The 40k Lorecast - Episode 90 - Warp Travel in the 40K Universe for the Imperium

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

On Today’s cast we cover how warp travel is performed by the imperium in the 40K universe. We open with how a warp travel functions, as opposed to FTL drives. We then get into the addition of Navigators and Astropaths to the experience of travel, and some canon conflicts therein. After that we move into the Gellar fields, so as to avoid being in the movie Event Horizon. We then dive into warp travel itself, the experience of those doing it. Then we close out with coverage of how the galaxy is segmented, and the great Nexus AutomaticaPatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast. With me, John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy. On today's cast, we're going to cover the movie Event Horizon, basically. Where some people, well, things went really well for a little while, and then we went, hey, we're going to do some warp travel. And then, yeah, just watch Event Horizon.

Yeah, there's a gap between warp travel and Gellerfield. It's not a great gap. So we're going to be talking space travel in the 40K universe today. Super fun topic. For those of you who've played, either Rogue Trader, it comes up in that. I played Imperial Fleet Gothic,

which is actually, doesn't come up a lot in it, but it's covered. There's a few different games this is covered up in. But most of this is covered actually in the novels and a little bit in the codexes.

I find it super cool, though. So this would be a really fun cast. That's what we get some really good background for it too. Oh, yeah. I mean, because they had the original game. I'm actually talking the video game.

The one on Steam. Got it got it. Yeah, the one on Steam. It's a good game. It gets a little repetitive at a certain point, but still, it's fun. I was talking about the actual, the miniature game.

The tabletop, yeah, the miniature game was cool. And then it became X-wing, cough, cough. Yeah. The 40K lore is a weekly podcast focused in the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. As always, please follow and comment on the cast. It does help our algorithm out a lot, reaching a lot more people, thanks to all of you are doing it.

I do see the comments. Again, every single day I have to go in there and read the comments. There's some really good ones in there. A lot of, like, me feeling good about myself, because someone said something I said was funny. And also a lot of little moments of like, hey, you can't pronounce this word. Yeah, I'm aware. In the show notes below, you'll see links to our Patreon, our YouTube, our Discord, and our merchandise site.

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We also now have a YouTube. For now, the YouTube is just our old episodes that I have gone through very painfully and added content to images, subtitles, etc. Those release every Friday at 7 a.m. But we have a new show coming out in June, where we'll also be talking with the history of the Warhammer 40K game tabletop, which I think would be really exciting. and we're expecting a first release near the end of June.

Probably you shouldn't announce things before I've recorded them, but screw it, we're doing this. I was just want to say, that's never stopped this before, John. Whatever. Now the pressure's on, so now I'll actually get it done. Lastly, of course, link to our Discord. That's completely free server designed for our listeners in mind, gave you guys a place to interact around the cast itself. But more importantly, about the kind of the overarching 40K universe, literature,

game play, video games, memes, random nerd stuff, etc. We are over 8,000 members at time of recording. So please, if you like what we're doing and you're looking for a place to interact around it more, join the Discord. Let's talk about the fact that space has a lot of ready for it, space. There we go. Yeah, the Milky Way. I haven't checked my math here, but I'm pretty confident. 99.999.99% open space.

It is great in the movies because there's always so much stuff going on. And in actuality, there's so much distance between everything. I mean, even in like the asteroid fields and stuff like that, the asteroid field, you could accidentally stumble through and hit absolutely nothing. Yeah, just go straight. Oh, yeah, it worked. They're not flying asteroids all over the place. You know, we didn't just blow up Alderon.

So the majority of the action in the game, though, obviously occurs in these tiny little specks in the universe that are the planets, but the universe itself is all open space. And we don't talk about that a lot. So that's what we want to talk about today. Now, today we're going to focus kind of on like how the Imperium travels and moves around the galaxy, but specifically the Imperium, because the Eldar obviously have the Webway, which we've covered. The Tyrannids use their Narhol system to kind of gravity weld them across the galaxy. The Necrons have phase shifting, which is also their own thing. the orcs have a combo of a bunch of different things basically they just believe maybe yeah they put their thumb out and they just hitchhike wherever they have to the tau don't travel they're stuck because they tried traveling and it didn't go well i think didn't go well might be a slight understatement everyone likes to lose i think it was a third or half of their entire force was the what was their next sphere they lost the entire thing they basically

Yeah, they took the champagne bottle and hit the ship and went, we'll see you guys soon or never. And then the Votan, the other one, too, I do want to talk about the Votan, we do have, we do know how they travel. But as we've said before, we're not going to cover the Votan until GW gives us a second codex. Because you just get, you know, and we're due for the codex. They're dropping everything else right now. My guess is Votan will be up for the end of the summer. And one of the travel, before we just get into how the imperium travel. You have to remember in the 40K universe, being able to get places is the main way to be powerful.

The only reason that, you know, warp travel made the imperium, the imperium. Other people, I mean, the Eldar dominated for, until they crashed themselves because they had the best means of transportation. They could go anywhere they needed to right now, take care of any threat before it was a threat. and anybody that hasn't, and we did a cast about a lot of these other alien races that had really, really powerful technology, but they didn't have the same ability

to travel effectively, move around the galaxy, so we were able to just isolate them and eventually beat them down. The last group I should also mention is chaos. So chaos does a combo of both. Chaos travels in a variation of the way the Imperium does, but also chaos,

demons can just appear anywhere. So again, today's... It's still warp travel. I'm doing air quotes to no one in particular. But they've got a little bit of a loophole. Yeah, so today's and actually end next week's cast is going to be about the Imperium. So let's go through this. So the real reason the age of strife was just so bad for humanity was actually not the cybernetic rebellion or the rise of psychers. It was the fact that the warp became impassable and it just cut them off completely from themselves. So no travel means no trade, no support, no reinforcements, et cetera. We don't have numbers, obviously, but millions of worlds and systems collapse.

We do know it's in that level. Well, they get isolated out because a lot of the worlds, they didn't do it as bad as we do now. Well, sorry. And now when I say now is, you know, modern 40K. Modern 40K. But I'm saying these worlds were still not complete insanity where you produce one widget, But like they did start to specialize because they knew that they could get there

with whatever you need. The other thing, it's not just travel in this. It was travel and communication because you were sending through the messages. We're going to cover that in a bit because I'm actually not 100% if that's accurate because the...

It was partly because it depends on how you try out. During the age of, let's say the dark age of technology, they had, if you go with everybody, the straight enders, game, they basically had an answerable for that. Instantaneous communication. I heard that was a really good movie. I swear to God, if we were at his house right now, I would have

Kung Fu kicked him. For those who don't know, like, there's things that everyone has that's burned them in life. The Ender's Game movie has done, has shortened Brad's life, not as much as his own heart and brain have, but it definitely did take a chunk out of his soul. My favorite book. Ever. Yeah.

