Mith wrote:
A point on Imperium industry; there aren't many new ships. Most are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. These ships require decades to centuries to build--assuming the people have the ability to make such ships at all. This supports the idea that these ships take a great deal of time to make.
That doesn't speak well for Imperium industry capabilities. The book however, does confirm multi-kilometer length starships, so that is something.
I suppose one could always find exceptions to the build rates, but when you picture in the FTL speeds, even an exceptional ship building rate doesn't mean a large fleet can be amassed in one random point of the IoM's territory easily.
This also fits with the relatively minor number of warships locked in battles which are still depicted as epic nonetheless.
An instance of a terrawatt weapon being mentioned. For those who are wondering, a terrawatt is equal to roughly 2.4 kilotons of energy per second. Well no doubt the fanboys would argue that's a vague claim and that terrawatt could mean anything, right?
Well I guess it could be said, for this very quote, that the TW beam weapons could be point defense beam weapons, even if it's said to be part of a ship's broadside. You do find plenty of anti-bomber and anti-missile stuff on the sides of a ship.
On another hand, the quote could also mean the larger weapons are in the TW range, so much that for the largest ships which boast dozens upon dozens of turrets on their flanks, they could easily bring multi-petawatts per broadsides, if you run with something like 800~999 TW per beam weapon.
Regarding the first option, the idea that the TW beam weapons are PD guns is busted by the following quote you presented, where it's made clear that kilotonne-level warheads are used against other warships to "roast" them with "high-intensity energy".
I'd say that globally, it totally fits with all the calculations and interpretations I went through went correcting Connor's wank.
In a way, if the weapons are worth a few TW/TJ, it could even make the gigawatt references valid. It certainly fits with the figures I got about the Eldar ships gathering solar energy with their sails (they'd get terajoules of gathered energy obtained after a while).
As another example, it fits with the crater seen by Horst at the beginning of "Shadow Point" (Orsai recently attempted to dismiss it, and it was frankly absurd, I'll have to cover that in the "Shadow Point" thread as part of my foolproof list of arguments).
Etc.
Surely, with such yields, the Nova cannons cannot be anything
but esoteric mass lightening tech. Even the 5000 kps versions.
What's also interesting is that despite the beached whale speeds, they still need to spray and pray in order to inflict damage.
Also note that these weapons require crews of dozens to hundreds to operate. Clearly a sign of advanced technology and combat doctrine...
Well it's not totally insane that for the heavier weapons, you'd need hundreds of people on them. A lance turret is, as said, a magnificent weapon that's powered by multiple energy projectors. The size of damage control crews necessary for a single lance could be that high. Obviously, they don't seem to fancy automated systems much. This reminds me of "
Execution Hour", where plenty of systems have to be shut down to allow computers (logic engines) enough power to calculate interception trajectories against missiles... and the results still were relatively mediocre in the end.
Travel time between Earth and Luna in an hour? Yikes. Alright, .25c will cover that distance in approximately 5.38 seconds. Imperium STL is roughly 669.1x slower than what an UFP ships tend to travel on average, and is far slower than Voyager's canonically stated STL speed of .8c. The Imperium moves at what is suggested to be around .037c. They wouldn't even hope to coming close to hitting most popular sci-fi ships, let alone one fighting at FTL speeds.
In case you're wondering, I checked on the point of it taking about two weeks to reaching Sol from Terra, and at 250,000 miles an hour with a distance of 93 million miles, it would take them 372 hours--or 15.5 days, just over two weeks time. Right where the quote suggests. Compared to .25c, the Enterprise could complete the journey in .556 hours. In other words, in about the same time it takes for an Imperium ship to cross the distance between Terra and Luna, the Enterprise can make a round tripe from Sol to Earth. Less if they push their engines.
I'm not surprised. Rogue Trader has established starship accelerations to a very few gees before.
Reminds me of the
Ships of the Gothic Sector's section about Low Orbit Defences, which points out that missiles can't reach beyond low orbit because at that point their fuel is gone and they're rendered impotent.
Asteroid fields, gravity tides, ice rings, and nebula are confirmed to be potential threats to ships--enough that they should be avoided or exploited.
