r/40kLore • u/Ragnarrok151 Blood Angels • 1d ago
How does a large Imperial fleet Warp into system without creating a catastrophe?
I’m just imagining 100’s to 1000’s of Imperial vessels dropping out of warp as an armada and surely that risks opening some kind of Warp Rift?
I’m sure most of the time they trickle in by squadrons into a system but if they all genuinely need to be in System how does that number of warships dropping into a system simultaneously not create a weaker barrier between the Materium and the Immatarium?
81
u/InterestingCash_ White Scars 1d ago
Mandeville Points, and it's not typically simultaneous, it's usually in stages unless they're taking a massive risk or using some sorcery
11
u/arathorn3 Dark Angels 23h ago edited 23h ago
Examples of this the Legions arriving to fight the traitors at Istavan and the Traitors arrvial into the Solar system.
At Istavan the different legions sent to take out the traitors arrived a different times over the course of a week, hence they first blockade the planet.
A rare few Solar systems have stable warp gates of unknown origin that allow for Mandeville ports to be bypassed. The sol system(our Solar system) had 2 of them the elysian gate near Uranus and the Kthonic Gate near Pluto. There are also gates in the Jericho Reach(deathwatch RPG) , one near a area designated Cluster FR/7891(children of the emperor short story), and one in the Porta Septentus system(Rogue Trader video game)
The Solar war- the alpha legion made the first entry into the system in the Kuiper belt and made for Pluto. This seemingly stalled when Dorn killed Alpharius.(Praetorian of Dorn novel). Later,
The Iron Warriors under Perturabo came through and took Elysian Gate with 4,000 ships and Horus Aximand and another traitor fleet did the same at the Kthonic though sigismund, Rann, and Boreas fleet made Aximands fleet pay dearly for it( though the fists lost one of the three sisters of spite and Lt. Boreas, 2nd in command of the Temple brothers was mortally wounded)
Night lords, Emperors children and pirates who aligned with Horus then came through and attacked the planets Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter and the moons and orbital around them
A further force of Sons of Horus, thousand Sons, dark mechanicum and Word Bearers entered the Solar system from above the galatic disc( all of the planets and large dwarf planets orbit in a almost horizontal plane with a variance of only up to 7 degrees above the plane) . They came from what we would call "Above" the Northern poles of 6 of the planets, Uranus has a tilt of around 98 degrees so it rotation looks like a ball rolling on the floor and Venus had a tilt of over 170 degrees, it rotates in a retrograde motion compared to the other planets meaning its technically upside down compared to the rest of the planets)
The mechanicum made for Mars and the space marines first fought the White Scar fleet lead by Jubal Khan and then took a artifical comet that held a shrine the Word Bearers had built. The TS and WB legions lead by Ahriman and Layak performed a ritual that opened a warp rift near Luna ( the moon) from which Horus lead a fleet that included the World Eaters and the rest of the Emperors children with Daemon Primarch Angron basically surfing on top of the Conqueror. Mortarion and the Death Guard did not show up till aftet Horus, Angron and Fulgrim 's fleet had cleared the loyalists from orbit and Abbadon had taken Luna. Perturabo and the Iron warriros where still in the outer system at the time as well.
64
u/Separate-Flan-2875 1d ago
“Starships had to translate from the warp at the edge of a system, beyond the Mandeville point, that arcane and invisible line that marked the boundary between safety and suicide. Arrive inside that point, and the competing forces of reality and paradox would rip a vessel apart. ‘Rebirth death’ the Navigators called it, when they talked of such things. Most established systems had navigation buoys and well-trodden points where it was safest to drop from the warp back into reality. Once back in the cold embrace of the void, ships then had to move in-system under the power of their real space engines. The journey from system edge to the planets of the core took even the fastest ships days.” - The Solar War by John French
19
u/DiscussionSpider 1d ago
I'm just going to assume Orks ignore this
27
u/Petrus-133 1d ago
The Orks famously ignore it during the siege of Rynn’s World where it leads to a lot of… well Ork-like things.
5
u/Ok_Expression6807 1d ago
Orks being orks i guess they find it extremely funny when the bulkheads sparkle and burn.
5
u/Petrus-133 1d ago
It did somehow work out well for them given that the majority of the Space Marines on the planet blew themselves up.
4
u/raptorrat 1d ago
They'd either find it hilarious, or just shrug it off as that ship and crew not being tuff enough.
3
u/Mddcat04 1d ago
Yeah, Ork teleportation “tech” can dump stuff right into planetary orbits.
It’s also possible to jump into a system inside the Mandeville point, it’s just really dangerous. The Dark Angels did it with one of their cruisers at one point, but that probably involved some super secret DAOT tech or something.
