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The imperium travels using navigators and the astronomicon, but how do chaos space marines, and fleets navigate, are there traitor navigators or the the dark gods just guide them. Also I know imperial ships have a reality bubble to hold some real space around the ship to protect from demons and warp creature so o chaos ships also have that because I think it was invented after the Horus heresy.

The Gellar field is the reality bubble and it was invented in the Dark Age of Technology.
Chaos ships don't really need them because demons are nicer to them and they navigate with normal psykers I think.

in the exact same manner as the imperials, but with the ability to have deals with some deamonic entities for protection.

Key thing to remember is that Chaos is not the warp, its just made from the from the warp, kill off chaos and the warp will still be there, kill off the warp and chaos dies,so if your gellar field drops in the warp regardless of faction, you are mega bonned and will likely die

pm713 wrote:
The Gellar field is the reality bubble and it was invented in the Dark Age of Technology.
Chaos ships don't really need them because demons are nicer to them and they navigate with normal psykers I think.

Depends entirely on the Daemon. Many are just as dangerous to Chaos as everything else.

In False Gods or Galaxy in Flames, a daemon tells Horus that while the Powers can darken (ala the Ruinstorm) the Warp, they can also bring light. I presume that the Gods light the way for their followers when it suits them. That is to say, they traverse the warp more easily than loyalists do.

Chaos fleets use navigators where they can.

They use regular psykers in a pinch (although this is more stressful for the psyker, and more dangerous for the ship).

Chaos ships do not sail in the light of the Astronomican, and strongly Chaos-aligned vessels recoil from its touch.

The Night Lords series features a navigator on a Chaos Marine ship as one of the primary POV characters, so its a good place to get some source material for this question, if you're interested in reading more.

Interestingly I think in Lords of Silence, the Death Guard ship is lost as its Chaos Navigator cannot see the Astronomicon after Abaddon breaks the gate

 KiloFiX wrote:
Interestingly I think in Lords of Silence, the Death Guard ship is lost as its Chaos Navigator cannot see the Astronomicon after Abaddon breaks the gate

But as that's DG, that's not a problem. All of their ships, by either Nurgle's will or some quirk of the Warp always return home to the Plague Planet.

Chaos is the Warp, and the Warp is Chaos.

Chaos Marines still have Navigators, they just navigate by alternative means to the Astronomican. Some use psychic powers, some use the Eye of Terror as a waypoint, etc.


Just because one Chaos God is minimally fond of you is no real protection against the various manifold denizens of the Warp were a Chaos ship to jump completely unprotected.
To get that kind of protection, you'd probably need to have some serious Chaos deity backing and attention for a crucial pivot point on the lines of fate/destiny, and even then, they still might decide on a whim you'd look better with extra limbs. Something which the likes of Abbadon and co. would never dream of risking.

 Ketara wrote:
Chaos Marines still have Navigators, they just navigate by alternative means to the Astronomican. Some use psychic powers, some use the Eye of Terror as a waypoint, etc.

But as KiloFiX points out, in Lords of Silence, at least one Chaos Navigator does rely on the Emperor's lighthouse.

 Ketara wrote:

Just because one Chaos God is minimally fond of you is no real protection against the various manifold denizens of the Warp were a Chaos ship to jump completely unprotected.
To get that kind of protection, you'd probably need to have some serious Chaos deity backing and attention for a crucial pivot point on the lines of fate/destiny, and even then, they still might decide on a whim you'd look better with extra limbs. Something which the likes of Abbadon and co. would never dream of risking.

So how do so many Chaos Space Marines live on worlds that are within the Eye of Terror, Maelstrom and Great Rift? Aren't these areas of space literally Warp made manifest?

 Ginjitzu wrote:
But as KiloFiX points out, in Lords of Silence, at least one Chaos Navigator does rely on the Emperor's lighthouse.

I'm not entirely sure how, given that it's stated elsewhere the Astronomican is blinding to Chaos Navigators.

That said, perhaps it's like the sun; you can sort of move around it without looking directly at it? But still using it as a point of reference? That would make sense.

So how do so many Chaos Space Marines live on worlds that are within the Eye of Terror, Maelstrom and Great Rift? Aren't these areas of space literally Warp made manifest?

