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A lot of 40k fluff is built around "The Warp" and how unreliable it is, but humanity originally expanded and colonized the entire galaxy WITHOUT the warp right?

Did they have sophisticated non-warp drives (STC drives?) In the Horus Heresy Novels, it is hinted that humanity originally had Star-Trek ish Warp conventional drives, the kind that doesn't invite daemons and make people insane. Was this technology lost? The human civilization Horus's crusade fleet met in the 2nd book didn't use the warp.

The Tau and Necrons do not use the Warp but their ships are still very fast, or even FASTER than human ships. Do they use conventional travel?

DorianGray wrote:A lot of 40k fluff is built around "The Warp" and how unreliable it is, but humanity originally expanded and colonized the entire galaxy WITHOUT the warp right?

Did they have sophisticated non-warp drives (STC drives?) In the Horus Heresy Novels, it is hinted that humanity originally had Star-Trek ish Warp conventional drives, the kind that doesn't invite daemons and make people insane. Was this technology lost? The human civilization Horus's crusade fleet met in the 2nd book didn't use the warp.

The Tau and Necrons do not use the Warp but their ships are still very fast, or even FASTER than human ships. Do they use conventional travel?

The Tau -do- use the warp. They make short jumps, skimming the surface of the warp as they have no Navigators, and thus are slower than the ships of the Imperium. This however doesn't really matter much, as Tau space is quite small in the grand scheme.

The Necrons do however travel without use of the warp.

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I believe the humans of the Dark Age of Technology used warp travel in a similar manner to how the Tau do now. The Lexicanum agrees with this thought, but I can't remember where I saw the information that it quotes, so as always, wikis can be wrong.

This would suggest that no, there are no non-warp drive STCs out there. IIRC, the Navigators were born from genetic experimentation in the DAoT, which would also suggest they were delving into the warp and were working on being able to travel further, faster.

Navigators were created by Scientists expierementing with Psykers, who also began to reappear during the DAoT(all Human psykers up to this points were part of the Emperor's soul)

Psykers were observed to draw power from the Alternate dimension called the Warp which humans were using to travel partly through.


Humans realized that Psykers could potentially allow for faster Warp jumps, and so the Navigators were born. While Navigators are specilized to Warp piloting, any Psyker can pilot a ship. just not as effectivly as a Navigator thanks to the 3rd eye.

Before the IoM space travel for humans was a combination of short warp jumps and multiple-generational ships.

Slowly... veeerrry slowly

You know the intelligence of an ork? That slow....

In the recent Deathwatch RPG rulebook there is a page which gives the progression of humanity throughout the millennia's. In the early stages of the the Dark age of Technology, they created sub-light space craft which were used to travel through space but the were still very slow and they continued to use them until the warp drive was created and they could travel through the warp.

Reading the Navigator entry on Lexicanum, it mentions that outside the range of the astronomicon, they have an extremely hard time operating, yet at the same time their existence and use predates the creation of the astronomicon. How exactly does that reconcile with itself? Have they simply lost the training or adaptation to working in "darkness"? In which case, wouldn't the astronomicon have been harmful, rather than helpful (unless it was a sort of "mass-produce Imperial navigators, blind non-Imperial navigators" sort of gambit that got away from itself)?

the Warp was far less turbulant in those days.

The would have been fairly close to the onset of the Age of Strife, though, which is implied to have been caused by the descent of the Eldar (finally coming to a head with the birth of Slaanesh that silenced the storms), which was already well under way by that point (implied by the Eldar codex, and Lexicanum's entry on the Age of Strife supports the descent as being responsible for the worsening storms, though sadly it lacks a citation for it), so the warp would have been fairly turbulent by that point anyways.

In addition, as they effectively "see" by its "light," they're effectively blind, or at least greatly hindered, in its absence. The only reasonable explanation that springs to mind is simply that they were originally trained to operate without it, and so were adapted to operating in the "dark," so to speak.