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A friend of mine sent me this little gem: http://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/3/2055/grimdarkgrimdark.jpg

While it is hilarious, is it accurate?

Not quite. The scenario thusly described is like a Warp Jump that goes bad but successfully completes. The majority of the time, the only people who need to worry about anything during a Warp Jump is the Navigator (who is flying the ship) and the AdMech who are maintaining the Gellar Field Generator.

Everyone else can just go about their day, because nothing they can do has any hope at all of protecting the ship in the event the Gellar Field goes down.

That wasn't even successful. On another note. A SM cruiser might survive gellar field going down

Warp jumps are dangerous in the same way that Mediterranean ship travel was dangerous during Roman times - if you were on a long voyage, through a dangerous route, on a poorly maintained ship, crewed by a bad crew, at a time of the year when the weather was bad, then the voyage would be risky as hell but you would get to your destination more often than not. If you were making short trips through non-treacherous waters, there was almost no risk (though it wasn't zero risk).

40k is drawing from tropes of fantasy and history, and one of them is that sea travel (warp travel) is not very safe. But fan fiction has had this tendency to portray warp travel as this unbelievably hellish experience, with insane rates of attrition. That just doesn't make sense - space travel would be totally impractical if you lost 1/10 ships after the standard warp jump, it would just grind the imperial navy and merchant marine into dust. No, what makes more sense is that warp travel is for the most part fairly safe and reliable. Occasionally you'll have horrific accidents on safe routes, and there are many areas of the galaxy where warp travel is just very unsafe. During the Age of Strife, when earth was convulsed by warp storms, warp travel probably was this dangerous - and you can understand why the emperor would sit tight on earth and wait out the storm.

Fanon tends to exaggerate things like overall Imperial Guard attrition rates and, in this case, how lethal a warp jump is. The scenario described isn't successful at all. 80% of the crew died which means that either the Gellar fields flickered or they didn't pack enough food for the trip. Or there was a mutiny.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Fanon tends to exaggerate things like overall Imperial Guard attrition rates and, in this case, how lethal a warp jump is. The scenario described isn't successful at all. 80% of the crew died which means that either the Gellar fields flickered or they didn't pack enough food for the trip. Or there was a mutiny.

They reached their destination, and can always press-gang more into service, so the jump was "successful"1.

1=Defined as: daemons didn't tear the hull asunder and devour everyone aboard.

Some time ago I quoted the 6th edition BRB about the perils of warp travel. If I recall correctly it mentioned that something like 17% of all imperial traffic was eventually lost in the warp or had never arrived. So while maybe the picture you linked above was a bit off, there's still a nice little element of grim dark out there. (And a completely unsustainable loss rate, c'mon Admech, build those ships faster!)

FM Argos

Edit: so maybe the average jump isn't that bad, if gak goes down,... well,....have fun.

Well, 17% "eventually lost" is rather not much, when you consider that many Imperial vessels have been in service for thousands of years. This means that a given ship may, one day, be lost in Warp travel, but it may have served for three or four thousand years before that happens.

That's a pretty damn good record, really.

I suppose when you put it over time like that it doesn't sound as bad, but that's an eventual 1 in 6 chance of never coming back. I'm sure it's less for newer ( or older more advanced) vessels, but I'd hate to think that every time I went to drive to work I'd have that high of a chance for an accident.

Your grimdark milage may vary. (Ooh... car pun)

FM Argos

Forgemaster Argos wrote:
I suppose when you put it over time like that it doesn't sound as bad, but that's an eventual 1 in 6 chance of never coming back. I'm sure it's less for newer ( or older more advanced) vessels, but I'd hate to think that every time I went to drive to work I'd have that high of a chance for an accident.

Your grimdark milage may vary. (Ooh... car pun)

FM Argos

Ok, was there any mention of the percentage of vessels lost to piracy in the Imperial Fleet? That'd have been a great statistics to know.
Since the majority of the Imperial Fleet are in fact merchant fleets, which consists of mostly small ships; on top of the perils of warp travel, you'd have to face the probabilities of hostile boarding action against your small ship taking place shortly after exiting the warp. That's a pretty grimdark image to me.

The "blinded mentally traumatized man", who is later correctly called "Astropath" isn't the one plotting the warp route. That's the Navigator, as Psienesis already said. The Astropath's job is to communicate over astronomical distances (among other things, but that's their main function).

And that's just one misconception. So no, I wouldn't call it accurate.

That's just like a car accident rate. 1 in 5,000 people die in car accidents (official statistics). Basically, a car has 0.02% to end it's ~10-15 year expluatation period in a crash with casualties. Now imagine that a car is around for tens of thousands of years. I bet it's chances of ending in a crash would be around 100%. But the odds of it's regular drivers (that own it for 2-5 years on average) dying are still around 1 in 5000. See, if your car lasted longer, it'd more reliably cause someone to die. It's just playing with numbers.