Travel
Travel and transport in the Dark Millennium varies massively from world to world - though the glittering future humanity dreamed of of gleaming hover-cars has failed to come to pass, the methods of transport around the Imperium are no less exotic, if... unexpected, were one looking at them from a past perspective.
The first and most important lesson to understand about the Imperium is that personal transport ownership tends to be rare. As it is a neo-feudal society, the distribution of wealth means that few individuals possess the personal resources to own a transport, and the tight controls on the production of technology that result from the Adeptus Mechanicus' monopoly on it mean that few worlds can produce anything that resembles the personal transport industry of Earth-that-was in M2. As a result large personal transports are rare and generally objects of the rich. On some worlds, common civilians might possess a personal transport in the form of one/two passenger motorized trikes, or a beast of burden, but the worlds where these are not either the property of their Guild or the Administratum, or simply stolen, is rare.
The second most important lesson about travel in the Imperium is that it is unsafe for the most part. Worlds and regions of space untamed by the Imperium are full of dangers; when one travels outside regions tightly under Imperial control, wild beasts, exotic environmental hazards, pirates and banditry abound. The dangers are myriad; in some cases (especially in Warp travel) the method of travel is dangerous in and of itself, due to unreliable technologies and navigation.
The third most important lesson is that travel is rarer the further you want to go. On many worlds the only reason to travel beyond the town or city of your birth is because you are required to for work. On some worlds, such as Hive Worlds or Death Worlds, transport and travel is rare because the world beyond the walls of the city is hostile to human life. As you try to go further it gets harder to find transport: on densely-populated worlds, intercontinental travel might be facilitated by ground, flying or aquatic transports, often moving in convoy, and operated by Guilds. Those who can find transport on them often have to work their passage; with so few people in the Imperium handling coin if someone wants to secure transport they will often have to barter services to do so. Void transport is rarer still. Few people have any hope of travelling to the stars: just travelling to a place in near orbit is a luxury most lowborn won't experience in their lifetime (with the obvious exception of Voidborn). Despite the fact that the Imperium operates on an interstellar scale, most Imperial citizens have only ever heard about other worlds. On some planets space travel can be so rare as to be near-mystical, with those who arrive on the world from visiting void transports being objects of pure wonder for populations otherwise entirely isolated from the rest of the galaxy. For most, the only option to ever see the stars and travel to other worlds comes with military service, with the luxury of void travel reserved only for Servants of the Imperium and those of Noble status and incredible wealth.
The methods of travel presented beneath are not the only methods, but they are those most commonly found on frontier regions of space such as in the Prosperitas Sector. They serve as a good example of those most individuals might have experienced.
Blessed Prometheum
The exact chemical composition of Prometheum is a closely guarded secret. It is a fuel that can be artificially refined by Mechanicus-overseen Prometheum refineries, from a number of different elements found commonly across the galaxy. Prometheum can be produced on almost any world. It is the primary fuel of the Imperium, most things run on it, and it is even heavily weaponized for use in flamethrowers. Prometheum is an incredibly efficient fuel: often used in combination with other power sources in the reactors of vehicles, it burns incredibly hot.
At the civilian level most vehicles run on Prometheum. Some rare designs have potent fusion reactors but these are more commonly found in voidships or in military use, where the Mechanicus have tried to reduce the reliance of machines on Prometheum so they can operate longer without resupply.
With its distinct acrid and oily smell, few individuals in the Imperium have not encountered Prometheum as a fuel, as it not only powers vehicles, but power plants and heaters in many buildings.
Surface Travel
The most common form of transport in the Imperium are motorised transports. Rugged wheeled or tracked vehicles designed for all-terrain operations are the most common designs; as noted above, 'luxury' or 'sports' vehicles are rare things, with most vehicles used for sports originating as more rugged designs intended at some point in the past for human colonists braving untamed worlds, or for serving an industrial purpose. Small two-, three- and four-wheeled transports are common enough but on most worlds massive tracked crawlers provide a form of armored public transport. Perhaps the most famous of these is the RH1-N-0 Tracked Exploration and Multi-Purpose Defence Vehicle, or 'Rhino'. A ubiquitous design that has been used by humanity for thousands of years, it is boxy, broad, and propelled by two well-protected tracked drives. The Rhino has been largely co-opted by the Imperial military, but in some frontier sectors such as the Prosperitas Sector they are still frequently seen in civilian use as well.