All right. But let's, let's dive into space. travel. So we've covered this before, so it must be a little bit quick. Mankind started out with just sublight travel. Massive vessels loaded with cryogenically frozen people and all the resources you could ever need, just heading off to a colonized world. And they would take multiple year, could be even decades. These were century trips sometimes. The early ones, though, because they were called. They had a couple that were the century ships or whatever that you know. Exactly. And then those ships never came back. And they went, eh, it's not the best work. Exactly.

Yeah, because this is a galaxy that is where, like, the average distance between stars is five light years. So this became Sisyphian pretty quick. I mean, just because the closest, don't forget, the closest system is five light years away. It doesn't mean there's a planet there you can colonize. It might be 10 light years, 15 light years. And when we say sublight travel, we don't mean just off the speed of light. It's faster than 20 knots. We're popping the sail.

let's do this. Yeah, exactly. It's not rowing. Fairly quickly, though, got FTSs, which is faster than light travel. Yeah, but they weren't, well, it's the big thing on this. This isn't Star Trek travel. They weren't going warp 12. You know what I mean?

They were going, this isn't forever to travel, but it's still a pretty hefty travel. Also, these ships had to be ready. There's just a lot that can happen. While it's very, very open, you've got a lot of. things that can go down. Well, and then let's talk about where we're really here for is the movie event horizon. So the warp drive is invented. And for those who don't know, the movie event horizon is not an official GW movie by any stretch,

but everyone who's, yeah, I'm surprised it to get sued. I mean, it's that level. The event horizon is probably one of the best examples of what happens when you jump through the warp without a Gellerfield. So the thing is, they're trying to. to fold space. And because what they did is they went with, instead of doing good Necron fold space travel, they went, hey, we're going through the warp. And what they didn't know is the warp isn't a super friendly place. And they also did not have any defenses against what they

were going to find there. So we had some crews that showed up with some bonus, some bonus when they got done with the job. There was some issues. So let's talk about the warp kind of in itself. So the warp is the inverse of our reality, but it's not a one-to-one flip. So because the warp has a different shape, structure, and there's no laws of physics there. So the reason, and this is where it differs from event horizon, when you can enter the warp at one point, drive a very short distance and exit the warp, and you could move a thousand light years in that time. It's not clean. And again, because this is designed to exist outside of the laws of physics,

it's not all that easy as a way to explain because it's not linear. The way they did it in Event Horizon was they basically drew a dot on two sides of piece of paper. Then they folded it and they went, hey, what if we went right through it? That's close-ish, but still, that's far enough off that, you know, again, it's not a 40K movie. The way I like to think about it is that every point in the warp corresponds with a point in the material. But they're a chaotic relationship. Well, and sometimes they're super close to something that's not.

Because they were doing the Einstein Rosenbridge in Evan Horizon. Right. The warp, it's more of I'm jumping into a different reality. You're going to the upside down. Yeah. There's some stranger things, Mojo. But the thing is, is that it's not just distance that you can just show up someplace, but also because laws of physics don't apply, time also doesn't apply in this.

So you can have. have a wildly different trip each time. Now, we've kind of figured it out, ish. Not really. No, honestly. No, we haven't. We kind of, because they jump. They do this, they continue to use warp travel.

So we've kind of figured out. We math it out a little bit. Yeah. Most of the time, it's two to three weeks, and we'll talk about this in a little bit. Sometimes it's not. You're like, hey. Sometimes it gets pretty ugly. Yeah.

Sometimes, hey, man, I made the, I made the Kessel run. It's super fast. the times you're like, hey, man, it's a thousand years later, which we have two stories of that. It's actually 1,200 years later. Yeah. And so what I based it off is in the writings, there's a relationship between the materium, the immaterial, and to Brad's point, where you can enter at certain points and you know you'll exit at this other point, but to Brad's comment, the time that takes will vary,

sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. And a lot of this depends on the movement and the warp. The warp itself can shift. but the main thing that is that's about warp travel is it can reduce travel times by upwards of 75%. Or more, really. Yeah. And it's a big deal with the warp because they have warp routes. It's basically we've went through this semi-direct path.

And you could cut more time off, but then you would be going on something that no one else has gone. When they say warp routes, they don't mean like, hey, this is a road we're traveling. It's just, hey, we've had multiple ships go this way, and they came out again. You know, I mean? We have a real low bar for success when we're traveling the world. Did everyone die? No? Cool.

That's it. We'll call that a success today. But travel on the warp is blind for regular humans. And this is because the warp has no real form. So when you're in it, you can't see out of it. There's nothing there. And there's no landmarks to base it off of. So this is effectively, for those,

anyone who knows how to sail. This is sailing at night under full cloud cover with no moon. Like, oh, yeah, and, and, and, and no compass. And so you have no idea which direction you're going. And I like the sailing reference, because I like to think the warp also has, it's sort of, they do, don't have winds. What really happens in the warp is, the better examples I saw is when you enter the warp, it's more like you're actually under the water. And so as the water shifts, you shift. So you don't feel the push or the pull, you just go with it. I do want to throw out one of the things on this, though, because you actually can affect your trip in the warp by your heavy emotions, which is one of the biggest things because

oh, no, this is this roiling crazy thing. Everybody on the ship's terrified. And all of a sudden it gets way worse because you actually affect the warp again with your... Because the warp, it gets excited. Yep. To that point, the original warp travel becomes tough because you go into the warp and the warp is shifting.

It's moving around you. And as it shifts and moves you, you don't realize this. Just like the example I use is that if you're standing on a planet that's a spinning at a thousand miles an hour or 1,600 kilometers per hour for people who have a logical measuring system, you don't realize it. This is ridiculous. Teracy. Yeah.

Yeah. You don't realize it. And so what happens to a lot of ships is they would enter the warp and then they would just get turned completely off course, but they have no way of knowing that's happening. In addition to that, there's also the gods of chaos and demons everywhere, which is probably a bigger deal than just being turned off course. But, you know, we're going to talk about this. I mean, it's kind of a bigger deal. If getting turned on course makes you go to the Garden of Nurgel, you're going to want to be back on course. So let's go through the history of this.

So the first warp drive is invented around M.8. and I have to go with ish. And it's possible, by the way, that this may have actually been what led to the dark age of technology because mankind for the first time now is entering the warp. It's never, they've never done it in their history. Yeah, I was to say, now they're doing it. The warp is starting. The chaos gods are starting to go up and then you jumped in there and went,

hey, guys, what's going in here? You're just poking the bear going, hey, you're sailing by. We'll get to more of this in a minute, guys. So the first warp drives allow for what are called blind jumps. And so the ship would effectively aim. aim itself in a direction and engage the warp drive. The warp drive, all it does is, I like the term translates. It takes you out of the materium and puts you in the immaterial at that point.