Well, "Nightbringer" sort of hints at that, with the case of the large asteroids being a danger to a capital ship. True, information is scant in that book, but we can get an idea of what happened. For example, we know that the people on the bridge could see the two slowly spinning asteroids ahead, and could watch them slide past the IoM warship. Dialogue alone by the pilot requires several seconds to pass, and since this place is said to be a maze and takes like six hours to cross, I doubt the LOS was that good. What I mean is that it would have been hard to see the two large asteroids that easily in a field described as a maze, if they had not been very close to them to begin with. Plus, if they had been rushing through the field, characters would have not had enough time to voice their thoughts before the asteroids had already been far behind them. The fact that the two asteroids could be seen and even identified as two masses slowly spinning means that they were not dots either. So characters see them rather closely when the description begins, and those asteroids remain in sigh of the crew for quite some time. It's largely implying a crawling pace.
Those two asteroids also are called rocks twice, once by the author I think, and another time by one of the guys on the bridge.
Orsai dismissed it since he argued that we couldn't guess the speed, nor the composition of the asteroid, he attempted to provide humourous examples in order to make look complicated something that is statistically simple, especially in light of Occam's razor.
The Imperium has sketchy control of the space around systems they control. Ie, they don't truly own it, though one would guess that an invasion force would be met with the traditional show of force.
If it gets there in time. Remember that in general, Aether FTL engines can only be activated on the fringes of star systems.
While this makes the ships in WH40K quite vulnerable, game wise it adds a fantastic layer of strategy. Such rules would rock in a game like "Sins of a Solar Empire" where ships FTL out in orbit of planets, which gets quite old after a while, no matter the extensions.
Also a note; travel between systems can take months or years. Clearly not something that allows them to easily move across the galaxy within months.
Apologies for the crude display of the table, but it's very useful. Remember, one day on this chart is equal to 12 days in the warp on average, though as noted, this isn't set in stone.
According to this chart, it takes 30-60 days in the Warp to cross 200 light years as per an Imperial Sector using accurate information and known warp routes (note that they do apparently make routes...interesting). That translates to 360-720 days within real space.
In other words, their top optimal speed is .555555556 light years a day, or roughly 202.79c! The Voyager technical manuel suggests Voyager's FTL speed is 392c and the show suggests that the ship can mantain roughly 1000c (probably just above that actually) for decades even cut off from home. In a less hospitable scenario, that falls down to 101.389c, almost a fourth of Voyager's suggested average FTL speed from the TM and almost ten times slower than their average speed shown in the series.
It should be noted though, that this is about playing characters who may be on the fringe of the Imperium--in other words, farther from the Astronomicon. Given this, I would suggest that the farther reaches of the Imperium are limited to roughly 100-200c, while closer to Holy Terra, the speed can vary from roughly 6,000c to 12,000c.
Mmm... that's even slower than the speed chart from "
Space Fleet".
Not the time dilation ratio, but the real time durations, where it takes between 5 real months and 3 real years to cover 5000 LY.
With the SF chart, 200 LY takes between 6 and 36 days (depending on if you use the low and high end durations for 50 LY and multiply them by 4), or 6 and 42 days (by using the durations for 100 LY and doubling them to extrapolate for 200 LY).
The decades long trips "beyond the bounds of the Imperium, where the fire of civilization are even further apart" are best explained by the Astronomican's light being faint. But decades nonetheless, with still some help from the glutton Emperor's guidance.
Now, the ratios in "Space Fleet" are quite flexible. The lower ratios (when there's less distortion) can be about 2 minutes in Warp = ~43 minutes in realspace (the lower time dilation ratio therefore being around 1:25.5), and increases to around 6 minutes for 4.5 hours (270 minutes in real space) if there are greater time distortions, giving us a ratio of 1:45, for maximum time dilation. We understand that these numbers are typical cases; that is, empirically backed up.
Most obviously, outliers such as ships arriving absurdly late after a battle or going back in time don't fit there. Equally, cases of warp calmness are completely left out, so much that anything better than 1:25.5 isn't taken as a conservative information.
With that Space Fleet chart, we notice that there's more time dilation when a ship takes more time in Warp to cover a given distance of real space through the Warp : the slower the ship in the Warp, the more time dilation. This could be because of time dilation phenomena encumbering the ship's path, not only forcing it to zigzag, but also still having it suffer great time dilation effects by having to pass close to those phenomena nonetheless, which implies that they're not avoidable.