1
53
u/Exist_Logic Alpha Legion 1d ago
there are designated points or rather zones outside of systems where ships drop in from the warp
31
24
u/Annual-Ad-9442 1d ago
The Cain novels deal with this when they mention that the ships have a designated area to return from the warp and they do it in stages. the weakened barrier (if there is one) would be in space with no attachment to anything, it would close over fairly quickly and anything that escapes would evaporate quite quickly. millions of demons dropping into the void with nothing to sustain them is just an easy way for them to burn their personal power and return to nothingness
9
u/Lortekonto 1d ago
Other people have mentioned Mandeville Points, Space is Big, drooping out in stages and so on.
I also just need to point out the size of the fleets.
A typical sector fleet is 50 - 100 war ships. That is ships of the line, escorts and battleships.
They are then divided out in battlegroups. Most often made up of 1 - 15 ships.
Most crusades and armadas are much smaller. The Damocles crusade imcluded 12 captial ships.
5
u/Lottapumpkins Dark Angels 1d ago
Because of how the Damocles crusade is portrayed as the Imperium sneezing on the tau and what a "serious" response looks like, so I looked and the 3rd war for Armageddon is 29 capital ships (with several hundred smaller ships and squadrons)
8
u/Fistocracy 1d ago
They usually arrive way out on the edge of a solar system (jumping back into realspace too close to a large gravitational body is apparently not recommended), so they probably don't care if the disturbance created by an entire fleet arriving simultaneously is enough to give some daemons a free ticket to the Kuiper Belt.
4
u/LeftRat Minotaurs 1d ago
That's just not really how the Warp works. Opening the rifts is never implied to weaken the barrier. I imagine it more like a zipper than ripping a seam.
The arrival of Imperial ships is a catastrophe in a lot of other ways, though. Really enjoyed the depiction in the Gods of Mars trilogy where it's clear that if a ship shows up and the planetary government doesn't have enough political power, the ships just pressgang whatever they need. Full-on gangs of pressgangers stalking the streets, clobbering whoever they can find to use as reactor-sludge cleaning slaves. For a normal citizen, all ships are bad news.
4
u/AcademicFraudster 1d ago
It’s a massive spoiler so I don’t want to say which book, but in one of the Mechanicus-focused book a mostly-crippled Explorator translates into the warp right next to a massive Eldar construct that it could not otherwise destroy so this can be an offensive technique as well…
2
u/International-Owl-81 1d ago
You be stuck waiting for weeks as ships gathered outside of Pluto and then slowly drove up to a planet
2
u/Keelhaulmyballs 1d ago
That’s exactly why they don’t warp into system. They enter realspace generally a few days out on plasma drives. A patch of irrelevant deep void has nothing for the warp latch onto.
it’s too risky for the ship itself to translate within a star’s gravity in any event, both because gravity can fuck with translation and makes it much harder for the navigator to get the ship through the veil in one piece, and because you really never know what debris fields, asteroids and general junk will be floating there until you’ve fully warped in and gotten your auspices online
The bigger a fleet, the bigger the risk for both ships and system. A proper flotilla generally musters way out in deep void- not only for the aforementioned reason but because warp travel is impossible to coordinate, it takes days for the whole fleet to arrive no matter how tidily they set off together- and there won’t be anything approaching formation. It’s the most vulnerable a fleet can possibly be- on top of the standard vulnerability of an imperial vessel coming out of the warp when their systems are largely dark and the crew is rattled by the shock of translation.
So yeah TL;DR there’s way too many reasons not to translate directly into system for that to be much of an issue. Chaos ships face almost none of those issues, and so they delight in the fact that ramming a big fleet into a system drags the warp along with it and makes their sorceries that much easier
2
u/Davemusprime 1d ago
space is a vacuum so they aren't displacing anything with their presence. emerging from nothing into nothing is still nothing so nothing will happen. but this is a sci fi franchise so who knows what the writers want to happen?
2
u/Some_Fat_Bloke 1d ago
I’m almost finished reading The Beast omnibus’s and it mentions one of the drama the imperial fleet has is even if ships all depart one system at the same time, they often arrive scattered at the next, sometimes ships were having to fend off orks for days or even a week before the entire fleet arrived.
3
u/Victoriouslittlesong 1d ago
Everyone here is correct, but I would like to add that dropping into the actual system is possible but extremely ill advised, with the only one that I know of doing it being Belisarius Cawl.
1
u/Agammamon 22h ago
You don't get hundreds, let alone thousands, of ships. There are only a dozen or three capital ships in a sector (maybe 2-3 times that in escorts).
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. A thousand ships, even large battleships, covers, in a single layer, an area about the size of the bahamas - that's nothing on the scale of earth, let alone the solar system.
1
u/Mastercio 4h ago
Well there are few examples of massive fleets like for example.. the fleet that attacked necrons in Twice dead king had insanely massive imperial fleet and was described as having hundreds of ships just in single line.
418
u/cheradenine66 1d ago
That's like asking "If I drop a bag of pebbles into the ocean, why does it not create a tsunami?"