Kind of like, what's the legend of Zelda on Super Nintendo, where you would go to certain points you'd flip to the other world? Is that Oricon of time that was on N64? But yeah, yeah, that's how I think if you translate there. Once you're there, you then have to engage your regular engines, and then you would drive for a little bit, but you're blind. And so it's, the example I used here is like submarines. So this is how early submarines would navigate. They might still do it, by the way. Okay. When I first read this when you sent it over to me, I was like, we're going to get some, some semen that are going to just

roll you for this, but continue. Of all the terms you could have used, that's the one you went with. Yep. Anyway, they're called, oh, really, Uranus. I'm sure there's Uranus. There's a bunch of during this episode. I'm sure we have people who are in the Navy who want to correct me on this, and I will sing that song back at you when you do. But the submarines do the same thing. A submarine can't see out the front. So they have to follow tectonic maps. And if they just ping the whole time, then the other submarines go, well, just shoot torpedo at that noise. So they actually have to navigate based off time and distance and speed. And that's how they calculate. That's effectively how these early warp drives function once they were in the warp. They would get in the warp.

And they would turn the engines to a set amount. They would clock it. At the end of that clock, they would translate back out of the warp. The issue with this is it was insanely dangerous. These guys were just maverick cowboy. Hey, man, what are we doing? We're going to go into hell effectively. They did no idea.

And try to cut some time off this and hope for the best. You're like, wow. And so it was done in what we call a leapfrog pattern. So all the jumps would go in, and all the jumps were less than four light ears, was the distance. You'd jump in, you'd come out, and then once you're out, you can actually see. You'd figure out where you are in the galaxy, move a little bit, make an adjustment, go back in. And it would work. One of the reasons that they did this is because it was very inefficient for a warp travel.

But because of the fact with No Gellerfield and they didn't know anything about the warp at the time, really, it did limit their time in the warp. so they had less time for terrible shit to happen, which made it so they didn't lose everyone every time. It's not bad. It's that they would literally get so far off course. They could buy themselves 10,000 light years off course. I'm just saying they at least, in messing up, they at least didn't get everyone murdered by demons effectively.

That's true. Because we're at a point where there's only three of the four chaos gods. And the ones who do exist, their grasp on the imaterium is still growing. Today, you enter the warp, you are instantly bombarded by chaos. At this time, they didn't. And I have my own theory on that. I just don't think anything in the warp thought something from outside the warp could enter the warp and kind of vice versa. But fast forward a little.

I knew it exists, though. If you, right now I'm pretty sure I'd be pretty surprised if something from another dimension showed up. Just came, yeah, rolling past my house. Yeah, exactly. Hey man, Cthulhu just showed up for a second driving a drop-down car. Like what? Now we'll get into navigators. And this is an important moment to talk about how you translate into the warp.

What happens is warp travel is not like Star Wars and Star Trek, where you punch in your calculation and then you jump. You have to use something called a mandeval point. And the reason you have to use a mandible point is that the translation into the warp, creates an ebb and flow. It basically creates a gravity well, for lack of a better phrase, not that this similar from the tyrannid like narwhal.

This distortion of gravity can have catastrophic events if not done with precautions. So, for example, if you were to translate into the warp and you've got a bunch of static objects around you, like satellites, asteroids, and the types of things, they would get pulled in.

And they could either just destroy you as they kind of come into you or you could translate into the warp with them as part of you, in which case you break apart inside the warp. I look at it kind of like a warp, translation just like a replicator from Star Trek, where it's just, it's going to take something, break it down to an atomic level, and then reform it, right? This is more of a teleported from Star Trek.

And so if a foreign body is present when you translate into the warp, that foreign body is going to be part of your body when you come, when you're on the other side of it. I don't think it is a replicator as much as I like the fact that these two things exist in the same, at the same time. almost overlap. I like the upside down reference quite a bit because they exist in the same space almost because the warp has its own topography, but it's supposed to be a reflection, but it's this chaos infused in reflection that just makes everything crazy. And so in order to avoid this,

what we use is something called mandival points. And so the mandival point is usually on the edge of the galaxy. For example, it's going to be outpass Pluto in our solar system. And it's not even just a specific spot. That's a warp gate. Those are different. This is something where you're far enough out. There's nothing there and you can jump to it. So on almost every system, once you get out beyond the furthest ring of a planet, that would be the mandible point. The exception being when you build a giant gate inside Uranus, that is... I knew we were going there immediately. There's no way. I'm skipping this. But you can put a giant entrance and exit in Uranus and then, you know... Well, these are set gates and things.

That's why, for instance, let's do a lot of people have asked in the cast, though, why didn't Horace just jump right on top of Terra during the Horace heresy? And that's why, because you may or may not end up in the middle of Mars or just destroy yourself instantaneously in your entire fleet. Going through the warp isn't precision science. It's around here. Also, like I was saying with the men of the point, You go through these points that other people have used and you know that they work.

Otherwise, you're just hoping for the best. That's a good point. Because the other thing, too, is with the mandival points, if I enter the warp at point X, but instead of doing that, I drive an extra, I don't know, a thousand miles and then enter, it's not linear into the warp. I could be entering a whole different part of the warp. So you also do have the mandival points are preset things. From a strategic standpoint, the Mandeville points are very helpful because, first off, you can organize planetary defenses around them because you know where everything is coming in and out of your galaxy.

Which is the tale of the Imperium, though, every place that we know people come out of, this is also why the demonic incursions sometimes are so lethal is because all of the regular chaos ships and anybody else traveling the warp, we semi know where everybody. else has gone through and these are the exits of the highway. And then we just put a sudden and guns around it. And we say, hey, if you come out here, be prepared to be pew-pewed. Yeah, it also works well because usually the planet's closer to the sun or the warmer ones. They're the ones you're going to settle. And then if you have a nice system like what we have in Seoul where you've got the junk on the exterior, it keeps people outside.

Although I do have to point one little thing out that the distance between Mercury and Pluto is 3 billion miles or 5 billion kilometers. So there was a moment we were like, we warp into the system and then apparently drive for six weeks and then you get to Seoul. Like we get off the highway and then drive for weeks on side roads. Yeah, if you're going a million miles an hour, let's do that math.

It would take you, yeah, it would take you five million hours to get from Pluto to Mercury. So I'm not a hundred, And no surprise, the GW math here isn't perfect, but I bring it up. The flip side, though, is that the mandival points are also pretty dangerous. And they're very dangerous because all the pirate fleets also know where they are and the Drukari fleets. And really anyone who wants to hit you, what they'll do is they're going to hide on the dark

side of a planet or moon and asteroid, whatever it is, near a mandible point. And then when you come out, they're going to jump you before you're ready. And so the translation out of the warp into the material is super dangerous because of this. It's hugely because you don't know exactly where you're going to show up. You're not ready at all. Also, everything's kind of like batten down the hatches when you're in the warp. You've shut down everything except for your astropath as far as what you're looking for, your sensors and everything else.

