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Wondering with the issues the Great Rifts causes to the communication and space travel of the IoM would that not leave most forge and hive worlds without the ability to get resupplied with food from the agri worlds. Even a small problem could cause massive galaxy wide starvation and if its as bad as it seems how close is humanity to being wiped out completely?

The imperium being cut off happened before. many will probably die but it not something they cannot survive.

also its just called the great rift? (im making a csm force and i was hoping it had a better name to work with :( )

Astropaths still work and warp travel is still possible, it's just likely severely impaired on the other side of the rift.

 Desubot wrote:
also its just called the great rift? (im making a csm force and i was hoping it had a better name to work with :( )

The Imperium's official name for it is the Cicatrix Maledictum. Other factions across the galaxy know it by different names, like the Crimson Path, the Warp scar, and Gork's Grin.

ooo thanks mate.

now i gotta come up with a name off one of those

 Frontline989 wrote:
Wondering with the issues the Great Rifts causes to the communication and space travel of the IoM would that not leave most forge and hive worlds without the ability to get resupplied with food from the agri worlds. Even a small problem could cause massive galaxy wide starvation and if its as bad as it seems how close is humanity to being wiped out completely?

It's pretty bad.
Note that most worlds needing food from off-world are supplied from within the sector - if a sector is cut off from Terra that's bad but it doesn't mean the sector dies.

The inability to co-ordinate raising armies across segmenta is a far, far bigger deal when faced with the scale of threat armies the imperium has traditionally had to fight.

Military response in the Imperium is somewhat decentralized in the first place. A world under attack calls for help and the nearest worlds send aid. If that is insufficient, other worlds nearby send aid and so on in an expanding radius, until the threat is neutralized by numbers if nothing else.

The main effect of the Cicatrix Maledictum/Great Rift would be disruption of long range navigation, since the Astronomicon is not visible. This means ships would have to rely on local warp beacons or resort to the calculated jumps instead. This makes space travel longer and I think would result in worlds, sub-sectors, and sectors breaking off from the Imperium, in fact if not necessarily in name. They would have to look to their own local needs and I could see worlds banding together instead of relying on any aid or communication from the wider Imperium.

 Frontline989 wrote:
Wondering with the issues the Great Rifts causes to the communication and space travel of the IoM would that not leave most forge and hive worlds without the ability to get resupplied with food from the agri worlds. Even a small problem could cause massive galaxy wide starvation and if its as bad as it seems how close is humanity to being wiped out completely?

Any world that needs to import food needs to be close to an Agri-World, just from sheer logistics issues. WH40K tends to show single star systems with multiple inhabited planets (suggesting a lot of terraforming went on during either the Slann, Eldar or human expansion ages), and probably a hive world is getting food from an agri-world in the same system, or another system very close. Granted the ships in 40K are huge, but that just means that loading and unloading times are equally huge. The less time spent going from system to system, the better, because the longer the journey, the more ships you need going back and forth (or the bigger the ships you need).

 Desubot wrote:
The imperium being cut off happened before. many will probably die but it not something they cannot survive.

also its just called the great rift? (im making a csm force and i was hoping it had a better name to work with :( )

It is officially called the Cicatrix Maledictum, in the space marine codex.

To be fair, this is humanitys 20th or so extinction level event. At this point your average human has outdone the cockroach and most microbes for sheer survivability.

Eldar Guardian: By the gods, they virus-bombed their own planet. Surely nothing survived!

Eldar Farseer: Nope. Take a look. Still a bunch of half dead humans wandering around.

Eldar Guardian: Damn. Now even the dead ones are getting back up.