaxys and colonised them. Even with the big void in between, the DaoT should have had more then sufficient a level of technology to make it happen. Stasis fields exist for a reason, and we know they had AI so they could have made robot stewards who were checked up on by actual crew that was woken up every so many years.

Or they could have established a bridge of spacestations to act as supply points along the way. Little danger out there and no gravitic mass to tug at it so keeping it in one spot should be relatively easy.

Basically: anything goes :-)

"Back in my day we didn't have no fancy pancy Astronomicon, we just eyeballed it!'

It's entirely possible that STL ships (possibly sleeper/stasis equipped, possibly generation-based, potentially even NAFAL types relying on relativistic time dilation) have colonised the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds) before the Long Night between the GAoT/DAoT and the Great Crusade (that's quite leaving aside the possibility of automated ships/probes fitted with an Abominable Intelligence), but I can pretty much guarantee that no-one from the Imperium of Man has tried it. Well, not that anyone has recorded the attempt, and they certainly haven't come back.

The closest anyone in recorded Imperial history has gotten is probably Lord Solar Macharius, and he was forced to turn back or have his troops mutiny/desert en masse. Interestingly, if you look at Ultima Macharia (the last world he reached and conquered), it's in roughly the right place to make a good final jumping-off point for an expedition to the Large Magellanic Cloud, although any attempt to do so would be limited to 4-5 LY (or at least, best guess on the behalf of the Navigators- I'd be surprised if they made 12-15 LY) jumps the whole way, and in interstellar space, so no easy places to stop and pick up supplies (food, water, air, reaction mass), or to take reliable star fixes for "dead reckoning"/calculated warp jumps.

Assuming you're doing it purely on calculated jumps (ie, without a Navigator), and stopping for a day between each warp jump (no need to cross a solar system to reach the appropriate point in the jump zone) for rest, maintenance and astrogation fixes, and further assuming fastest statistically probable passage time per jump (8.5 hrs subjective), a one-way trip to the Large Magellanic Cloud would take roughly 114 years. You could knock that down to a mere 31 years if you were capable of immediately recalculating and re-entering the Empyrean, but that'd put a ridiculous degree of stress on the ship, let alone the crew, and even assuming no physical, moral or psychological failures over that period (which in itself would be a major miracle), even the most prepared exploratory vessel fitted for the deep void run is going to start running into serious food, disease and morale problems after the second year without resupply.
All things being ideal, the crew will likely be forced to choose between starvation and cannibalism by the sixth year without planetfall, and will run out of fuel for the warp drives by year 15, at the latest (reaction mass for the plasma drives and generatoria would likely run out earlier, unless the ship is fitted to refill from interstellar hydrogen, which would massively increase the journey time).

Needless to say, it'd take much less time with a Navigator, but you'd essentially be looking at Novator, or even Paternoval Heir Apparent-levels of talent to successfully guide a ship that far from the Light of the Astronomican.

I vaguely remember a short story/piece of fluff that said that an ancient Human probe had been sent out of the galaxy towards our closest galactic neighbour. It then arrived some time in the 41st millennium, and the transmissions that came across were in the Ork language. Shortly after, the signal to the probe was lost.

Can't remember where I read that though

Theoretically, it's possible, but there are a lot of problems with actually trying to traverse a gulf of that size in Imperial vessels.

1) Guidance through the Warp and the Astronomicon are big ones. These are actually the easiest to solve, however, for a powerful Rogue Trader dynasty -- get your hands on a Void Abacus. This means cutting deals or simply hiding one from the Navis Nobilite, but since it lets a crew without a Navigator make 5 to 10 day jumps on their own, it's computations should be enough to let a skilled and experience Navigator chart courses through the Warp without the Astronomicon. The deal is, though, that if you're bringing more than one ship, you need more than of a Near Unique tool.

2) Supplies and morale. This is the second hardest part of the trip. You need fuel, food, and water for the years it will take to cross the distance. Fill it with a normal crew in Stasis pods and a Servitor crew to make up for the lack of active crew in the ship. Remember that morale is lost if a crew spends too much time away from planets and the like, and you're going to need most of your room for logistics, so you're going to be running a skeleton crew most of actual people most of the time, while the crew takes shifts in the stasis pods.

Also remember that components can break, especially things like Gellar Fields, so you're going to need redundancies for key components, and replacement components just in case. And that's on top of an Arboretum, extended supply vaults, and other components that simply make the trip possible as well. Then there's the fuel -- you'll need plenty and them some to spare.

3) Building a new civilizations from scratch

This is the hardest part, hands down. You need to be able to defend yourself, find resources, and eventually resupply. You need to transport enough materials to start a colony with a military to ward off attacks, which means finding habitable planets in a completely unknown and uncharted area in the universe, with no possible way of getting back home, and build a new civilization with only the technology you've brought with you.

So you need a Barracks, Murder Servitors, and probably a Launch Bay for bombers/fighters. You also need to Ice Harvesting, Asteroid Mining, and Gas Harvesting Rigs, along with the populace to build a world into a thriving industrial center, which means Tech Priests and Manufactorum components, as well as skilled Agricultural specialists, and all kinds of miners.

All this equipment means you're going to need 2 to 3 Universe-Class Mass Conveyors minimum, since only a ship that size can provide the storage space for everything you'll need. And to be safe, you're going to want to double that, so you have redundancies that won't doom everyone if a single ship is lost. That's without considering the Great Cruiser or 2 you'll want to bring along for defense once you arrive.

