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I wonder how W40K races discover starships (beyond eye range, of course).
Warp echoes ? If yes, does that mean ships not using "psy" or "warp related" power are more or less invisibles ?

The Imperium ships leave massive warp signatures where-ever they pass through the warp, usually followed by thousands of daemons. In Path of the Seer, the Eldar track the Sons of Orar as they travel through the warp, and do mention the trails left by the ships.

Eldar and I guess Dark Eldar, who do not utilise the warp would be harder to spot, the ships in 40k must use some sort of radar or whatever to track other ships in real space.

Also, I'd say many races use psykers to track and predict where enemies are going to go. Just my thoughts, anyone feel free to correct me.

Rouge trader describes auger arrays that detect gravity light and heat at really long range with no mention of how exactly they do so. It also mentions that the really good ones can see ships traveling in the warp.

I also skimmed a few BRG rules and found a few references to sensors, but no metion of what form they take. Though a few quotes seem to imply that they show a visual of their target.

Warp signatures and auger scanners. 40k has a lot of vague technology like that.

Basically, they can detect things coming into orbit.

Radar, warp trails, etc and other forms I would say.

Imperial ships can be spotted by the world they are heading to because they must drop out of the warp with several days travel beyond the system they are entering. Too dangerous to just drop right into the system, they don't have ability to calculate the entry to a precise spot. So they drop out in no mans land and then spend a few days getting into the system. Better than coming out and finding they are in the middle of a planets core.
Chaos ships can come in closer since they aren't really "enemies" to the warp.
The Tau skim it and sling shot out.
The Orks, well they are just plain mad. They tend to dive in and round and round we go, where we land our Waaaagh shall go.
Eldar and Dark Eldar have access to the webway gates, so come out either in orbit where a large gate is, or skip the need for the craftworld being put in danger and come out planetside from a smaller webway gate.
Necron's I think have better navigation and coordinate data, so they skip the randomness too.

I remember reading that nid ships use sublight speeds and gravity to travel, don't remember if this makes them easier or harder to spot though

 Hive Fleet Lazarus wrote:
I remember reading that nid ships use sublight speeds and gravity to travel, don't remember if this makes them easier or harder to spot though

I say harder. In DOW 2, they don't detect the nids till they start to make landfall.

40k is not really scifi, at least not in the sense of Star Trek. It's even less technobabbly than Star Wars. Whenever you want to think about how technology works in 40k, just apply one of these two helpful phrases:

[sacred technology lost to our understanding in this dark era]

-OR-

[vile xenos blasphemy that would drive an upright mind to ruin]

Any question about technology can be answered with one of these.

nomotog wrote:

 Hive Fleet Lazarus wrote:
I remember reading that nid ships use sublight speeds and gravity to travel, don't remember if this makes them easier or harder to spot though

I say harder. In DOW 2, they don't detect the nids till they start to make landfall.

Yea...we use our lovely little narwhals, which open up handly little rifts that we shove as many ships as we can through, then, once we encounter a gravity well, we get shunted out months or even years outside the system, and use sublight propulsion to finish out the rest of the leg of our journey. We don't have a warp signiture, so the only way to really detect us is to get thrown out of the warp from our shadow, on top of us, or look up at the sky as the drop pods fall, or pay attention to your intersystem radar scans and realize you have something insanely massive headed towards you.

LittleOrk wrote:
I wonder how W40K races discover starships (beyond eye range, of course).
Warp echoes ? If yes, does that mean ships not using "psy" or "warp related" power are more or less invisibles ?

On the latter point, yes. Necron raids are so dangerous because they seem to come out of nowhere, from the IoM's POV.

I dont think necron ships are capable of entering the warp? Maybe the fluff has been altered since their first codex - and i havnt read tomb kings one yet but if i remember correctly, necrons and c'tan are masters of realspace and the warp is their complete antithesis according to the previous codex and fluff necrons are able to manipulate realspace in ways that other races, including the eldar cannot comprehend

also, as been said before, if you dont want your ship to come into realspace in the middle of a planet or sun, you should do so in a bit of no mans land and use the days it takes to reach your target to prepare for the impending combat

I am not sure what your response to me (I presume) is intending to convey.

The usual way to detect something dangerous in IOM seems to be an outpost silenced or one last distorted and cryptic astropath message. IOM seems to use kind of "canary bird in the coalmine" alert system...

A signal is left just before ships 'surface' from the warp and when they materialize they can be detected by the usual radar type of things, as well as heat signatures ect...

 Hruotland wrote:
The usual way to detect something dangerous in IOM seems to be an outpost silenced or one last distorted and cryptic astropath message. IOM seems to use kind of "canary bird in the coalmine" alert system...

That's intentional, it represents man-kind overburden with it's massive network of planets and communication systems that every enemy of man has ample ways to silence them from the Imperium save strategic points like armageddon, cadia, fenris ect.

Thank you for all your answers, guys :-)

And some enemies are just plain sneaky. Like orks, or nids, or eldar, or necrons, or tau.

Another way of tracking a ship is to look for the massive radiation its engines will give off. Plus whatever light it is emiting.

In the BFG rulebook, the description of a ship disengaging is for the crew to cut the engines and all operating equipment to effectivly become invisible against the blanket of space. Then just drift away from the battle, fire up the warp drive once far enough away, and head for home.

Sometimes it's hilarious how close an enemy fleet can get

A DE fleet was sitting right over the SW world of Mydgarden for ages, unnoticed until they went and had a good look at all nearby space to find why recruits were just vanishing.

Granted the DE are good at hiding, but even so


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Another way of tracking a ship is to look for the massive radiation its engines will give off. Plus whatever light it is emiting.

In the BFG rulebook, the description of a ship disengaging is for the crew to cut the engines and all operating equipment to effectivly become invisible against the blanket of space. Then just drift away from the battle, fire up the warp drive once far enough away, and head for home.

Basically submarine tactics, only applied to all emissions, rather than just noise. You can still be spotted against the stellar backdrop or a world, visually, but who besides the Orks actually flies ships visually these days

Well unless the area is particularly well lit up its going to be very tough to see a ship in the blackness of space.

They will blot out the stars/shadow planets

If you have a viewer capable of magnification you could pick them out.

It would be hellishly difficult at any range, but possible.

Warp signatures is plausible; the fact that spaceships are hundreds of degrees hotter than the surrounding space makes them pretty hard to pick out, I'd guess that the easiest way to find a spaceship is to look for the heat.

Considering the ship would need to be insulated to avoid freezing the crew, its probable that they wouldn't show any major heat index from the outside.

Insulating the hull would roast the crew. Not to mention you can't insulate thrust from the engines.

Depends on the engines

A drive system based on gravetics (Eldar ships are iirc..could be wrong) would generate little heat, but would set any thing set for detecting gravity wells off.