I've seen it a few times in a few posts:

"I'm going to birth my ship in the starbord holde..." Etc. As a member of a naval family, I recommend the following link:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_nautical_terms

Read it, learn from it, love it. If you're really jonesing for some space travel talk, grab an old copy of the Bluejacket manual. Think of it like an Uplifting Primer for naval folks.

There was also a list of "spacers terms" over at Anargo that some people threw together. It's not up at the moment, but can be found if people were interested. My favourite will ever remain "chumming the waters," or a reference to how the use of psykers will draw daemons ("sharks") to the waters/warp around a ship...

Kage

Dang it, no edit... I forgot to say thanks for the list. I can feel more "spacers jargon" coming on as I type.

Kage

Thanks for the information, I will have to cram this down my players throats when I get back home.

I mentioned the Bluejacket Manual in my last post, some archaic-looking scans of older versions are available at:

www.bluejackets-manual.com/

It's an ugly site, but the books are pretty cool to look at (and printable, if you need a handout or two).

Itd be cool to modify one of these to be more 40K ish, with diagrams of ships from BFG and information on the imperial navy and what not.

Eh, space has pretty much nothing in common with the sea, you know? Retrofitting nautical terminology is a conceit, really and has probably contributed to all the rubbish "Space as 'Age of Sail' in the stars" science-fiction out there. That said, you can't get further into that genre than Battlefleet Gothic and Rogue Trader spacers are going to be very much in the same tradition...

Age of Sail among the stars, isn't that the game we're discussing here? I'm all for it!

The most enjoyable way to get the nautic jargon going is probably to read Patrick O'Briens 21 books about Captain Aubray and Doctor Maturin back to back a few times Highly recommended.

Oh, by the way, speed, is that in void-knots?

I pointed out that Rogue Trader is exactly that, in many ways, aye. Expanding a little further, some nautical stuff just doesn't carry over, even with that in mind, for example your quip about void-knots actually touches on one of the big differences; scale. All the same, I think some of it can easily be carried over and while it might debatable that it would / will do so in reality, I think it's pretty clear that it probably has in the 40K setting: specifically, I am thinking of terms like "berth", "rating", "boatswain", "hatch" and so on. I think my original post was mostly a knee-jerk response to the tired old memetic error of imaging space vehicles to be "ships in space" with keels, captains and broadsides. That, however, is precisely the WH40K approach and a ton of setting colour behind it, so... ;¬)

Good stuff!

Being from an old naval family myself, I was given a copy of an old Royal Navy Officers Handbook, which, although of WW2 vintage has some words of wisdom right out of the age of sail, especially in regards to naval discipline. I was really struck by the test recommended to ascertain if a seaman is drunk on duty - if he can't do his job, he's drunk, but if he can still do his job regardless of how much he's had to drink, he's not drunk!

Drunk = "incapacitated by drink (alcohol)", so aye, that's the test. This remains the basis for the US "walk the line" test, after all but here in the UK it's an entirely unemotional vapour sensor followed by a blood test (and then a court appearance, ban and loss of job, probably, if you actually are over the limit).

Andy Hoare said:

I like that idea, Andy. It justifies my own assertion that the difference between "drunk" and "inebriated" is the ability to pronounce the word "inebriated"...

Well, inebriate is just the Latinate form of "drunken" so not really, although I like the reasoning. Historically, everyone consumed a lot more alcohol than most people today do or probably realize (however it was also almost always a lot weaker, too), so worrying about people drinking while working would have been very foreign as an idea. In a modern Navy, though, decisions must be taken and interpretations made quickly and they must be the right decisions and interpretations and the person making them might be quite junior; this doesn't leave any room for being a bit 'happy' whilst on duty. On the other hand, my good friend served in the Royal Navy when he was younger and spent a lot of that time drinking, indeed, I gather that the officers preferred to have them out drinking and mostly behaving themselves (sailors have a seedy reputation for a reason, it must be said) rather than on base getting dangerously bored or cooking up schemes.

Although anyone who goes out of a night in the Portsmouth/Gosport area has to be pretty careful of the provosts - they have a habit of assuming anyone a bit tipsy is a seaman, and only checking their actual identity the next morning, when they let them out of the cell...

Anyway, back on topic - that has to have a 40k analogue!

Oh yes! The Provosts! I'd forgotten about them... there's bound to be some fun there, you know?

"I'm the gozzdum Lord-Captain, yuh buzzterd..."

"Sure you are... SIR... you just sleep it off in this nice warm cell with all the other drunken ratings..."