Read: some areas of real space have their corresponding Warp area stroke by such turbulence: The ships have to pass through them!
Now, if there were some extreme turbulence in a ship's more or less "direct" path, but that this area of turbulence had nothing to do with departure or arrival, a crew might decide to circumvent it, if there's time to gain there. After all, less time-dilation still means that even spending some more time in the Warp may, in the end, reduce the amount of real space time days that go on.
But the SF chart does not support that idea. Perhaps it is a complete outlier and there just aren't that many solutions. Sometimes, I suppose that there are currents which must be crossed (like sailing ships must cross oceanic currents no matter what), currents which can't be circumvented, and that on the average they are what leads to the figures in the chart, once everything is averaged out.
Considering that the chart covers distances as small as one light year, it could be possible that those currents are either very large, or very numerous and that there are very few occasions to completely bypass them.
Note that further Space Fleet material says that currents are changing. So it would explain the rather fixed "safe" values of the chart.
Now, in this "Rogue Trader" book, the average ratio is about 1:12. No minimum, no maximum. But since there's a room for "much worse" distortion, we could easily meet Space Fleet's greater distortions as presented in the chart. The conflict being that SF's average ratio is between the minimum and maximum speeds, so somewhere between 1:25.5: and 1:40 (and those values change a bit with greater distances), at 1:32.75.
SF's average ratio is therefore 2.73 time greater than RT's.
One important thing to understand hinted at by Space Fleet and confirmed by Rogue Trader is that they tell
you're not gaining anything with greater time dilation. For some reason, absolute speed and distance are "fixed" in the Warp, and captains should clearly try to find the calmer path in order to come as close as possible to the 1:1 ratio, even if it's a total miracle or myth.
For example, for a given distance in the Warp, hopefully representing a given distance in real space, a ship may fly it under calm conditions and waste very little real space time, while a same ship, covering the same path and the same "distance" in the Warp, but under troubled conditions, would actually arrive later at their same destination.
This means ships getting further away from the 1:1 ratio start to lose real-space time, especially when they get stuck around heavy Warp currents, meaning that their crews would clearly aim at
avoiding them by all means.
Funnily enough, if we were to reconcile SF and RT's ratios, with a bit of leeway, considering that SF's ships were of "older" design (the game is clearly an ancestor to Battlefleet Gothic), we may claim that "back then", the Warp was actually
more chaotic.
That would be some...
unconventional thinking, to say the least.
A better way of explaining it would be that their charting of Warp, or their ways of seeing currents, has improved significantly.
Still, in the end, Rogue Trader's FTL speeds are still
more than twice as fast as those from Space Fleet.
Besides, it also reinforces my belief that those 200 x 200 LY sectors aren't adjacent. We already came across that problem some time ago when trying to estimate fleet sizes based on territorial occupation of the galaxy. It's clear that huge gaps between sectors are necessary to make sense of all of that. The concept of "tiny islands" = sectors and oceans/seas = large gaps around sectors, if taken a tad literally, would completely fit this theory.
EDIT: I forgot something about the roads. That's very interesting. I never really understood if the calmness in the warp allowed for faster travel or slower travel in the Warp, like if you could get a "boost". My opinion was that calm regions allowed the ships to travel solely on the sheer power of their FTL engines, and it was slow but reliable. But when getting closer to turmoils, they could, if properly tagging the road, "ride the wave", as exploiting specific currents and considerably increasing their speeds... as well as literally getting themselves lost if they were to be sucked inside the eye of the tornado, or terribly slowed down, even taken backwards in time, if going against the whirlpool's rotation.
That, unfortunately, doesn't work. In SF, there seemingly is a correlation between longer Warp durations for a given (constant) distance and greater time dilation: the more people waste their time in the Warp for a given distance, the
even more real-space time they waste. Thankfully, this is what Rogue Trader went for.
In RT, all speeds seem to be based on the average 1:12 ratio (1 Warp day = 12 Real Space days). The closer one gets to the 1:1 ratio for a given distance, the less real-space time is wasted. Meaning that, for example, to cross the entirety of the Calixis sector, at 1:1, it would still take no less than 30-60 Materium days, or on the fastest side of things, 3.6 H/LY for 200 LY (assuming the sector is round, not square), or a top speed of 2435 c.
