I understand that travel time in the real world vs the warp is muddy at best, but is there some kind of general time frame it takes to transit from one system to another in the same sector?
Travel Time
Most of your travel time is going to be eaten up reaching a safe jump zone (days to weeks, early fluff put it at months to almost a year). After that it's travel in the warp. There is an old table floating around that gives the typical time experienced by the crew/time elapsed in the real world for a jump of distance x. I basically boils down to 1-6 hours in the warp for 2-4 days in real space on a jump of roughly a parsec (~4 light years, or roughly the distance from Sol to Alpha Centauri). It also gave calculation times for when a starship didn't have a Navigator, so it's probably worth seeking out just for that (I'm hunting through my personal archive to find it, as the site I used to link to for it has died).
More immediately useful, however, would probably be Table 7-2, on p184 of the Rogue Trader core book.
I have heard of fluff(don't have the reference) of a ship traveling back in time arriving before they left.
Table 7-2 (page 184) in the RT core rulebook lists sample durations of travel.
That whole business about a ship arriving before it left does happen, but it is very rare. The only known place in the Expanse where ships have been thrown back in time is Anomaly 616 Theta, which is mentioned twice in Edge of the Abyss, chapter 1.
Time travel adventures can be a major headache for the GM, if you decide to go that route. But, very rewarding if you do it right…
Cheers,
- V.
Im generally under the impression that you travel under the speed of Plot anyways..
This map serves as a good frame of reference:
Awesome map reference—thanks, sketches!
The Navis Primer tramples over this map somewhat, unfortunately. For example it gives the travel time from Footfall to Grace as 90 days: much, much longer than this map would suggest, and Footfall to Burnscour as a mere three days, about ten times quicker than on the map.