Another good show guys. Inheritance seems to be getting interesting now. I’m going to pop over to the forums to see if I can sort out that faster than light issue. By the way, the Deliverance Lost is the Horas Heresy novel with the Raven Guard in it where it all goes wrong for them.

Do they have to travel at “warspeed”? Maybe that’s why they took 10,000 years to return.

Before deciding on how their armies are organised, how they fight, etc., it might be best to think about who they were fighting against as that dicates how they evolve to fight them. The Roman army is also a good example in this respect.

Congratulations. I’ve genuinely no idea what the beeped “Ming the G???less” is. +1 for creative swearing (and if anyone wants to DM me I’d be grateful).

Ming the Germless ?

Usually, I’m not hugely welcoming to this sort of AU scenario, because it can get REALLY messy in a hurry, but this is, potentially, magnificent.

As far as “light speed” goes, I think that if you want to make a harder scifi faction, you will want to avoid direct, literal FTL travel. Usually, I am a fan of things like slipspace from Halo; you create a rift and essentially piggyback off of some alternate dimension, but as Warren said, that is a no fly for this. Considering that, I agree with the warp travel alternative. We, or whoever, can say that while some of the more militant primarchs were going about kicking trans-galactic tushy Ferrus, or whoever, devoted some time to increasing increasing the efficiently of the fleet, and in doing so created something like a Fold Engine. This “Fold Engine” allowed the fleets to avoid traditional Einsteinian limitations and work around to light speed barrier by folding space between two point and making a bunny hop at traditional speeds, then re-expanding the folded space. Hard science, if hugely theoretical.

One cool thing (personal opinion, I know) I was thinking of was the potential proliferation of plasma based weaponry. Bolters, as I understand them, were seemed intended to be a stopgap measure for the Imperium; plasma based weapons were too inefficient to give them to every marine, so the bolter was made to fulfill the role. Who is to say that the Inheritors haven’t developed safe, efficient, man-portable plasma weapons? Who is to say that these weapons haven’t become so cheap and easy for them to produce that they haven’t become the mainstay for their entire military?

I’m sorta going off on this, aren’t I? Sorry, probably not the best place for this, but I got a bit excited. Anyway, this if fantastic, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

If you want a warp drive model, try this:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/warp-drive-plausible/

Alternatively, is it not possible that they were sent away by the Emperor via his experimental webway that he was rumoured to have been building at the point the Heresy kicked off? Maybe he knew the outcome of the Heresy even before the first shots were fired and, to protect the Imperium, they were sent through the webway to only the Emperor knows where, and then the Emperor himself removed them from record, to prevent anyone from finding them. And if the Emperor knew where they were going to end up, he might then know that it would take them thousands of years to make their way back without access to warp drive. This opens up virtually infinite possibilities, such as having been sent to other galaxies. This would give them a different attitude towards Xenos and Alien races, creating the possibilities for new alien allies, massively different kinds of technology. It would also change their attitudes towards alien races within the Imperium – they may be much more amenable towards races such as the Eldar and the Tau.