In some areas, massive freight-rails and maglev lines criss-cross the landscape with powerful engines pulling several carts in tow along a pre-built track - speedily moving massive cargo-loads and passengers cramped in tight carriages across a world. Most of these are operated by Rail Guilds who often have to pay for security (commonly known as 'line bulls') to patrol the surfaces of these transports to protect them from bandits and aggressive wildlife.
After ground vehicles, the second-most favoured form of transportation, at least on worlds that sustain the keeping of them, are riding animals and beasts of burden. Many worlds possess a creature they call a horse that resembles, if one squints very hard while inebriated, the ancient Terran equines that once existed on that world. Most of these share little to no genetic heritage with the creatures they are said to resemble, but are generally four-legged (if one is lucky) creatures ideal for carrying one or two riders. Animal husbandry and domestication continues across the Imperium, for while it is intolerant of sentient aliens, the Imperium will gladly attempt to tame xenos beasts and put them to use. On many worlds beasts are vatgrown, bred or deliberately mutated to enhance their usefulness to the Imperium; often beasts are bionically enhanced too, both to increase their endurance, and to make them easier to control via neural implants such as volitor chips.
Walkers are fairly common on dense urban worlds, or worlds where extensive mountainous regions or unstable surfaces would make it hard to operate other ground vehicles. Two-legged Sentinels as well as four-legged Mars Universal Land Engines (or MULEs) stalk across such environments. All owe their heritage to the technology used by the Imperium's Knights and Titans, which are much more advanced examples of walkers.
Grav vehicles are rare enough that only the most powerful Nobles, and the most advanced and civilized worlds are likely to have them. Anti-gravity technology is a lost art to the Adeptus Mechanicus and so examples of it are rare to find in production; most grav vehicles are old and the secrets of their manufacture no longer known. Each of these vehicles is capable of creating its own lift rather than relying on wheels or tracks. Pushed along by propulsion generating engines, these rare and magnificent craft glide through the air - often accompanied by the very loud buzz of their grav-lifts.
On worlds where large bodies of water divide regions, boats and hovercraft are more common. In the ten thousand years the Imperium has reigned over the galaxy it has done little to vary these from what many would recognizably identify as a boat in M2. Often propeller- or fan-driven, sometimes heavily armored to protect from toxic waters and sea-beasts, many motorized vessels ply the waters of Imperial worlds for transport, fishing (on some worlds), or for those who have the luxury, leisure. Primitive sailboats and oar-powered boats exist on more primitive worlds, but on most worlds these are exotic exceptions rather than things an Imperial citizen might commonly see.
Air Travel
On many worlds, but especially at the frontiers of Imperial space, air travel is often the only way to reach other inhabited regions without encountering dangers in the wild or needing to travel in convoy. On many Hive Worlds the simple hostility of their surfaces that necessitated the construction of the sealed hive-arcologies that dot them in the first place make ground travel impossible.
The availability of air travel varies from world to world. On some planets such travel is reliant on gyro-copters and planes that travel the airways, whereas on others, glider transports launched from the tops of high spires or cliffs provide air transport. More exotic forms exist, from the flapping wings of vast ornithopters to long-ranged grav vehicles as noted above.
The general absence of dedicated aircraft is notable: on most worlds, shuttlecraft designed for ground-to-void travel pull dual roles in this respect. This harkens back to a historical decision to prevent any single military commander being able to command both void and ground forces by firmly barring the commanders of each from posessing the other. Because of this aircraft ended up the purview of the void-bound Imperial Navy, which has led to aircraft development under the Imperium stalling as it is based around Naval requirements and designs rather than civilian ones. As a result, on worlds where aircraft are not a necessity, air traffic is minimal and the airways largely plied by noble craft and orbit-capable shuttles.
Void Travel
When one refers to 'void travel' in the Imperium, one is referring to both space travel in the vast emptiness of the interplanetary void, and the strange inter-dimensional travel known as 'Warp travel' that the Imperium uses to bypass the impossibly huge distances and travel times between stars. For the purposes of this section we are referring to the former space travel, rather than the latter Warp travel, which is covered beneath.
As noted in the opening of this page, void travel is a rare luxury; most Imperial citizens will never experience it, and for those who are lucky enough to experience it, it does not have the majesty of space travel as presented to earlier generations of humanity. A lowborn citizen will not have a view of the majestic expanse of space, for they will most likely experience space travel in a vast dark hold with only artificial light to see by, often oblivious that they are even travelling or to where, likely labouring to pay their passage - and this is all presuming that they have not simply been press-ganged into the Imperial Navy.