And on our next cast, we're going to talk about the Imperial Navy. And this is one of their main jobs is to clean this kind of stuff up. because you do get ships jump in and they get immediately assaulted. The Drukari love this, by the way. It's one of the best ways to get, if they want to do a good slave run, they'll just because they'll have a webway near a Mandeville point, and that's just a bad combo for everyone that's not the Dracari. So we get lightning precision and you get groggy.

I don't know where I am. Okay, sounds good. Yeah. We'll just go raid that ship, take all the people back and no one's going to even know we were here. Yeah, basically. The whole thing we were talking about before, though, is blind jumps. So people are coming in and coming out, not really knowing where they are. So they're kind of jumping in at a mandival point, readjusting, possibly driving for a while in the

materium, go to the next mandival point and jumping. This is funny, between M10 and M22, we were discussing earlier about how much this swings, but it's more close to M18, M20. The first navigators appear. They basically came either right after the invention of the warp drive or 2,000, 3,000 years after. Danger, Will Robinson? Yeah. Basically, the emperor made them. We set up prior cast.

My viewpoint is like the entirety of 40K advancement and travel feels like the emperor going, like, hey, I made you guys this thing going, oh, crap, I forgot about this one piece. Then making that one goes, oh, crap, forgot about that piece. Then making another piece. And you guys are good. Alexi's worst dad still. Yeah. So the navigators, quick refresher, they're huge.

humans, but they have a mutation where there's a third eye in the middle of their forehead. But the third eye doesn't see the world around them at all. It actually peers into the immaterial all day, every day. Well, you're not even doing that justice. So their third eye can see into the nightmare realm. Oh, yeah, when they close their third eye, good to hear, still can see into the nightmare realm at all times. I would some navigators as being, yeah, they're not the most. mentally stable group because the constant looking into the immaterium, even when they're sleeping,

isn't fun. And I also believe the emperor whipped them up in the lab real quick while cooking other things. I think he was working on. It's like, in my mind, the emperor is cooking and navigators are on the back burner, just trying to chill while he's making everything else. He's just like, oh, yeah, not the back burner. He's making dinner. Hey, are we going to have a salad? He was up. Yeah, sure. shop up some lettuce, here you go. That's the navigators. They look like such an afterthought, and I'm assuming it's because he was annoyed when he realized no one else could see into the warp like he can,

and went, oh, fine, I'll make another human. I do love on the side note of this. We said it before, but it just cracks me up that. I feel half the problems that the emperor found was he was always kind of annoyed that everybody else wasn't a all-powerful psych and immortal. You're like, fine. We'll get the Gellerfields in a second where he was like, I don't care if there's a demon next to me. I just obliterate it with my mind. And it's like, oh, you all get eaten by them.

All right. I don't mind. I'll fix those two. I don't know if you just destroy it. He's like, why wouldn't you also just project the power that you have so no one actually comes to you? Yeah. Which is effectively what he did when he rolled in there, we just went, anybody want a piece of this? And they all went, not really.

No, not really. It's kind of terrifying. for all of us. We'll be right back after a quick break. Let's talk about Navigators for a bit. Navigators barely look human. Well, that's not fair. They can look anything from a human with a third eye to, is it toxic Avengers? Maybe that. I mean, that's how far we're going to go into what they can look like. Or something created by a homunculus covenant. They look rough. I'm going to give this one, though, a little bit. I think we did this, though they were already messed up, but to make them better navigators, we kept tinkering with them in not a great way. But like, as time has gone on,

we haven't exactly treated the navigators super awesome. We tie them to a ship and say, look out the window and tell me where to go. Yeah, well, that's the thing is they also go, hey, I noticed that you have a hard time between the warp and the reality. How about if I just put you in this chair in a box? So you don't have to worry about what's in reality. Well, and let's talk about that chair in the box, because it is kind of funny. So once, as we said before, when a regular ship translates into the warp, the entire human crew just see nothing but like colors and darkness. It's kind of a combo of both. That's all they got. The navigator can see almost everything in there, which means that they may be sitting there looking at Slanesha's palace and basing travel off.

All right, don't go that way. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Turn left. Anyone's seen rally racing left, 30 degrees left now. This is massive because the navigators can actually also see the movements of the warp. So it's not just, oh, hey, we're about to drive into Nurgles Garden. That's not going to be fun for anybody. It's even more we're caught in a stream. It's moving us about seven to 10 degrees off course, course correct back this way. This means the ship does stay the course within the warp, allowing it to actually exit at the point it meant to exit at. I like it a lot because the best of the navigators actually know how to use the ebb and flow of the warp to make it so they're traveling fast or less risk. Yeah.

That's why the best navigators are, it's why you have those navigator houses. We talked about that in a couple. Like the best navigator house is producing the best navigators are just gold and super powerful. The difference between navigators, it's not, these guys aren't all the same. You don't just plug and play. Oh, yeah. You have varying navigators. And we'll talk more in the next cast about what ships have navigators, what ships don't.

But the main piece that you have to understand about the addition of the navigators is we went from warp jumps of five light years or less to jumps of dozens, few, I think, 100 or 1,000-year warp jumps. This changes everything because now you actually can expand out into the galaxy rapidly. And remember, translating into the warp and translating out wasn't that dangerous at this point. There are no tyrannids. There's really no orcs unless you go pretty far. Necrons are all asleep. Drew Carrier is still part of the Eldar. The Eldar are doing their thing.

There's no Votan yet. There's literally no tau. And most importantly, there's no chaos. You do have random Xenos as we've covered, but that's a random thing. They're so small in comparison, though. Yeah. The galaxy is so big and there's such pockets. Yeah.

But when the emperor rose to power, they took this transportation and they exploded. Where the navigators are a little bit more convoluted is the navigators can see into the warp. They're able to see out of the warps a little bit goofy. And when I say goofy, it's because over 40 years of GW writing, there's been a little bit of back and forth on this. All beings with a psychic presence can be seen from the warp. Psychic presence manifests itself in the materium, and all warp entities are aware of psychically powered non-warp entities. They may not be able to track them at all times, but they're aware of their presence. And the greater the manifestation, the brighter it is.

And so we have this with like Eldar. We talk about, you know, like Slanesh can find Eldar real easily because she can sense where they are. She just can't manifest herself in a way to grab them. Navigators are a bit of a weird one because I don't think navigators can do that. But if you put a lot of psychic energy into one area, the navigators can see that area like a psychic beacon. And you also, by the way, can obscure it with blanks, which is what the Astronomicon was, which is invented around M30, which is what's funny about this. The Astronomicon, this is where this whole thing gets a little bit convoluted.

