During the preparation for a campaign I am currenty running, it occured to me that the players will be highly interested in the possibility of tracking a ship's warp trajectory. Now, the information they will have at their disposal will probably only incude telemetry data composed of the ships local bearing and speed from the ships jump point and, on the off chance, a pict of the ships position and allignment before entering warp (with noticable stars they could use as reference points for Logic , Navigation (Stellar) , Scholastic Lore (Astromancy) and/or Forbidden Lore (Warp) checks).

I keep picturing it as pointing the ship precisely towards your desired destination followed by attempting to traverse trough the Warp in an as straight as possible line,albeit with course corrections depending on warp currents, and with the slightest diferences in th ships initial bearing (in the range of a couple of meters, degrees, radians) leading to vastly different destinations. Assuming that this idea is sound, the mechanic for calculating a trajectory that I had in mind would work, but if not, I have no clue how to approach it. And, unfortunately, my players (as well as me personally) like it when things are elaborated into fine detail.

Now, since I can't really find anything in the fluff that would corroborate my idea, or infact anything that deals with the subject in the necessary detail, my dillema is, is it plausible, with the noted information in hand, to calculate a basic line trajectory of a ship traversing the warp? Or, better still, how is actual warp travel handled fluff wise? Or general-consensus wise? Or how would you handle something like this?

Obviously, any thoughts or observartions are kindly appreciated.

If I remember correctly in RT navigator have special power which gives him ability to track other ships.

I've always pictured warp as pink sea of madness, where you could travel for days and don't move at all if you hit "bad weather". I think that only psyker, navigator or tech-priest with arcane machinery can track other ship in the warp as it is other dimension where rules of physic don't work like in materium

The background of the Calixis Sector established the idea of 'stable warp routes' criss-crossing the sector, making un-Navigated warp travel possible. The 'Olde-Timey' map on the inside covers of all DH hardbacks shows some of these routes. So, one possibility is: if your party knows the ship their quarry is a 'warp-jumper' with no psychic Navigator, they could check astronomical charts to find out what worlds lie along the local warp route and make an educated guess as to their destination.

I've always seen warp travel as part maths part old school sea navigation.

So the entry into the warp is pretty much as you describe, they would need to get into the right position relative to local phenomina (gravity wells etc.) and there would be complex maths involved in making the jump into the warp. These can obviously therefore be investigated in order to help track pretty much as you describe.

In terms of actually inside the warp I've always thought of it like a series of rivers/canals on top of a sea. So when you are traveling you want to stick to the 'known warp routes' (rivers/canals) but these shift, storms happen, and you can be pushed off course ('into the sea'). When you travel through you leave a wake, disturbances, hungry things that change postion to watch you pass etc. that can be used by a skilled navigator to work out if someone has passed this way. I would argue that 'telemetry' inside the warp is a very dangerous thing. Attempting to take actual information from what the ships sensors pick up might be possible but ought to involve some risk.

I would suggest therefore that your players can do the calculations outside of the warp, and can look at the telemetry to help inside the warp but doing so should potentially incur insanity points whilst if they can persuade the navigator to help them he can do it better.

Hope this helps.

Thanks everybody, this certainly helps.

I think I mislead you a bit with my opening post/remark for which I am sorry.

The Acolytes don't actually have any means (aside from the possibility of them formulating an exceptionally cunning plan… con) to acquire the… well, means to track and follow a ship through the warp. They are running a covert op concerning the ship while parallely running an entirely unrelated overt op (to be precise, it's Illumination). They have no direct proof of their Inquisitorial status other than Aristarchus who could technically corroborate that they are Acolytes of another inquisitor on loan to him, but he isn't privy to the nature or even the existance of their covert op, and, more importantly, will most likely be dead by the time they would need him to do that. Besides, the status of Inquisitorial Acolyte doesn't really carry much weight when trying to commandeer a ship, 'tleast in my book. Plus, they are short on cash. Also, they aren't under orders to follow the ship anyhow (though they'll probably whish they had followed it by the time the story unfolds). Now, the importance of this fact can be mitigated by the Accolytes eagerness, but knowing my group, it's highly unlikely that they'll try to follow it.

As such, the question in my first post should have been formulated more clearly, somewhere in the lines "Can an educated individual make a relatively precise educated guess as to the next destination of a ship when in posession of said ship's (more or less) exact telemetry at the moment just prior to it entering the warp."

Having said that, this all was written simply to rectify my mistake for the sake of posterity, since you all managed to figure out what I was going after