I cannot find anything in the rules to give me a benchmark for how long a trip via a Warp capable ship takes to travel from one system to another. On Page 325 it says it takes Eight hundred days standard to travel from Scintilla to Malfi. Using that as a guide and looking at the map on page 288-289 it is 18 rectangles away means that to travel each square takes roughly 44.44444 days so a trip to Sepheris Secundus from Scintilla which is 20 squares away would take 888 days which seems a tad long and characters would spend most of their lives travelling and any investigations or leads would well and truly have gone cold by the time they got there.

Do ships travel at different speed in the warp. I know time works differently but is their anything either in the rules or in books that can give me an idea how long a trip should take???

Warp travel isn´t entirely reliable, so the travel time can vary grately, some ships are rumored to take decacdes to get to their destination

Schwarzie said:

I took that to mean that many ships don't use the warp because of the dangers, and are traveling in realspace. Given the unpredictability of the warp, I suppose it could be both.

If everything goes well, a couple days/weeks/months.

If things mess up, from a few seconds to a few thousand years, provided you dont become a space hulk

OK I understand that journey times can vary greatly but by how much?

The time that is given in the book to get the Malfi how does that compare to getting anywhere in the Calixix sector?

I was given to understand whilst the Warp is fickle there are tried and tested routes that can be followed that make the journey comparatively safe. Looking at the more arty map on the inside cover some planets are conected by lightning like lines and some are outlined with small dots. What do these signify?

You travel at the speed of the Plot ;-).

Well, in Gaunt's Ghost they travel up to few month between planets and that is in a war with a slow advancing frontline, so I'd say you travel at least a week between neighboring Planets and in Sector Travel probably takes several month on average. A good Navigator might be able to speed this up.

Also while you can theoretical end up needing several centuries for a weeks journey, under normal conditions travel time probably only fluctuates within a few days, otherwise the Imperium couldn't function.

If you're looking for actual rules for warp travel, I would recomend the ones I found on the Dark Reign website http://www.darkreign40k.com/downloads/gaming-aids/20.html I am using it until rogue Trader comes out. To me it makes the most sense of all the rule sets I've seen and seems to be the most well researched.

Cheers.

This matter has been discussed before, most recently (I believe), here

ebony14 said:

No, they don't travel between systems in real space. There are a number of factors that affect the speed of warp traffic.

1) Quality of the route.

2) Warp storms and other unusual warp phenomena. This is uncommon, but can radically alter the standard travel time.

3) Whether or not you have a Navigator on board. Travel with a Navigator can literally be a hundred times faster than travel without one.

4) How good your Navigator is.

5) How good the ship is.

6) Time flows differently in the Warp. You can be caught up in a warp squall and take a journey that seems to be only a few days, from the travellers' perspective, and end up taking decades real time. This doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Most Chartist vessels, that is to say most commercial transport, don't have Navigators. They move at a crawl through the warp and are generally limited to the safest (not the fastest) routes. They also aren't built for speed. Rogue traders and Naval vessels have Navigators as standard and thus can respond relatively quickly to distress calls and plunge into unexplored areas of the warp with minimal risk.

For a Chartist vessel, making a lightyear a day through the warp is pretty good. An expert Navigator with a fast ship, good routes, and good luck could cross most of the galaxy in a year.

Mithras said:

Thats brilliant. Pretty much what I was after.

Good website too.

Thanks for all the help.

Good to see that people are using the Warp Travel rules I wrote.

I am not a 40K expert by any means, but I just felt that the lack of travel time rules was one of the gaping holes in Dark Heresy, so I did a bit of research and put that together.

I need rules and systems for everything. The whole idea of 'speed of plot' is an abhorent, nightmarish, half hearted cop out.