sonofccn wrote:The Imperium has a loose grip on its empire even with "peak" warp travel. The destruction of the beacon will limite them to a far slower speed and likely increase the voyage of a hypothetical flotilla. A far distant sector goverment, as far away now as Holy Terra once seemed, can hardly make the case against the hive world ten lightyears away who shows up with a handful of now armed transports and hired pirate forces demanding an "imperial tith". They can use an astropath to call for help and wait an unknown time for warships to be dispatched or simply swear fealty to the local boss and spare themselves from being blasted.
Well, the sector government has warships:
The Space Commander has direct command of a portion of the Segmentum's warfleet. A typical command comprises about 50 interstellar ships, although the number would obviously vary depending upon the needs of the sector.
I took that one from the WH40k fluff bible, so I'm forgetting which the exact source is. I think that may be cited in BFG, though, which also tells us that a "typical" [inhabited] sector is a cube 200 light years on a side, more or less. There are a fair number of inconsistencies surrounding this number, such as the fact that it would take a couple million of these sectors to fill the Milky Way.
If I pick two random points out of a 200 LY cube, the "typical" distance will be 2/3 of that, i.e., 133 LY; the capital of the sector is probably somewhere in the interior of the cube, but most worlds will be within 100 LY of the sector capital.
So
if the Imperium looks, locally, like what it is supposed to, then the sector command will be not so terribly distant.
I have a question, if I may. Are the battletech clans getting all of thier worlds and only a tiny fraction will overlap Imperium holdings or is it only worlds that overlap that get transported? That will effect the outcome greatly. Thank you in advance for your patience.
The whole thing. All three thousand (ish) inhabited systems.
Well marines are not stupid, fanatical yes stupid no, and once they reach the first world that is part of the Imperium on thier charts but is full of strange nonbelievers they are going to grasp the magnitude of the problem. They will realize this is more than single chapter can handle and will attempt to form a true crusade. One thing I just thought off, JMS said the warp was evened out within one thousand light-years of Holy Terra. If that "bubble of normalcy" is still in existence when they arrive that will aid their travel. No warp storms=faster travel time.
Well, it's still the mind-bending Warp. It just happens to have been temporarily calmed and cleared out for a moment.
If the Warp is like an ocean, momentarily flattening it and clearing the weather won't last long. The wind will quickly pick up waves, clouds will start to drift back in. They should have relatively clear sailing in the first few years - or possibly even decades, given how slowly things change in WH40k - but it's still sailing out on the open ocean rather than a lake.
Enosh wrote:from what I understand it works like this
warp is like an ocean and the emperor is the biggest lighthouse in it, when you can see it you know where relative to the position of earth you are and where you have to go to reach point X
before the emperor there were a lot of smaller lighthouses, still the same idea, just with a shorter reach, in fact iirc the emperor can't reach certain parts on the edge of the galaxy in the Ultima Segmentum, so there are still beacons somewhere in the space controled by the ultramarines, those small beacons are what alowed humanity to use the same FTL they use now before the emperor
then there is the other version of FTL that is much slower and just alows ships to kinda glide along it but they never actualy go fully into the warp, this is what ships without navigators use (cargo ships etc that only need to travel small distances, there is a limited amount of navigators afterall and not every merchant needs them) and tau use the same princip
in case the emperor is gone the IoM could in theory go back to using the beacons
(this might not all be true since I am talking from memory)
They might remember how to use them, but definitely those beacons would have a much shorter range if they did. There are other things that act as beacons for Chaos, Tyrannids, et cetera:
Chaos Child wrote:There was no star nearby to bend space so that incoming vessels must emerge billions of kilometres short of their goal. A raider might materialize suddenly above the craftworld itself - especially if guided by such a psychic beacon as Eldrad had been obliged to light.
However, these other beacon-like devices only really seem to work as well for people drawing near them.
I think I understand. A ship without a Navigator can't travel out of sight of "land" or it'll get lost, and the crew has no idea how to rig the sails to take advantage of the wind, so they have to paddle. Hence it doesn't even go fully into the Warp. A ship with a Navigator is like a good sailing ship - the Navigator can see, understand, and respond to the conditions of the wind and waves.
However, without a beacon, the Navigator doesn't know if they're on course or not when they're on the open ocean. He has no compass or other bearing, so while he may be able to respond to local conditions, and may be travelling quickly, he'll tend to gradually drift off course, perhaps even going in circles without realizing it.
the biggest problem with the emperor beign gone is the whole "he is the only thing holding the chaos gods back"
The major theme of WH40k being that humanity is in for it, they just haven't quite managed to get wiped out quite yet because they're being tough, mean, and almost as evil as the stuff surrounding them.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Well then it can be really, really fast. What will take them time is circumvent the Warp outside the ocean of quietness, with their usual speeds and limitations. But once inside the BT area, if the top speeds are right, they can cross the entire zone within a short day.
Here I talk about Warp speeds; I looked at three different sources before concluding warp speeds were being inconsistent. The slower speeds are given as 2,000-12,000
c, which would fit with it taking "hours" to travel to Alpha Centauri. The faster speed given was 90,000-365,000
c, which would not be hours. I prefer the lower speed, since the citations accompanying it explain that "apparent" speed from on-board the vessels is in the range of the higher speed estimates given.
The Tau move
sans Navigators, and are frequently cited as one fifth the speed of Imperial vessels. (Supposedly in the Tau Codex, but I'm having trouble finding it there). I would have assumed that's about the typical non-Navigator speed reduction.
WH40k wiki says that the newest Tau vessel moves about 1/3 of the "average" warp speed.
I also note that one of the source pointed out how the Imperium was making it sure the Astartes didn't become too powerful. Well, now that concept is really screwed.
What can BT forces hope to do in space?
Well, what they
can do is travel a fairly consistent ~1500
c on average for long distances, making "instant" jumps of up to 30 light years once a week with commercial and military ships. Reliably and regardless of the condition of the Warp or any beacons.
What they
can't do is fight naval battles with a sector fleet:
- The Clans have 300-500 between them, and the Inner Sphere, I think, doesn't have more than that. I don't think there's any "current" faction that has more than the 50 warships typical of a sector fleet.
- Most of these mass less than a million tons, although a few battleships go up to two million. They're not especially big by WH40k standards - escort sized. A Lunar-class cruiser dwarfs anything in BT.
- They have fusion engines, but no inertial compensators, and accelerate therefore at only a few gravities (at most) during combat, so they don't have a speed advantage.
- They have fairly limited effective ranges; Explorer Corps says that tops out at around 450 km. We're pretty sure WH40k ships have no trouble reaching that far, and a number of references have them shooting further.
- They don't have shields (although they have BT's ridiculous armor, which almost makes up for it) or a firepower advantage - up to kilotons, while WH40k capital ships are providing megatons.
- No inertial compensators means these ships accelerate at most several gravities during combat, so they're not going to have mobility on their side, either.
One typical IoM sector fleet could go toe-to-toe with the entire assembled warship fleet of any BT nation, I should think. Quite possibly all of them; the sector fleet might be outnumbered 10-20:1 in ships and have trouble tracking all the fighters and landing ships flying around, but I think the typical WH40k warship is going to be at least 10x the mass of the typical BT warship, with over 10x the firepower and over 10x the durability.