#got bit by a need to write my old astropath transcendent character having a terrible horrible no-good very bad day

[nightphoebe]

Sometimes you're getting ready for bed and the urge to write purple prose Warhammer 40k fanfiction slaps you in the face so hard you stay awake until 1:30 writing.

And by writing, I mean researching because in all my years of 40k experience, it never occurred to me that Games Workshop just do not give a fuck about the details of space travel. Like, there's a galactic map but its very broad strokes and it seems like, in every edition, important landmarks just move around.

Beyond that, there are very beautiful drawings of fuck off massive star ships that have no interior schematics at all. Where do people go in these things? What parts are for what?

The answer is it literally does not matter because they are only there to give background for how you got to Fuckedupplanetland IV where you will be engaging in land combat with enemy flavor of the week.

I don't blame them for this necessarily. Armies on ground maps are what they're selling. This isn't X-Wing. But like, I've played Fantasy Flight's Rogue Trader and it never occurred to me that for all that game takes place in space, there's very little... space travel to it.

There have been a lot of hand waving reasons for the inconsistencies in universe. Warp travel is so fucked up and weird that the people mapping the galaxy can only really guess where they and major landmarks are. But the fact that I could only find one example of space coordinates and they used fucking compass directions is boggling. Yeah, you've got segmentums and sectors but those are vast, vast sections of the galaxy. Ostensibly, there are subsectors, but those are never represented on a single map. How do the people in this universe ever get where they're trying to go in their monstrous city ships that are as full of fog of war as any battlefield because no one knows where anything is in them?

I don't know. I'm probably frustrated because I spent four hours scouring books, Lexicanum, Reddit, and any other sundry sources I could find only for the answer to end up being "I dunno, make shit up." I could have done that at the beginning of this ride. I'm a fanfic writer. Making up characters and scenarios and dialogue is what I do. But I find the 'make shit up' approach kills my emersion faster than anything else when it comes to things that should be technical knowledge in a universe.

Four hours, all for a single paragraph where an Astropath sends a distress call with fucking coordinates in it and I still had to fudge it.

I love being a writer.