Finally, the easiest hurdle to conquer when leaving the Milky Way becomes the hardest once you're there: Warp travel. Unless you brought enough Navigators with you to maintain genetic viability, you're forced to rely on Void Abacus', and unless your Magos-Explorators can replicate Near Unique Dark Age technology, that's precisely what you'll have to have brought with you.

That doesn't solve the lack of an Astronomicon, though. Ironically enough, Astropaths become the largest hitch at this point -- while a Choir of powerful Astropaths could possibly amplify a Beacon to act as a short range Astronomicon that an expert Navigator could use to guide ships to at least nearby star systems, you'd need a network of such choirs spread across the new galaxy to even begin to hope replicating the effects of the Astronomicon, which is going to be very hard without an Emperor to Soul Bind them.

Guess those Tech Priests should get cracking on that Dark Age tech

This is all with perfect conditions among the crew. Someone's going to have to smooth out personality conflicts before they threaten the expedition, and ambitious individuals wanting to boost their own power may threaten vital resources.

As already stated it's where the Tyranids come from. Other than that there's no fluff on it that I know of. I think the Ork thing is fluff that I vaguely recall but I don't remember the probe being an intergalactic probe. I think they've kept it as a hard barrier on purpose. There's a lot to be said narrative wise for having a boundary on the universe. It also allows for new threats.

Oh and Zoats. Zoats come from there too.

There are references in the Badab War books to certain fleet-borne Space Marine Chapters venturing beyond the bounds of the known Galaxy, and occasionally even returning. I think the Novamarines and Carcharadons are mentioned in this context.

One of the possibilities to having a human inhabited globale galaxy is to have a special anomaly or warp gate linking the two (could have a few mysteries).

How would the Humans who have colonised these galaxies respond to imprial citizens.

Of course these galaxies could be where all the squats moved to.

I wonder if two things in this regard.

A. Does, or did, the Eldar Webway extend out there?
B. Are the Chaos Gods present in these other galaxies?

dunno bout the webway, but logically the chaos gods ought to be present, as they reside in the immaterium which is a dimension that runs parallel to our own.

It could be however that the barrier between the two dimensions is a lot thicker there though, meaning they have less sway.

MILLANDSON said:

I remember something on that light though if I'm right (which is far from certain) the probe was crossing the Milky Way from one end to the other rather than moving to another galaxy - and picked ork signals all the time, leading the Adpetus Mechanicus to the depressing conclusion that no matter where you go in the Milky Way, you'll have orks not too far.

Badlapje said:

But there's also no known intelligent life Out There to fuel the growth of the Ruinous Powers and lesser demonic entities. It's entirely possible that Warp Space that far away from anywhere inhabited by sentient life is placid and virtually empty.

Drhoz said:

And, potentially, nigh-impossible to effectively travel through - As I view it, Warp Travel is reliant on currents and tides, regions of aethyric pressure and fluctuating stability, with vessels aligning themselves with particular flows within the Warp that head in the right direction. Regions of wild space, places like the Koronus Expanse, are tempestuous and anarchic, with a Navigator needed to make a jump of any decent duration simply because the stable currents and so forth will change so frequently... the Navigator needs to hop from current to current, detour around areas too dangerous or difficult to safely navigate, and generally be on the ball at all times.

But the Warp outside the galaxy, beyond the howling storms and the warp-echoes of dead civilisations, is still and inert. It has no motion, and no temporal echoes to coast upon, no ripples of cultural consciousness to be buffeted by, no reflections of mortal emotion to sail around. A ship that voyaged into the darkness between galaxies would find itself becalmed, lost upon the sea of souls. Ironically, the same things that make Warp Travel difficult and dangerous are also the things that make it possible in the first place.

i disagree. I see the warp as akin to air and spaceships as akin to planes (or as akin to air and ships). The warp can be travelled through, and if you catch a good current you'll go a lot faster (akin to catching a good backwind when flying in an airplane), just as you'll go slower if you're going against the current. But current or no: you enter with the intention of being propelled by a warp engine. Else you wouldn't be able to traverse a warp route in both directions, which we know we can do. If the air/water/warp is calm, that just means it's entirely up to the engine. And that engine is imo not a sail waiting to catch wind but akin to the internal combustion engine. If it weren't, it wouldn't need power which we know it does need (quite a lot in fact).

Also, who says there's no intelligent life out there? We don't know what's out there. It's the big unknown where anything is possible. It's definitely highly unlikely, but unlikely does not mean impossible. I've said it before and i'll say it again: if it's outside the boundaries of the canon then anything goes. Let your imagination run free. At the very least the other galaxies ought to contain intelligent life. And not all intelligent life uses the warp to get around (them worm thingies supposedly don't for example), just because humanity is reliant on it doesn't mean it's the only way possible.

So, what are you going to put in this "other" galaxy, that would justify the massive effort for the players to get there? If I spent my character's fortune outfitting a ship for inter-galatic travel, and ruined my character's ability to interact with the 40K continuity by enduring millinea of cryogenic sleep, only to discover that the "new" galaxy looks just like the one I left- complete with humans! - my GM would be sporting a Rulebook-shaped dent in his head...

IIRC, before the War in Heaven, the Wrap wasn't a nightmare hell realm. While I may be wrong about that, it's possible that other galaxies aren't as tumltuous as the Milky Way. Though we don't know if the Warp would even exist without life of some sort, especially sentient life, to fill it.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

The warp seems to form sentient creatures from the stuff of our emotions. Potentially that could mean that in another galaxy the creatures that roam the warp are far less malign if the sentient races there don't have such a messed up society and or soul/intellect/flesh spirit