Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-25618639-20150220210346/@comment-6078851-20150313162313

i know, i'm not actually disputing that :)  when i say non-astronomican (or beacon device) warp travel was/is relatively safe for short trips, i do mean relatively: it's still very dangerous and ships were lost regularly, but compared to longer trips through warpspace it was much safer and the loss of ships were far, far fewer. relatively safe short trips through warpspace though are very short trips, galactically speaking: this is just an arbitrary number but i'd imagine that maybe a hundred or so 'neighbouring' systems to terra could be considered close enough for relatively safe 'short trips' through the warp, allowing for a fairly well connected and stolid core-system for the empire. but remember the scale that empire achieved - possibly greater than the imperium - so the vast majority of the empire would be well beyond safe warp travel and as such most of their inter-steller commerce/trade would rely on more conventional means. i've read that they did occaisionally try long trips through the warp, but only for the direst of emergencies since the chances of ships exiting on the other end was, under the absolute best circumstances, something like 10 percent.

it does raise the question of how good their ftl was though. i don't know how good the imperium's ftl tech is, but since such tech is hand-me-downs from the previous empire i think we can safely assume that their ftl was better than the imperium's.