Part of this has to do with the scale of voidcraft in the Imperium. Voidcraft capable of interplanetary flight are rarely less than one kilometer long; most smaller void craft are not designed to operate without the support of a larger vessel to provide them with transport between worlds or systems, lacking the fuel or supplies to do so. These vast craft are huge, bulky things with many deep and vast decks, and holds that one could live in for years and not even realize one was aboard a ship in the first place - for the only real views to the stars exist on divided upper decks reserved exclusively for ships' officers and passengers of wealth and high station.
Similarly, though a lowborn citizen might just be lucky to find transport aboard a ship they are more than likely not to see another world for years, or even in their lifetime if they are truly unlucky. Not because void is dangerous (though it is) but because, without advanced warp drives, it can take entire lifetimes for ships to traverse the space between two systems in the Imperium even at the fastest speeds. Warp drives are mercifully common however, and one would need to be supremely unlucky to end up on one of the vast generation-ship-like sub-light freighters. The lack of Navigators, who are essential for long journeys in the Warp, on most vessels will force most ships to make short 'hops' as they navigate to their destination, meaning a journey on most 'Navigator-less' freighters may be a matter of years before they reach their destination.
The most important lesson is that without the warp, space travel is slow: it takes days to reach the moon of a world, weeks at the fastest speeds to reach another world in the same system, and sometimes even months to reach the edge of a particularly vast system such as Holy Sol.
The cost of maintaining vessels of such size is astronomical. It is quite rare and representative of immense wealth for even a Noble House to possess one or more voidcraft; there are those who do, but they are some of the most powerful families found in their respective Sectors.
The Chartist Fleet
Known also as the Merchant Fleet, the 'Chartist Captains' (as they are known) are the lifeblood of the Imperium. Chartist vessels possess a 'Merchant's Charter' which grants them rights to trade. Often sworn to a so-called 'Chartist House' of the Imperial Nobility, these vessels are both the property of the Houses that sponsor them and to the Imperium that relies upon them to keep supplies flowing between worlds. When one is addressing voidfolk one is most likely to find oneself conversing with members of this vast fleet because it is the most common role for voidcraft in the Imperium - often when a Noble House claims to 'own' a vessel it is in fact a Chartist Merchant craft, and its existence is as much supported by their great wealth and sponsorship as it is by Imperial subsidies.
Warp Travel
The true nature of the Warp is a matter for the Ordo Malleus to debate and to shield the wider Imperium from the truth of. As far as much of the Imperium is concerned, despite the strange noises and effects of Warp travel, the Warp, also known as the 'Sea of Souls' or 'Immaterium', is simply an otherworldly dimension connected to our own. Time and space flow differently in the Warp and distances thousands of years of travel away in real-space can, if one understands the madness of navigating it, be mere days away if one travels via the Warp. Without Warp-capable ships, space travel would get tedious very fast, and the Imperium simply would be too vast to function.
The exact workings of Warp engines are a mystery of the Mechanicus but they operate by creating a 'rift' in the dimensional barrier between our dimension and the Warp through which the ship enters. When inside the Warp the ship is subjected to 'tides', 'flows' and other such phenomena described by Navy officers desperately trying to apply reason to a realm where there is none. The only creatures capable of comprehending the Warp and its 'pathways' are the Navigators of the Navis Nobilite who use their third eye to guide the vessel under their control to its given destination.
Translation to the Warp cannot be performed anywhere within a system. Every solar system (bar a few special cases with unique architecture or stellar terrain acting as a ‘warp gate’) has a point nearing the edge of the system called the Mandeville Point. At the Mandeville Point the gravitic energies caused by the creation of a warp rupture no longer conflict with those created by the system's star, and the strain on the ships Warp engines is sufficient to prevent catastrophic translation failure. ‘Missing’ the Mandeville Point is more than often lethal, with the gravitic shockwaves set off by the sudden Warp rupture often annihilating both the vessel emerging from it as well as anything that has the misfortune to be nearby. Warp jumping into combat is a fantasy entertained by young Imperial Navy officers, who are rapidly corrected by their Navigators pointing out that any victory from such a thing would be posthumous as the gravitic deathknell of their fleet erupts over opposing vessels.
The problem facing most Captains, however, is that Navigators are rare, and this means many vessels have to function without them, not an easy proposition when one considers the dangers of Warp space. Most transport Captains unable to hire a Navigator will often make contact with a representative of the Navis Nobilite to pay for 'Warp charts' and 'Warp routes'. These are not so much actual maps of the Warp as complicated and arcane instructions designed to be fed into a ship's helm cogitator in order to navigate it through the Warp. These routes enable a ship to take small jumps into the warp in order to reach their destination. The exorbitant cost of these charts is often why many transports ply a specific trade route as the cost of buying the charts for another one is beyond their means.