In the deepest parts. But it isn't the case that you drive over the border border with the Eye of Terror and you're suddenly in the Warp; it's more a case of degrees where the veil gradually thins between the real world and the Warp the further in you go. To put it more quantitatively, it'll take you five million souls being killed at once to open a gateway outside the EoT, maybe three million on the brink, one million a few systems inside, and so ad infinitum (to pluck figures out the air for demonstration). The more psychically attuned will be more open to hearing whispers, manifested daemons will require less warp energy to stay manifested, astropaths will be more likely be sent mad and find it harder to send messages, and so on.

Once you get well inside, it doesn't mean the laws of the Universe vanish even then. It might be the case that only sufficient warp energy leaks through locally to enable a certain small number of daemons to stay manifested. Or to enable what would have been tremendous feats of sorcery to break the bonds of reality with very little effort (allowing you to reshape the surface of an actual world and conjure things from nothing for example). That doesn't mean pure warp denizens can appear and disappear at will, the physical universe is still the primary feature; with the warp as a sort of an easily accessed overlay on the top.

So you'll find our Chaos Marines are living in areas where they can use sorcery to bend the worlds around them to their will much more easily, where those who refuse to have truck with daemonic powers simply couldn't live. But that doesn't mean that daemons and warp entities have free reign there; and our friendly local neighbourhood Veteran of the Heresy isn't going to be keen on being entirely at the whim of every Horror of Tzeentch (which thinks his intestines would be funnier on his face). So our CSM friends will still have the Gellar Field activated when they jump systems.

 Ketara wrote:

Spoiler:

 Ginjitzu wrote:
But as KiloFiX points out, in Lords of Silence, at least one Chaos Navigator does rely on the Emperor's lighthouse.

I'm not entirely sure how, given that it's stated elsewhere the Astronomican is blinding to Chaos Navigators.

That said, perhaps it's like the sun; you can sort of move around it without looking directly at it? But still using it as a point of reference? That would make sense.

So how do so many Chaos Space Marines live on worlds that are within the Eye of Terror, Maelstrom and Great Rift? Aren't these areas of space literally Warp made manifest?

In the deepest parts. But it isn't the case that you drive over the border border with the Eye of Terror and you're suddenly in the Warp; it's more a case of degrees where the veil gradually thins between the real world and the Warp the further in you go. To put it more quantitatively, it'll take you five million souls being killed at once to open a gateway outside the EoT, maybe three million on the brink, one million a few systems inside, and so ad infinitum (to pluck figures out the air for demonstration). The more psychically attuned will be more open to hearing whispers, manifested daemons will require less warp energy to stay manifested, astropaths will be more likely be sent mad and find it harder to send messages, and so on.

Once you get well inside, it doesn't mean the laws of the Universe vanish even then. It might be the case that only sufficient warp energy leaks through locally to enable a certain small number of daemons to stay manifested. Or to enable what would have been tremendous feats of sorcery to break the bonds of reality with very little effort (allowing you to reshape the surface of an actual world and conjure things from nothing for example). That doesn't mean pure warp denizens can appear and disappear at will, the physical universe is still the primary feature; with the warp as a sort of an easily accessed overlay on the top.

So you'll find our Chaos Marines are living in areas where they can use sorcery to bend the worlds around them to their will much more easily, where those who refuse to have truck with daemonic powers simply couldn't live. But that doesn't mean that daemons and warp entities have free reign there; and our friendly local neighbourhood Veteran of the Heresy isn't going to be keen on being entirely at the whim of every Horror of Tzeentch (which thinks his intestines would be funnier on his face). So our CSM friends will still have the Gellar Field activated when they jump systems.

I think I read somewhere Chaos followers have a easier time moving through their god’s home realm, but they still need gellar fields to stop Daemons in the warp collecting on their pacts.

They probably will also have daemons bound within parts of their ships which can repel other forces while in transit like a Geller field would.

I would actually think that Geller fields would actually play holy hell with all the possessed artifacts inside of a Chaos ship, rather than be a benefit, honestly.

I don't think it would. Binding demons into objects seems to make them stable in reality so a gellar field would do nothing to artifacts just demons.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Chaos is the Warp, and the Warp is Chaos.