We had the Golden Ninja Technology. So the Golden Ninja Technology, we have navigator traveling throughout the warp, all this stuff. There is no Astronomicon. So, but anyway. Sorry, Imperial fans on this. I think the Astronomicon is bananas overbri. blown because you had these guys already doing it. And maybe the warp has got more and more convoluted because of the presence and active

interference of the chaos gods. Maybe that's why it's needed now because the chaos gods are actively trying to make it difficult and destroy people and have their ways, basically. But, I mean, there's two other things you could say, but, like, one of the arguments is that the Ternan saw that, like, go up like a flare. there's also the other Well, the other one The Ultraman started it, yeah, the Ultramarine started this

and now the tyranids are rushing into the galaxy staring at the Astronomicon going, that looks delicious, let's go there. Yeah. Now, I can see that pretty clearly. Yeah. One of the piece I do have to crap on of the Astronomicon. I've done it before.

I'm doing it again now. This is in the writing. GW refers to the navigators using the Astronomicon to triangulate their position in the warp. The thing about the word triangulate, is the first part is try, as in three points, not one. According to GW, you can triangulate your position off of one point. And I'll be honest, you might be able to do distance because you could tell like,

but not degree, unless the Astronomicon, every like micro degree around it amidst a different color. You'd never be able to do this. And there's no compasses in the warp, which is why anyone's listened to Cast Longs. I refuse to call it north because there isn't one. There's just up. North, southeast west, baby. There's just up.

So that's a thing about the Astronomicon that I won't let go. But let's go into what happens next. On the side of the Great Crusade, the Imperium outfitted their ships with navigators and turned the Astronomica up to an 11. At this point, they start doing routinely doing work jumps of 5,000 light years. Even some longer have been done, but those were all emergencies. There's more to this than just getting in and out of the warp at the same time. This is what I mentioned earlier I wanted to get to.

Astrophats. So with humanity spreading across the galaxy into tens, hundreds, thousands, and more of light-ears apart, they have to communicate. Yeah. Well, it's not just, we're not just spreading out. We're on a military crusade to conquer the galaxy. You need to know what's happening with your. forces that are now all across the galaxy. So what's interesting about this is that we have no idea how this was done before M30.

We know the colonies communicated regularly because they had the federation, but the astropath is an astrophath is created by taking a cyker and then lobotomizing them effectively, and then they're turned into an astropath. That is a business and a structure done by the Imperium that they call out, came into existence after the emperor unified terror. So all I can assume is that, you know, prior to M30, they had some sort of technology that allowed them to communicate through the warp. It's a bull.

Because otherwise, they'd have to. Because if you tried to build relays around the galaxy, the delays would be incredible. I mean, you'd be looking at, you know, it wouldn't help in all, especially militarily. You know what I mean? So one of the bad parts of the astropath, you remember the astrophatic? You remember the astropaths are all the people that had psychics but basically failed. There's a pretty big deal. You don't want to fail a test when it's a psychic test given by the imperial.

Well, there's a worse fail. I mean, the astropath at least get to be alive. I mean, do you call that alive? I mean, it kind of. The Astronomicon ones. I mean, it's quick. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, you're having your soul sucked out and fed into the emperor over a period of weeks.

I mean, it seems probably you're going to not, you're not going to be able to walk that one off. I'm just saying. And there's also the ones who probably use as practice for Sisters of Silence. I just don't like the idea of that I'm on walking email server. Yeah, it's a fair point. I mean, you're also kind of aware of that. That's the big, you know what, I'm going on a Brad rant. The Apparead. Let's everybody be aware of the horrible shit that they do to them. Like, just making them not aware, dude. It's more effective. It's just so crazy. Like, hey, man, we're going to completely. take away every free will, you're going to basically be a walking automaton. But like, I want to let you know that we're going to make sure that you're still aware of all of that happening. You're like,

why? That's not fun for me. That gives me the sadness. With the invention of the astropath now, they can communicate through the warp, which means that, and this is also, by the way, isn't just like from one planet to one planet. Ships that are in the warp can talk out of the warp. So this becomes all of a sudden this incredible sea of communication of travel, trade, everything explodes. But another problem arose in the early travel, and that was event horizon. My theory is that the first bunch of ships that went into the warp had no problem. There were no issues whatsoever because all the beings in the warp had never seen a ship from the material.

And so they were basically looking at something and they're like, well, I don't know what that is, not messing with it. And then one of them went over there and ate some of the people inside of it and went, hey, you guys got to check this out. It's awesome. They're just cruising buffets out here. Yeah. Yeah, they're bringing us lunch, just throwing it out there. And the demons of the warp just start descending on these things. We have no records of the time, but I'm pretty convinced. And this is where, again, watch Event Horizon, because that's exactly what was happening to these ships. It has to be crazy for the denizens of the war. because a lot of them, you get a figure they probably don't even know, especially the smaller ones.

At this point in time, they might not even know that the materium exists. Well, you probably at this point would have had a bloodthirster fighting with a Lord of Change. And then they both looked up at just a ship with windows on it going past, going, should we just pause this fight and go see what that's about real quick? I don't really know what the hell just happened. I feel like we're going to go check this out for a minute or two. Also, I feel like that was something that we should do something about. So this is where it gets goofy.

Now we're going to get into what humanity I do to protect itself. Cough Cough, Cough, the Emperor did it all. And that is the Geller Field. Now, what's fun about the Geller Field is that it's invented again around M18. It's pretty quick. We get the warp drive and then we get the Geller Field. Then we get navigators. So that's the actual order.

But I did them in this order because the Geller Field's a lot more fun to talk about when you know everything else. So first off, what a Geller Field is. A Geller Field is not just a force field generator on a ship. I mean, it kind of is. But what it really is is a force field generator whose battery is a cycle that's been jammed in it and drugged up. And the Geller field is just jacking this guy's life force to power our force field against. Yeah, a Geller field.

Incursions. Yeah, a Gellerfield is a psychic force field. It's actually a dream. It's the, the psycher is dreaming and that his dream creates a force field bubble in the, that is effectively the material, but it projects inside the immaterial. So anything inside the bubble, nothing from the immaterial can cross it. So you're effectively bringing the material with you into the immaterial. Now, the issue is that, sorry, I just have, I can't. I love that. Most everything's written from, you know, humanity's aspect, but man, we are a nightmare. I think they do. The Imperium of man, every time we make something, it should be powered by nightmares every single time. Without a moment's break. And so this is, again, we're capturing a cyrus. Cyprus are new to the galaxy at this point. Fun story. This actually technically. predate psykers. That's the fun part of the Gellerfield when I was reading this. I was like, well, psychers actually came in M22, but now we have it M18. So I can't figure that one out. It's just

why it is. But you're capturing psychers, shoving them in a machine, and then drugging them up, making them dream. And those dreams do allow them to travel in the warp safely. Now, the force field, though, that they create is dependent on a couple things, namely the power of the psycher. you know, the stronger the psycher, the stronger the Gellerfield, but also the other force. But also you need a trigger cycle for the bigger ships. Yeah, the bigger ships and also the more tumultuousness of the warp. Then what I like about this, that Brad's point about, I think, being a nightmare, they've got little readouts all over the ship showing like what's our current Gellerfield status at, and they're watching it go up and down. That means the guy in the thing is dying.