So people would try to avoid high time dilation zones in the Warp, which are associated with currents.
When trying to reconcile both sources, we see that according to SF, more time spent in Warp multiplies even more the time that passes in the Materium as the time dilation ratio increases, and in RT the time dilation ratio increases when once navigates through tumultuous regions of the Warp, implying that vast amounts of perhaps unpredictable currents tend to make your ship travel in circles without going nowhere, and times even slows down (as more real-space time goes by).
The fluff between the rules here is intriguing:
The Game master should, however, feel free to vary his ratio as he sees fit and on the most stable warp routes this should be less (even in 1 to 1 parity in some places), and in turbulent areas potentially much worse. Factual accounts of ships arriving at their destination centuries late are thankfully extremely rare, but known (and should never “randomly” occur during the game). There have been accounts of ships that have actually arrived at their destination before they have left!
So let me get this right. When the Immaterium is calm, there's little to no distortion of time: one day spent in the Aether is one day spent in realspace, basically.
As alluded to a few paragraphs earlier, could this affect speeds?
We're entering complete speculation here, and it even appears in slight contradiction with what I pointed out above at first glance, but you'll see that it may not be the case.
What if the astropaths actually seek the places of most spacetime distortion, so much that for one day spent in the Warp, they actually get dragged over a much longer distance in realspace, even if it has made no difference to the crew aboard?
By default, the Warp would always allow to cross greater distances. Ships, after all, only have that much thrust, be it in Warp or real space. The Warp is clearly a place where the real space corresponding volume is sort of folded, so that for the same propulsion, a ship covers more real space through the Warp than by flying directly in real space.
Now, what if currents, even if they actually increase the time dilation ratio and may have a ship get lost, may allow, when masterfully navigated by skilled astropaths, making the ship faster
in the Warp, so much that the gain of speed in the Warp outmatches the loss of relative speed in the Materium (because as time dilation increases, you actually take more real time to cover the distance between A and B)?
Say, you zip 3 times faster along the path through the Warp by using a current which has the side effect of increasing the time dilation ratio from 1:12 to 1:24 (you'd lose twice more Materium days).
Clearly, these unique people
would be looking for anomalies, as long as they'd know what they're doing.
Therefore, the Warp would be best seen as an ocean with its main current (think gulf stream) or a large river, and the turmoil being all those whirlpools sailors would try to avoid, which would mean going left and right in order to avoid them instead of sailing in a straight line (and apparently even zigzagging would still make the ship lose less time than if it suffered the effects of passing through a high time-dilation turbulence). Those whirlpools would, a bit like black holes, be distorting time, and sometimes one ship would even find itself spinning in the wrong direction (going back in time randomly). But in some very rare cases, one could see a pattern in this turmoil and see the extremely rare path that could be used to actually use the sum of the spins to cross the distance faster.
Here's why:
Passage within the Warp/Example Voyage
1 day/Short passage between two close systems by a well-traveled stable warp route
5-10 days/ A journey between systems in the same sub-sector using accurate navigational information
30-60 days/ A journey across the body of a full Imperial Sector (such as Calixis) using accurate information and known warp routes.
100+ days/ A perilous journey across a Segmentum at best speed avoiding only the worst known hazards.
Several years/ An odyssey across the galaxy.
A trip between two close systems, which in general are only separated by a very few light years, takes about one day. That's a calm speed, and is what ship can do by bunny hoping when running without the Astronomican, as seen in Space Fleet, where they can only cross 4~5 LY.
Although it's implied that hazards make ships waste their time, it's not said that their
unique property is to be slowing them down.
I suppose one could actually exploit such hazards, as long as they could be properly mapped, as per the current/whirlpool theory. However, for anyone not knowing their specs, they'd represent such a danger to a ship that it would actually force pilots to slow their crafts down and take complicated routes, because of the uncharted factor, and lose far more time than navigating the calmer regions.
In layman parlance, ships could use a kind of slingshot effect (although it has nothing to do with slingshot effects - disregarding the countless times SF authors miss the meaning of this maneuver btw).
So most of these examples are for stable and relatively calm routes. The extra calm route allows for top speeds. Based on Rogue Trader, since the average ratio is 1 warp day = 12 real space days, and the best ratio is 1:1 (absolute calmness in the Warp), any average FTL speed can only be maxed to be twelve time its average. That would explain the odd FTL speeds we get from time to time which are one order of magnitude greater than usual.
