I'm curious; does it really take that long to travel in-system? Lexicanum doesn't seem to specify anything. Maybe I missed something.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:05, Mon 08 May 2023.

Isn't it also an artificial system?

Lore varies from hours to weeks to get in system from a Mandeville point depending on the system you arrive in vs th planet you head to. No these are sub-luminal speeds we are traveling but also role of GM

 Officially, going anywhere takes ages. The inspiration for a lot of RT travel is the Age of Sail, which means long travel times, isolation 'at sea', large crews and brutal discipline.

A typical interstellar voyage might begin with a cargo ship lying in orbit around an Imperial world. Tiny shuttlecraft busily transfer precious minerals, foodstuffs, crew, and manufactured items from the world below. The loading procedure may take days or tweeks as the shuttles return time and again to the huge ship. Once loading is complete, the colossal craft slowly accelerates out of orbit under the power of its main drives.
 The ship heads outwards towards the rim of the solar system, carefully increasing speed by tiny increments as it does so. Although the vessel’s engines are capable of terrific acceleration, the risk of collision with inter-planetary debris is high if the ship accelerates too quickly or too much. As the sun shrinks in the ship’s wake, the density of debris lessens and the ship’s speed reaches approximately one percent of light speed.
 After several weeks of travel, the ship arrives at its first destination. This is the ‘jump-point’ lying around the star system like the circumference of a circle. This delineates the point at which inter-planetary debris falls below maximum warp density. Once this invisible line has been crossed, it is safe to activate warp engines. A crew careless or foolhardy enough to prematurely activate warp-drives would be lucky to find their ship hurled thousands of light years off course. More likely, the ship would be torn apart and destroyed, never to be heard of again.
 With the safe activation of its warp-drives, the ship is plucked out of the real universe and enters the dimension of warp space. Its true interstellar journey has begun. Ships travelling in warp space do so by means of jumps varying in length up to 5,000 light years. Even so, almost two weeks pass onboard ship before the craft is ready to end its jump. Meanwhile, because of time shifts in warp space, over a year has passed in the real universe.
 The ship re-enters real space just beyond the jump-point of its destination solar system. If it is lucky, the ship will come out close to the jump-point, otherwise it may take many extra weeks to reach the inner planets. It is always wise to allow a safe margin when jumping towards a star. The results of re-entering space within the jump-point would be the same as prematurely activating warp drives on the outward journey, and would almost certainly end in disaster.
 The ship is now ready for its final haul, beginning by broadcasting to its destination and establishing a new time coordinate. Time in warp space is so different from time in normal space that the crew has no idea whether their journey has taken a few months or years. Initially the ship travels at approximately one percent of light speed, decelerating gradually through the denser inner regions. Eventually, the ship reaches its destination, where swarms of tine shuttles once more make themselves busy loading and unloading cargo and passengers in preparation for the ships next journey.
- Rogue Trader, p312

 That said, circumstances may vary. If a station is built near the limit for convenience, then flight times are obviously shorter. The GM here may also wish to arbitrarily change flight times, but Iim definitely not in favour of doing so.

Right this is a system that is like in the middle of a mini-eye of terror or some such? Reasonable to expect some oddities in the travel times.

Surprised our Navigator didn't nope the fuck out of there.

Thanks for that Jak, sadly I wasn’t reminded of that passage when I asked back in November and, failing any official rules I made my own formula which was based on ‘Eye of Terror’, an old Black Library book I’d been reading, in which a ship takes three hours to get far enough from a planet to enter the warp. I set the travel time to mandeville point out of Stone’s Throw at 10 hours and that is the sort of time you can expect in this game. I am genuinely sorry if that clashes with anyone’s expectations but don’t intend to change it.
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10 hours suggests that the safe jump distance is well before the last planet in most systems, which works if all you need is a clear space because you can just travel off the ecliptic plane.

If you needed to be farther away from the star to make the jump then you will need some type of medium FTL drive to leave even the smallest systems in 10 hours.

There were some protests and quiet discussion of, well, how likely we were to succeed at said jump in private. On the plus side... We've got a chart now for going in and can this trace our way back lol.

As to travel times and translations... The main component is to just ensure clear space as far as I understand and to avoid any gravity wells as this plays havoc with the transition and also has the potential to introduce what could be politely dubbed invasive species.

That said like all things 40k it's all over the god damned place with mundane drives being relativistic in some situations and just overglorified rocket engines in others.

Also apologies for some of my quiet been a tad eventful of late and not much use for a wounded navigator in boarding/etc etc.
This message was last edited by the player at 17:56, Tue 09 May 2023.

In reply to alphapred (msg # 993):

 Well, it seems as though there are three basic 'fixes'. Four if you just decide 'it took longer, but nobody cares'.

 i) Stone's Throw is further out-system than most habitable worlds/stations or closer to a conveniently low-density anomaly that you can jump out (not necessarily in) more readily than you otherwise might.

 ii) Imperial ships are capable of pulling seventy or eighty G acceleration and deceleration curves and regularly bimble around star systems at near-relativistic speeds with all that that entails.

 iii) Mandeville points are, in fact well inside the system limits and you can get to them with the space-going equivalent of a Honda Civic (you still need a warp drive to make use of them though).

 Obviously, I prefer either 'it just took longer but no-one cares' or 'Stone's throw is unusual' because the other two are even more nonsensical (not that sense is a big thing in Rogue Trader) and do a lot to undermine the sense of vast, echoing scale that's one of the coolest things about the setting.

 I love that in RT, space is big and we - even in our flying city-ships - are tiny and that going anywhere, even to a 'nearby' moon is a non-trivial operation.

As much as I truly detest agreeing with Jak. Did it not take us weeks to leave the last place we were? IIRC that was the direct result of this exact same discussion at the time (up around message #137).

Not that I care about the consistency of the whole thing regardless.

Personally I'm not against stuff that gives us all downtime to do stuff. Gregory was planning to pick up Pilot (Jump Pack) and that's not going happen in 12 hours, what with all the big personnel reorganizations that he'll have to oversee. And if he gets the time, he'll go through airborne drills with the (Planetary) Assault Company (Breachers get a well-deserved rest).

 Yeah, quite aside from my preferring the canonical travel times, I wanted time to explore the dead spaces of the ship (even if only in a 'you see this, make X rolls, you learn this' kind of short-format) and had penciled in a lazy schedule of a couple of crafting tests a week (rather than say, seven) to provide stuff for people in between doing more interesting things.

In response to popular request all future flights to and from the mandeville point will be long and tedious, but not the current one. Bottom line here is that I started this game in response to a request in ‘Wanted GMs’ and am running it for you guys so who am I to deny you.
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My meaning was that I didn't mind long or short trips. Sorry if I gave offense, boss.

Also yay 1000th post?

In other news, I have an operation tomorrow. Yaaay.

Best wishes for that, from me and all the NPCs in this game.
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Good luck man, hoping all goes well.



Thread is over 1k posts.

Best wishes on the operation and a speedy recovery.

In reply to alphapred (msg # 1000):

 That's fair. I just like the longer trips. Gives you a chance to throw a few curve-balls at us along the route, makes things feel big. Kind of the way 'a space combat turn is thirty minutes' kind of really drums home 'these here ships are bloody big' in a way that shorter turns just don't.

Been on vacation this last week. I'll get a post up as I catch up.

Feel free to comment in game or here in the OOC.

Most of you guys are logging in but not posting so just an acknowledgement that you are still in the game would be encouraging.

Thanks.
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Still here.

Still here. Just busy if late on the home front.

Hey, still around. We should really start another OOC thread tho.