And if it gets low enough, they have to translate as an emergency out of the warp because it will fail. When they do so, they've kind of got to hope that one of two things is going to happen. A, they don't translate out of the warp into a sun. And also, B, they translate out of the warp somewhere where they can get another replacement Geller field. Otherwise, we're on for a very long journey. For it, though, most ships have multiple nightmare fields for it. Yeah, well, they should have backups, but even then, like, it is.

Yeah, that is one of the, one of my favorites. and they did it in a rogue trader. Play that game. It's very, very cool. But one of the things that chaos, when they try to get in, they want to screw you over is they go and try to kill your navigating. They try to kill your astrophath. They try to kill your Dillard fields. Right.

Because it'll trap you. So with all that established, let's talk about warp travel itself. And so I wanted to shift here and talk about what the experience of warped travel actually is like in 40K. They do this very well in the Eisenhorn novel, actually, talking about some of the travel he does. But effectively, warp travel is better than because instead of doing a long cryostasis trip, you actually can do it, but it's still long. Warp travel to me is very similar to like sailboat travel in like the, I don't know, like 15th, 16th, 17th century. And part of this is that so one of the key things at warp travel is the warp is very similar to the oceans of Earth.

some of them are pretty smooth and reliable, whereas some are bad. So, for example, the Sargasso Sea, which is just off the eastern coast of the Atlantic Ocean, is famously smooth. It's actually why there was so much trade out of Europe into the Caribbean. It's because there's a chunk called the Sargasso Sea there that is, unless there's a hurricane, you can navigate it. So it's really great for trouble. There's a current that flows there.

Yeah, makes it really easy. On the flip side is Drake's Passage, which is the very tip of South America, which is a nightmare field where we decided it was better to dig a giant trench through a country than have to go through that nightmare field. Thanks, Panama. We appreciate it. The warp is very similar. Some parts of the warp are pretty smooth sailing.

You jump in here, you jump out over there. You're pretty reliable. Just like oceanic travel, we monitor them. Pilots report back. Well, they don't report back. We see them jump in and then jump out and go, oh, that one only took a week. Other times, they jump in and never jump out. out and we say, hey, that journey, send six more guys on, but then cross it off.

And even the warp storms themselves are recorded because, and they're added to the calculations for all the blind jumps that are occurring. And spoiler, for the next cast, 99% of jumps are blind jumps. So you guys notice that. But another key part is that warp travel isn't a linear path. The routes, they have curves and turns. And so you have to kind of like jump in and then jump out. and do all this stuff. But it's still a lot

fast on FTL travel. A lot is an understatement. It's bananas faster. But the problem is that because of how dangerous the warp is, we only have, we have a lot of set routes, which means that those routes can get congested. And if you're

going to have that situation, you need someone to manage the congestion. So 40K bureaucracy, the right. Oh, my God. Imperium does that right. bureaucracy. We are the most. powerful paperwork ever. So travel in the 41st millennia is heavily regulated and heavily limited.

And there's two things, reasons for this. One, navigators, astrophats, Gellerfields, warp drives, they're not cheap. You know, again, this is not Star Wars. Whereas in Star Wars, we constantly have like, oh, I'm going to translate to warp. You don't have that power. There aren't Millennium Falcons rolling around. That's just, instead, everything is built. And these are much more expensive, much larger ships.

But the bigger, so what you'll all, what you bet basically is large transport vessels, ultra-rich, military, et cetera. That's who's going. Let's take a break in this talk about who does warp travel in the 41st millennia and how it's achieved. Some of them are pretty obvious. Space Marines have their own fleets. They have to travel around. Same with the ADMEC.

The ADMEC have massive fleets, how they build them. fleets, so they're allowed to travel as much as they want. Hey, can you talk about the fun ships? Oh, the Adeptus Telepathica. These are the great ships. These are the ones who come through and collect all of your psychers and turn less than 1% of them into assassins, and it's worse for everyone else. You forgot the entire ride. You don't want to be the first person the black ship picks up. Remember, they nightmare you the entire way.

Yeah. You sit there. You guys want to listen to that cast. It was fun. But yeah, it jammed you in a box and turn the lights off and turn the music up and not good music. And that's your life until you get to your final destination. Next, you have the Adeptus Ministorum. This is the Ecclesiarchy.

They, again, they're allowed to travel. They have their own fleets. The Inquisition obviously have their own fleets because they have to move around. Much smaller ones, though. Then you get some of the more interesting ones. You have the rogue traders, obviously, who can travel around. Then you actually get the Arbytes. And the Arbytes are someone that we're going to be.

probably do a cast on in the future because I like the Arbytes, aside for the fact I own, I think 60 of them now. Whatever. Some of us build weird armies. The Arbytes of those who don't remember, the Arbites are the police force. They're allowed to travel around because they're oftentimes sent to a planet where the planetary governor is showing noncompliance. But it hasn't necessarily warranted a full-scale invasion, but the Arbites have to have a way

of getting there. Because otherwise, if they're relying on planetary travel, that planetary governor would say, yeah man i'm a lot of ships can't get you guys here this week but all of those everything we just listed is about one percent of the entirety of the bulk of ships everything else falls into the imperial navy the merchant fleets and then the very small after that are the civilian fleets i want to add to the civilian fleet as they're basically be considered under the civilian fleet larger crime networks have warp travel by the fact that they've

taken ships from and or astropath and whatever else. Yeah, those ones are goofy because technically the Imperium can see them. Right. That's always... We have the nexus. They're aware of every one of those ships. That's my funny thing is, it's like you've got these small... You get a couple villains

in the books that have war travel. But for the most part, the bad guys, the bad guys, they're all bad guys. Yeah. The bad guys that have ships are actually. large crime syndicate type things where they have control over a planet's worth of resources kind of thing. Yeah, and there's an element where the Imperium either knows about them and doesn't care or they're just on the list of murder later. But let's go real quick, the civilian fleet.