With or without a Navigator, Warp travel is dangerous and unpredictable. As noted above, time and space work differently there and the realm is alien to human life. Ships rely on a powerful shield generator known as a 'Gellar Field' that produces a bubble of 'reality' to protect the ship from the Warp. Should this fail then the ship is subjected to the tides of the Warp, altering reality within the ship, bringing madness and mutations, and often causing the loss of the vessel with all hands as a result. Even without the risk of Gellar Field failure, the Warp punishes navigational errors harshly, and Warp phenomena can massively alter the course of a vessel. When this happens, a ship would be lucky just to appear in an entirely different area of space then it intended to. Because time is also inconsistent in the Warp, a vessel making a navigation error can re-emerge after what feels like days to its crew, only to find years have passed in realspace. There are even fables about ships appearing before they have left, but █████████████████████████████████████████████ [Redacted by order of the Ordo C██████] - though these are mercifully rare occurrences.
The most interesting fact is that because of the vagaries of time within the warp, even without navigational error what the crew of a ship experiences as a few hours can be days in realtime, and vice versa - a crew can experience what feels like weeks of travel and emerge only a few days after they left in realtime. Because of this, many ship crews and voidborn record two ages: one is their ‘subjective’ age based on the time they have personally experienced in their life, and one is their ‘relative’ age based on their recorded date of birth relative to the current Imperial date.
It is of note that few craft smaller than a Scout Sloop possess Warp drives, making it almost unknown to find craft smaller than 0.95 kilometers with one. One of the only counterexamples is the incredibly rare small craft known as the Warp Cutter. These vessels tend to be around 150-300 meters in length, and require a single Navigator to pilot them in the warp. Their warp capabilities are limited, however, as they lack the power to project a Gellar Field for long, so they are restricted to short warp jumps and have less long-range travel abilities. For inter-Sector travel, for example, they would be better served docking with a larger voidcraft. They are ideal for travel within Sector space, where reliable transit routes make them valued by high-ranking Imperial officials and Inquisitors who want a more subtle footprint on orbital traffic when they arrive around a world.
Void Travel Times
Beneath are example travel times. These are the ballpark figures drilled into Chartist Captains when they study to pass their examinations in order to be granted a Merchant's Charter, rather than entirely accurate figures. Any experienced Void Captain would tell you to take them with a grain of salt, as prevailing Warp currents or hostile Warp tides can alter them significantly.
OOC NOTE: These times are here to provide players with a way to appreciate the time it takes to travel between worlds and should not be taken as a hard-and-fast rule to lecture others with if they get a number wrong. They are just IDEAS of the time it takes to travel between points in the vast regions of space voidcraft operate in.
- Normal void travel takes prohibitively long to get anywhere fast, and it can be months before a fast ship leaving a planet reaches the edge of a planetary system. It would take minutes for a shuttle leaving the ground to reach a ship in close orbit of a world, but more distant objects even in a planet's orbit can take hours to reach at top speeds.
- Interplanetary Travel refers to travel between planetary bodies within a single System. These distances are normally traversed at sublight speeds, taking days-to-weeks at the highest speeds to cross the distance between planets or to reach the Mandeville Point of a system.
- Interstellar Travel refers to travel within a Sector, between two systems of that Sector. With a Navigator it can take a few days realtime to traverse the Warp to a nearby planet; longer the more ‘jumps’ away from a system of origin one takes (marked on most maps by connecting lines between planets). It can take a few weeks to traverse a standard Imperial Sector, though the crew may not experience that time personally due to subjective time in the Warp. This can be cut down by following an established trade route where the fastest passage of travel has been calculated already. Without a Navigator, as a rule of thumb these times double - or worse if the ship encounters Warp phenomena and tides it is unable to compensate for without a Navigator to make course corrections.
- Intersector Travel refers to travel to the nearest system of nearby Imperial Sectors. Although the Imperium may claim every light-year of the Milky Way, there are vast areas of unclaimed space not fully explored between Sectors. These distances usually mean that travel to other Sectors can take months or even years without a Navigator. However, they can be circumnavigated - the Sol-Prosperitas Passage in the Prosperitas Sector, for example, has what Navigators call ‘warp tides’ that, if prevailing in the favour of the vessel, can not only mean it takes mere weeks to reach nearby Sectors, but means it is possible to reach the edge of Segmentum Solar (containing the core Sectors of the Imperium) in a few months at most.