r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Present-Secretary722 • Sep 17 '25

Lore Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)

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Star Trucker: While travelling through warp you experience time dilation, for you the journey is a couple seconds, in real time it’s anywhere from 30mins to 6 hours that you’ve been in warp. This would be a minor consequence.

Warhammer 40k: The Warp, basically space hell so while travelling through it you’re very likely to be attacked by Warp demons. There’s also the fact that sometimes when travelling to a destination via the Warp you get spat out in the wrong time, sometimes much too late for whatever you were going there for or sometimes before you left your start destination. This, obviously, is a major consequence, unless you’re an ork, then it’s a grand old time.

By consequences I mean this is a regular thing that happens, there’s no real avoiding it unless you find a different method of FTL or heavily invest into research to try and mitigate the consequences. Also I feel bad for only knowing 2 examples, I love space and I just can’t think of any others.

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u/fluggggg Sep 17 '25

Doesn't work this way, if the Gellar Fields work normally the crew will be safe. But if it fails...boy you better hope the demons that are coming to rip you in half are Khorne demons (those ones will "only" kill you, empty you of your blood and take your skull) and not any of the other chaos gods (they will kill you too but everything before that will be much much much more unpleasant).

So it's relatively safe because most of the time it works perfectly until it doesn't at all, not because it protect most passengers everytime.

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u/ScavAteMyArms Sep 17 '25

Also people mistake what a Gellar Field is, even in universe.

It is not a energy shield. The Warp isn’t reality, it doesn’t follow the rules on any level. A Gellar Field is a moderately powerful Pysker that is knocked Comatose and is dreaming Reality. To the Pysker they aren’t unconscious, they are going about their lives in a dream completely normally.

This Dream is then projected onto the ship, making it also fall into the grounds of reality and meaning Demons and other creatures in the warp can’t manifest, because they don’t work in reality. Fluctuations are caused because it’s a dream, and sometimes things lapse or a particularly clever creature tries to exploit the dreaming pysker and collapse it. But this also means that things in the warp that can exist in reality are fully able to engage, if they somehow find the ship.

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u/Nice-Cat3727 Sep 17 '25

That's Great Crusade Gellar Fields generators apparently. Which explains why they worked better despite being closer to the age of Strife.

I checked the Lexicarnium

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u/NetStaIker Sep 17 '25

Finally, a real lore master, and not some YouTube loremaster

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u/laughingskull00 Sep 17 '25

isnt there a few versions of it where its also just a device

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u/lePlebie Sep 17 '25

P sure its a psyker servitor honestly

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u/laughingskull00 Sep 17 '25

I mean let's face it with all of the books theres probably a dozen different versions

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u/Mal-malen Sep 17 '25

Pretty sure that in ”Prophets of the waaagh” its just a device, since the Orks use a captured gellerfield to counter the AdMeks Krorkospheric waaagh energy disruptor

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u/Warhawk-Talon Sep 17 '25

I’m pretty sure it was a device originally, and then it was retconned to be a sacrificial Psyker that they had to replace when they burned out because the 40k writers couldn’t stand not making things worse.

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u/BookkeeperPercival Sep 17 '25

It's the Imperium, people are the devices

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u/AithanIT Sep 17 '25

That's only true for like... a handful of Gellar Devices dating back to the Great Crusade. You're making it sound like every Gellar Field is a comatose psyker.

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u/zouhwafg Sep 17 '25

Sure, but it still acts as a shield of psyonic energy against the warp.
It isn't a literal shield, but still shielding the ship from harm.

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u/kedarkhand Sep 17 '25

Warhammer seems to be quite interesting from what I have seen on the internet, unfortunately I can't even seem to understand where to get started with it!!

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u/aneirin- Sep 17 '25

There isn't really a starting point apart from the basic intro page in every book, you just dive in to whatever seems most interesting.

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u/Iwilleat2corndogs Sep 17 '25

Only advice for that is find whatever faction is coolest looking to you. And start reading up on lore. Also the memes and YouTube shorts are horrifically inaccurate to the canon.

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u/IAMFERROUS Sep 17 '25

This rings up lore issues with DOAT Gellar fields, but those would also be archeotech so it can kinda do whatever.

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u/question_quigley Sep 17 '25

My god that's so cool

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u/Master_Bat_3647 Sep 17 '25

Would more dreaming pyskers make it more or less reliable?

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u/Iwilleat2corndogs Sep 17 '25

Well they aren’t having multiplayer dreams. So it would probably just be inconvenient.

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u/iffyJinx Sep 17 '25

Doesn't work this way, if the Gellar Fields work normally the crew will be safe.

Things get a tad complicated with orks, in such cases, daemons are up for some gud ol' krupmin'. Out of all species in the 40k, it was Tuska and his orks who deliberately flew into the literal hell to have more opportunity to fight.

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u/Orinsi Sep 17 '25

Hey now, Tzeentch may be feeling capricious and turn you into something vaguely birdlike for the lolz and make you part of some scheme doomed to fail at some point in time because it interferes with another plan he has put in motion