So the civilian fleet is a term used for people of wealth who want to move around the galaxy. These are private crafts, mostly owned people of high standing or power. So your navigator houses, planetary governors, Lords of Terra, assorted high-ranking bureaucrats, and people like, you want to the audits, they're going to have their own ships, they're going to fly in, inspection of supplies, etc. The next largest one, though, is the Imperial Navy. When I say next largest, the Imperial Navy is a fraction of the last one we'll talk about here. It's still so big, though.

I know. The Imperial Navy is larger than everyone we've talked about up to this point combined. And by a power of 100. Yeah, I mean, incredibly large. And real quick on the Imperial Navy, this is the spaceship arm of the Imperium. After the events of the Horace heresy, as part of an effort to prevent that ever happening again, the Imperial Army was split up. We've talked about Gillen breaking up the Space Marine Legions, but he also broke these guys up. And he did it because the idea was we can have a ground force, now called the Imperial Guard, and we'll have a Space Force, now called Imperial Navy, even though Space Force.

would have been a better name. And this way, you kind of shut off rebellions, because I can either have the sky or I can have the ground. Yeah, and having the sky is probably better. Don't get me wrong. You can orbital bombard, but you still can't take land. So eventually you will starve to death. And then if you're on the ground, you can conquer

a whole planet, but then we can either orbital bombard you or again, just starve you out. And then Bobby G. Completely redid that as soon as he came back. But because he got back and realized, look, you guys took this in a weird direction. I'm going to defend Bobby His ideas were good, but it required a very good bureaucrat to run it, and then he went and got himself stadd by Fulgram, so we lost our bureaucrat, and now we got our bureaucrat back.

So let's get this going. Now, the Imperial Navy is, I mean, this is every starship, not just start, this is all of the battleships, the cruisers, the transports, that's all the Imperial Navy. And they are a minuscule fraction compared to the merchant fleet. And by the way, next week, we're going to be covering these guys more in depth. But just so you understand, the merchant fleet itself is 90% of the entire imperial spacecraft. Well, let's throw that real quick. We're going to talk about more about it. But like, the reason, one of the reasons this is because we specialized worlds.

We said, hey, these guys make hubcaps. And you're like, hey, is there any vegetation on the entire world? You're like, that seems dumb. I said hubcaps. So they're like, we'll send you food. and we have to send everything to certain planets. And we do that over again. The Imperium of Man is a million planet strong.

And all of these are transporting goods and everything to all of these just so they survive. So this is a gigantic amount of ships. Exactly. The Imperial Navy moving around. These civilian fleet, space marine, ADMEC, all of this. Someone has to watch all of this. And we learned about this in a book. It's called The Nexus Axiomatic.

It's back on Terra. It's a, yeah, this is this. Normally, I wouldn't ruin a book, guys, on this one, but this is actually a small portion inside of another book, so I don't feel as bad doing this. So there's a book came out in 2019 called VALTS of Terror. It's about an inquisitor hunting down a, what he believes to be a, like, what you're called, like, it's just a spy novel.

It's a spy novel. Yeah, it's a four-de-a-all-reve-a-all. 40 case. It's 40s, but anyway, really cool. And while the inquisers hunting down, he encounters something called the nexus axiomatic. Now, the nexus axiomatic, which I'm going to start calling nexus because it makes my life a lot easier, is not a secret cabal. It's just an incredibly well-kept secret within Terra. I mean, I think you're doing it in justice to say incredibly. It is a secret that was kept for how many years?

It's more than three. Yeah, but it's also one of these things that it's kind of near the Golden Thrones or how do you get access to it? When we say secret, there's a lot of secrets than 40K. This one's more like, good luck getting there. You have to get through a lot of crap. But this guy did, and we get a little bit of description. So the

nexus is this ancient structure, but it's kind of cool because when inside of it, you've got information, you've got images, you've got structures that all date back to the age of technology. And you don't know from the writing if this is something where this building actually predates it. Was the Nexus built in like M15? Or did the emperor find all these pieces and then jam them in the Nexus during his unification wars? Right. And the thing is, it's effectively

air traffic control for the war. Or the galaxy, yeah. Yeah. Quadrillions of ships. this is the place where the ID code of every single ship is stored and checked. So in the phrase, it's an old code, sir, but it checks out. That would have gone through the Nexus. Within the Nexus, though, as the- Pump the brakes, John. Let's tell everyone, as with all things, Imperium, this place is a nightmare.

It is a horror show. Yeah. So the Imperium doesn't use AI. And so it has to be able to collate, track this much data. No regular human could do it. So they have something else. We don't know what these things really are. All we know is that there are these giant liquid vats,

and inside of them is a living being with a bunch of tubes and electronics plugged into it. Like you said, living being, because saying human would be question? Yeah. From the description, you can't tell that this used to be a human and it's mutated. Or is this something that was created for this? Is it an abhuman that was created for this? Also, is that guy been in there for 20,000 years? Yeah.

You don't know. We don't know. All we know is that they are in there and all of the data of the entire universe is flowing through them. Every Space Marine fleet, every Inquisition fleet, the black ships, everything. The Nexus could pinpoint the exact location of every inquisitorial agent, every Grey Knight ship, everything in the galaxy. So I did a Brad thing earlier about the crime.

syndicates, yeah, they can find every single one of them. It's just a matter of, do they bother? Because there's other crap going on. One of my favorite parts of the book, though, when we talk about the history is there are four pictures inside the nexus. And they kind of hint towards the origin of space travel for mankind. So the first two have a cloaked figure in it. You can't see his face, but it's clear it's the same figure. And the first one is the figure standing in front of the first ever warp engine. And the second one is the figure standing in front of the first ever Geller field. I think it's Malcador. Personally, I don't think it's the emperor. I think it's Malcador. But you can't see it. The third. It's just one of the two. How about this? For sure. I actually

took it as the emperor, but I could see Malcador also. Yeah, I just think it's Malcador because I don't see the emperor posing in front of it. I could see the emperors when taking the photo. All right, stand there for scale. Yeah, stand there for scale. Someone's got to see this crap. The third one, though, is the original designs of the Golden Throne. This is the picture of the actual, basically, the blueprints for the Golden Throne. This is a big deal, though, because the Golden Throne, then it shows the Golden Throne linking to the Galaxy, though. This isn't just the Golden Throne on Terra.

Exactly. Well, it's supposed to be. Because, remember, with the Webway project, the plan was to build this throne, it's going to give me, I'm going to link every system, every planet back to me, but also I'm going to link back into them. I believe the Golden Throne was meant to originally be a multi-way communication tool where He could just sit on it and rule the galaxy forever. I agree on that because he had an instantaneous communication and travel to everywhere in his empire.

Now, the fourth one is the one people who've read the book have a lot more debate around. The fourth one is a curled up fetus inside of a vat with a flame logo on its head. And some people think it's Magnus. Other people think it's an early cycle. There's a ton of ideas of what this could or could or would not be. There's been so much fan theory on this. Yes, and no one knows what it is because it's not that well described. Because the truth is, the flame logo sounds cool, but as far as I know, there's no flame logo on Magnus.