That is not true, Chaos is made up of the warp, but cannot exist without it, however if you get rid of chaos somehow, the warp still exists, so chaos is the warp, but the warp is not chaos.

In the Tale of Ctesias, Ctesias places runes throughout a rival sorcerer's ship was visiting it. When the ship enters the war, the runes take down the Gellar field and daemons attack the ship, killing every. Ctesias himself describes it as 'the perfect murder.' So yeah, Chaos ships still need to protect themselves while traveling.

They have lots of ways, navigators, sorcerers can even do it, bonded daemons can and even servitors, like the one the Lion used to navigate through the ruinstorm.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

pm713 wrote:
I don't think it would. Binding demons into objects seems to make them stable in reality so a gellar field would do nothing to artifacts just demons.

Yeah gellar fields just keep them out. If there is a hole in the gellar field daemons can get in and they aren't effected by the field when they are inside. Plus Urkanthos has the biggest collection of daemons slaved to his ships.

 Ginjitzu wrote:

I don't know how much of your description is canon, and how much is your own interpretation, but I like it. I find the idea of the veil between reality and unreality - if I may so coin a phrase - being thinner in the Eye than outside of it, much more appealing than the Eye just being a piece of the warp in space. I have to admit that I sometimes imagined that deamon worlds were just worlds where deamons and worshippers lived alongside each other, and it always seemed like nonsense to me. Like what could bloodletters possibly be getting up to in their down time? Do they just sit around talking about how great it is to spill blood?

As far as I'm aware, it's all canon/consistent with the fluff. We see Chaos Navigators working in several series (the Night Lords series for example) and we see worlds within the Eye of varying degrees of corruption (see for example, the Iron Warriors hangout in the Ultramarines series, or several fortified bases). We also regularly see references to the 'piercing the veil' when it comes to opening warp portals or performing large scale Chaos rituals. And so on.

The forces of Chaos hang out in the Eye of Terror because they're not scared of 'corruption' or mutation. Many of them serve the Chaos Gods, and even for the ones which don't, being there grants them security from the Big E's forces and in many regards, opportunities for considerable power. You can claim rune-studded weapons, perform psychic feats which would be ten times harder were you outside a warp rift, rule over entire worlds of chattel, and so on. There's virtually no risk of the Imperium, the 'Nids, or the Eldar showing up to ruin your day.

Furthermore, there are entire civilian populations and the odd alien race around to dominate and rule over. You can have a series of fortress studded worlds, hundreds of millions of devotees, mortal armies in the millions, and more. You can infuse war machines with daemon spirits to power them, lash thousands of psykers together into warp weapons of mass destruction, fight for immortality in the eyes of the Gods. The possibilities are endless. It's why many Chaos Marines never even leave the eye; they're too caught up in the Great Game.

And the further into the Eye you travel, the more the Warp pervades reality and the thinner the boundary gets; until you hit the epicentre where space and time no longer mean anything and matter can be created and dissipated with but a thought. The realm where the Chaos Gods create and destroy worlds and vast daemon armies at a whim.


The only problem really, is that none of it holds true once you leave the Eye. Daemons and warp-energy reliant enhancements are snuffed out; unable to maintain corporeal form. Which is a big problem if the only reason your fifth eye works is because of warp energy instead of biology, or your ships are relying entirely on giant farting mutant tentacles to fly. If the geneseed of your warriors has degraded so far that it can only stabilise with regular psychic shennanigans; your warriors will keel over the minute you leave the Eye and their implants are rejected. And so on. It's why the Gods don't just 'create' fifty million marines and throw them out the Eye; they'd be so reliant on Warp energy for their existence that they couldn't move outside of it.

I agree with Kerala. At the end of the day, there’s no one answer. We’ve seen slaved human navigators, warp corrupted chaos navigators, psykers, Daemons, ships that are Daemons, warp devices, secret charts, etc. all used.

What we do know is that Renegades are slightly less concerned and / or impacted by corruption but they still face perils.

 Formosa wrote:

 Nurglitch wrote:
Chaos is the Warp, and the Warp is Chaos.

That is not true, Chaos is made up of the warp, but cannot exist without it, however if you get rid of chaos somehow, the warp still exists, so chaos is the warp, but the warp is not chaos.

I'm just paraphrasing Codex: Chaos Daemons. I'd quote it but I don't have a current copy to hand. Maybe they removed that part?

I assume the Daemons just all agree to not bother the CSM since it smells/is similar to their own chaosy~ ness

 Nurglitch wrote:

 Formosa wrote:

 Nurglitch wrote:
Chaos is the Warp, and the Warp is Chaos.

That is not true, Chaos is made up of the warp, but cannot exist without it, however if you get rid of chaos somehow, the warp still exists, so chaos is the warp, but the warp is not chaos.

I'm just paraphrasing Codex: Chaos Daemons. I'd quote it but I don't have a current copy to hand. Maybe they removed that part?

Dont really know to be honest, however if they have written that in the chaos codex they are wrong and they simply do not understand the setting that was created long before they added to it, chaos has always been shown and we have always been told that it is made up of concept and emotion, its a virtual sea of souls as well, we have also been told that the warp used to be a calm placid place until sentient races started throwing their mind STDs into the ether and causing all kinds of horrible entities being born, so if you strip away all of the sentient life in the multiverse, the warp is becalmed as there is no source of emotion or concept to create these "creatures" , but the warp will still go on without anything in it, not even the chaos gods would survive if all life across all universes ceased to exist.

On topic though, Deamons do not care which god you follow, they do not care if you are an ally or not, if your gellar field falls, you are dead, pure and simple, the raw stuff of the warp is anti matter (not literal antimatter) and will dissolve anything it comes into contact with over time, bodies go very quickly if exposed while larger objects last longer (and form space hulks sometimes).

Basically it goes like this, your ship is travelling in the warp, your field falls, the warp forms deamons of no particular god from your perceptions that invade your ship, while the ship itself starts to warp from the outside in, eventually the raw warp stuff (think of it as radiation) will start affecting you, twisting your body as it overwhelms the real space within the ship replacing it with "warp radiation" that is seeping in, you will then dissipate into the warp completely.

Now if your incredibly lucky a god might intervene and protect you or you might drop out of the warp in some random location

Talon of Horus and Black Legion make it very clear that the relationship Chaos Marines have with Daemons is dubious at best, but for the most part they are able to navigate through the Warp without the protection afforded by Gellar fields. In those books, the Black Legion actually uses very powerful psykers from their assorted recruits as an alternative to Navigators. There is also some vaguely defined Chaos Space Marine Warband called the Warp Ghosts who act as ferrymen for the most tumultuous areas of the Warp.

Eye space is not the warp though Darth Bob, its just saturated with warp energy, so the ships can travel within the eye space "relatively" safely, as soon as they enter the warp proper though they need the gellar field up, others wise they disolve.

 Darth Bob wrote:
Talon of Horus and Black Legion make it very clear that the relationship Chaos Marines have with Daemons is dubious at best, but for the most part they are able to navigate through the Warp without the protection afforded by Gellar fields. In those books, the Black Legion actually uses very powerful psykers from their assorted recruits as an alternative to Navigators. There is also some vaguely defined Chaos Space Marine Warband called the Warp Ghosts who act as ferrymen for the most tumultuous areas of the Warp.

What about super devoted ones like Word Bearers? I'd have thought Demons would like them as they're super big fans of everything chaos.

pm713 wrote:
What about super devoted ones like Word Bearers? I'd have thought Demons would like them as they're super big fans of everything chaos.

Chaos is chaotic. For every daemon capable of understanding you're a fan and giving you some sort of help there's another who thinks your highest desire is to be a plaything to break in some violently disturbing way. Worshipping Chaos doesn't make you that much safer from it, mostly it just gnaws away at your sanity so you no longer care about the danger.

Surely sacrificing some cultists in a blood ritual eould appease some deamons for safe passage?

 Formosa wrote:
Eye space is not the warp though Darth Bob, its just saturated with warp energy, so the ships can travel within the eye space "relatively" safely, as soon as they enter the warp proper though they need the gellar field up, others wise they disolve.

I don't think that's the case - the gellar fields are there to keep malevolent warp entities at bay, but to preserve the structure of normal matter in the warp. Space Hulks do just fine, after all.