Remember, though, that the SF chart has no ratio akin to 1:1. Simply put, the time spend in Warp is always smaller than the time that goes on in real space, be they taken from the minimum or maximum columns.
EDIT 2 (a late one, sorry): I noticed that those RT durations on the left are for the time spent in the Warp. So the decades long trips are not just about the fringes. An odyssey across the galaxy will take decades in real space, due to the average 1:12 ratio.
As a mean of comparison, Space Fleet has worse distortion ratios, yet covering 1000 LY takes between 1 and 4 days in the Warp only. 1000 LY, that's not inter-system at all. However, there's still room before we may decide to call this an odyssey across the galaxy.
Notice that if we multiply that distance by 100, and thus the flight duration by 100 as well, we find that crossing 100,000 LY would take between 100 and 400 days in the Warp (between 0.274 and 1.095 years), and thus from 30 to 45 times more time in the Materium.
Quite conveniently, we still do find, in the end, that Rogue Trader and Space Fleet agree that it will take decades in real space to cross the galaxy, although Rogue Trader actually points out that things can get "much worse" yet RT's speeds are better on the average.
There's still a kind of disconnect though, because Rogue Trader clearly establishes that the speeds become considerably worse when moving in regions at the fringe of civilization or beyond, while "Space Fleet" doesn't.
More, SF seems to imply slow FTL speeds even when close to the Astronomican (the chart makes for no specific cases closer to Terra), in comparison to what you get when flying through the far reaches of the Imperium and beyond.
Perhaps we could also consider that RT's chart is more relevant to routes close to Terra, explaining the trips of lower time dilation on the average, while the Space Fleet one was a really all encompassing chart.
All in all, we're obviously dealing with a four to five digits FTL speeds at max here in the best conditions, and much worse when moving away from Terra's long ranged influence.
It's also interesting that ships can store up to six months worth of food, or perhaps seven if crammed. That's severely limiting trip durations in Warp. It's possible to stretch those rations over greater periods of time, but at the expense of the crew.
On the best case scenario, this would mean that a fleet movement not putting the crew at risk could only last 6 to 7 months (~180 to 210 days) in the Warp (12 times longer in realspace), and thus fall into the duration range that represents a "perilous journey across a Segmentum at best speed avoiding only the worst known hazards", or a considerably smaller distance when flying with minimal FTL guidance from the Astronomican.
Regarding the first case, we can establish a distance, by taking the average Segmentum crosswidth (although keeping in mind that some of them are oddly shaped). Ultima is best left out, as it would skew the figure: a whole portion of it gets very little light from the Astronomican at all, since the Astronomican's range is 50,000 LY from Terra.
Conveniently enough, it does look like the most distant points of both Segmentum Obscurus and Tempestus are roughly 40,000 LY apart
in each case.
So the complete consumption on a regular basis of the entire stock of food and water would allow a ship to fly for 6~7 months and cover that much distance, using the best speed.
That's about 205 LY per Warp day (or about twelve times more in averaged real time). Ouch, that's
ten times faster than what RT establishes as what can be crossed in 1 Warp day (the smallest distance between two systems shouldn't be smaller than 10~15 LY, really). Thankfully, it was identified as "perilous journey across a Segmentum at best speed avoiding only the worst known hazards", meaning that it's neither average nor conservative. And guess what, that ten times factor is almost what you get between the 1:1 top of the pop ratio and the average 1:12 one. Heck, it would mean that in fact, the best known path bring you to a ratio of 1:1.2, not 1:1.
It seems to imply that these trips are possible, but extremely rare, when one astropath can avoid nearly all known problematic currents and anomalies even on such long distances. This would most likely require a perfect collaboration of all sectors on that path and a constant chart updating. A thing that I don't think the universe is well known for.
So it remains as nothing more than some hypothetical
best case scenario because it would therefore take between slightly over one year and roughly 1.5 year to cover the entire galactic width. Yet we know it takes several years in the Warp, say two to three to begin with, to complete "an odyssey across the galaxy."
So the distance covered in half a Warp year would likely be inferior, perhaps twice as short.
Obviously, "across" isn't absolute. It just means a trip that covers a large pan of the galaxy, more than a segmentum.