He's got red hair, so we don't really know what they are. But to me, what this implies is the nexus is one of the most important structures in the Imperium. The emperor hid this thing away hard with a lot of his most vital projects. I would assume the nexus was at least at some point close to the Primark project. I think a lot of the stuff he did was all built in one area. And now he's moved them around to kind of keep him safe from prying eyes. And funny story on prying eyes, by the way, one of those prying eyes is the Inquisition, who except for this one Inquisitor were not aware of this thing existed.

And I am sure they would love nothing more than they gain access to where every ship in the galaxy is. That would be fun for them. Also, the space marines would probably try to destroy it. The Lords of Terra would destroy it. the admec, the ad mech would just, they'd make it bigger. I mean, I was just going to say they would try to relocate it. Moving us to Mars. I also love the fact that the upper in my mind has got all these like Dr. Evil layers and plans going on at all times.

But one of the really cool things about the nexus, though, is getting away from the great mystery of it is what it tracks. And so when we talk about warp travel, the Imperium tracks the distance between points to map out more efficient travel. And these small changes can have really big effects. And since warp travel is one of the most critical elements, having a safe and reliable passage is paramount. And so one of those stories I like about this, I think this is eighth edition codex, is how wild warp travel is.

You have a high world called prox and a mining world called Hephaestin. Tens of thousands of ships make this journey. Somebody, they make it every single day, the same thing. Yeah, probably multiple times a day. And these. two planets are separated by 12 light years, all right? The average journey takes one to six weeks. So the average isn't even that type. There have been a couple ships that took 1200 years.

And another, a couple of have taken five minutes. But my favorite part is that 22% of the ships that have done the journey have yet to arrive. So that's warped from. And I use example, this is one of the most traveled routes in the entire Imperium still has that much variability to it. Now, before we close out this cast, because we're going to set this up for the next one, we talk about the war, travel, and all these things. There's one more piece that's important. The Imperium itself is segmented into segmentums. Sorry, GW does this stuff.

It breaks the galaxy into five parts because the galaxy is huge. And so you actually don't travel all the way across the galaxy. You tend to travel and do almost everything within your segment. And this is just more from the logistics and everything else standpoint. Some ships, obviously black ships go all the way across the galaxy, but like 99% plus percent of the galaxy stays within its segments. This is also where stuff like the Death Watch have separated throughout the galaxy. Even space marine fleets will not, they'll go like their home world,

but they'll tend to set themselves up. They stay in one segment almost all the time. And it's a big deal because it's messaging. It's travel, one, they figured out that if you stay within your segment most of the time, you can travel faster within those segments. They found basically the pathways through the warp in these particular ways go quickly. But it's also the fact that you have to send messages. You have to communicate and it takes time. So you can't have your forces on one side of the galaxy and they are on the other side and hope to manage.

For example, if you're out all that in like Tao space, you can't be realized. your message all the way back to Seoul. It will just take too long. So it goes more segmented. The other thing, too, is it's also response times. Like we just said, a 12-light-year journey could be five minutes. It could be 500 years. So the closer you are to the area, the better.

Everything tends to structure themselves out that way. So much so that we'll cover us more than the next cast, the merchant fleet actually only is approved to operate in its assigned segment. Oh, yeah, for sure. It moves outside of it. It is completely separate. We are kind of crazy about that, too. If one of those merchant ships goes outside of a segmenta,

you can just get blown up because they just assume you're not. Yeah. But let's talk about the segments real quick, just because I wanted to make sure we call them out before him. So not all are equal. So some like Seoul are very well developed and very well defended. And others like Ultima are a bit more Wild West. So just because there's two segmentas that have 90% of all of the conflict,

in the galaxy right now? Yeah, what? Where's the problem? So, real quick hitter here, Soul system. It's a main one. Geographically, it's the smallest, but it's the highest density

of colonized planets, and it's just like center left in the galaxy. That's where the soul system sits. Then, next to them, the left of soul, you have the segmentum Pacificus. This is the home of Colchis, which is the word bearers, and Tanneth, the former ghost.

Pacificus is one of those areas that now there's been some tyrannid activity there, but for the most part, it would appear in a novel as a world in a thing. But it was never much in the codexes. Then you have Segmentum Obscurus, which is just above Seoul. That's where the eye of terror is. Segmentum Obscurus, that one's a bit more critical. Also, Caliban, obviously, Bolial, Vigilus, Medusa, a lot of the primarks ended up in Obscurus. Obscorous kind of sucks.

But obscuris is very heavy part of a 40K lore. Underneath soul, below soul, you have the segmentum tempestus. When you say underneath, do you say to the south of soul? I mean, look at soul, and then

look down, and then you'll see obscuris. And obscureus is where Herberus is, Gryphon, Krieg, a few others, but the main thing about obscures, there's been like chaos incursion down there randomly. That's more what obscure is known for. But the real party is the ultimate segmentum. Ultimate segmentum is to the right of

soul. It's two to three times the size of every other segment. It might be five times a size of soul. It's a trash fire. This is where you don't move. The property values are really crappy right there. It is yet. Ultimus segmentum is the worst part of the galaxy. So you've got, this is where the orcs basically come from. The tower there. that big of a deal, but you know, whatever. I'm kidding. You also have like Kolf. You've got, believe the ghoul stars are out there. I mean, everything bad in the galaxy. You also got the

fringes of one of the Ternid fleets. One, like five. Yeah. This is the worst part of the galaxy, but it's the largest. And so what we're going to discuss the next time is a bit more of the merchant and some of those things. So that's where you make the most money. Because, you know, being a merchant in soul isn't that hard. It's, you know, it's paid, but fine. If you want to go out there and you want to like, same with rogue traders, you want to go out into the ultimate segmentum, that's where, that's where you can make your fortune. Cash money Benjamin's, baby. Exactly. Also murder, murder, murder, murder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's start. Let's keep with the cash money benjamins. Don't look at that bad side here. But I think let's break there,

because next week we're going to dive into a bit more of the function and life of space travel. We're doing the merchant fleets, naval fleets, the void-borne, some of the actual vessels themselves, a bunch of this stuff because this is things that I want to cover because it comes about when you're reading the game. You want to read a novel or if you're playing Rogue Trader or you're playing some of the video games. Rogue Trader comes up a ton. I like talking about this after I played Rogue Trader and I actually went back to Rogue Trader a couple times. So this is where I think the next cast we're going to talk a bit more of just the logistics and business behind a lot of this stuff. So we hope you guys liked this cast. I did. If you didn't, sorry, there's more stuff coming

that you will like. But until next week, this has been John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy.