There are occasional warp gates/tides in the warp that enable ships to do better than this, but it's VERY rare on a galactic scale. A 10 lightyear jump is dangerous-to-the-point-of-desperation, and anything more than that simply WILL get you killed and/or lost. How hard? You MIGHT be able to do a 3-5 lightyear jump without too much hassle. Without the Navigator you can still travel using the warp drive, but it's HARD. Once you're in the warp, you need a Gellar field (more on that in the end) to keep your ship from being torn apart by literal hell, and if you want a real chance of moving quickly you need a Navigator. There's a note about in one of the Eisenhorn books, though I forget which one. Interestingly, it does NOT need a navigator to operate, or indeed any kind of psyker.

It stands to reason that, if the Tau captured a Warp Field Generator, there would be biological bits attached as whatever hard-wired servitors or brains-in-jars used for processing power would obviously be biological in nature.

The revolt of the Men of Iron means ALL sufficiently complex machinery requires 'wetware' (brain/nervous system tissue from a biological source) to guard against another AI revolution. As a complex machine it would have to have some organic components, by Imperial and Mechanium law, but that's probably all vat-grown. We know this because human Warp Drives have been around since before human psykers. It's entirely mechanical in nature, apart from a few bits of organic matter for processing power.

Warp Drives Make the Hole, Gellar Fields Keep You From Dying, Navigators Make Travel EASY (some restrictions apply)Ī warp drive tears a hole in realspace via some fancy manipulation of the barrier separating realspace from the Immaterium.

Real warp drive ship gif