Lore Question: How can there be space pirates?

[Sloul Des Tucs]

I am not versed in WH40K lore, but how can these people get Navigators?
Navigators seem to be very rare, and only able to practice their task through strict training and absolute loyalty tot he Emperor. I don't see any Navigator serving pirates.

Or maybe pirates can simply not jump and are bound to realspace?
But then it makes their ability to get battle-capable spaceships quite questionable.

And ofc, remain the issue of Enginseer, we've seen first hand in the game that those guys are maybe as important as navigators, and they all seem to belong to the adeptus mechanicus.
I can't see an adeptus mechanicus working with pirates, save a bunch of them.


Is it a plot hole in WH40K or am I missing something?

[Morgian]

Pirates are part of the WH40k universe. Many of them are deserters from the navy, the imperial guard or the adeptus arbites.
There are certainly renegade navigator houses, as found in The Navis Primer. You can also kidnap one. And there are psykers who can double up as a makeshift navigator.

[Zsrai]

To add to what Morgian said, you can also manage short (like 3-5 Light Year) jumps without a Navigator and just using cogitators. It's definitely not ideal, but it's useful in emergencies or when a small time criminal needs to move around.

[G Willikers]

Most pirates either use captured/renegade navigators or don't have them at all and do short, blind jumps or rely entirely on realspace engines (which can reach a percentage of light speed, more than enough to blast into an undetectable area of a system's oort cloud.

Pirate is a massive category in 40k. It can range from navy deserters, to scroungers, all the way up to aeldari/human adventurers or chaos marine warbands. Their capabilities also vary wildly.

[Daliena]

As for Enginseers, there are a LOT of Hereteks out there who aren't with the Adeptus Mechanicus. Be they strays who take off on their own paths, or even outright throw their lot in with the forces of Chaos.

[Tias Terror]

You'll find it explained in the Navis primer for the roleplaying game.

In short, as has already been somewhat adequately explained: Navis houses are extremely powerful and extremely corrupt, and having a junior navigator fall off the back of the bus to aid someone they're allied to or their pirate servants, isn't a stretch.

The tech-priests have widely different factions, including straight up chaos-aligned ones, and pirates usually contract the services of heretek mercenaries. What you have to get is that the adeptus mechanicus is ALLIED to the Imperium, they are in no way identical to the other adepta in their beliefs, and in the case of the oldest tech-priests, no longer even really human. Their alliances can vary in the extreme.

[Андреја Костић]

Well, for the warp navigation, the timeline was somehting like this: Warp was discovered, and there were methods of short-range warp navigation, which were unreliable. Then, during the dark age of technology, navigators were genetically engineered, which enabled long range warp navigation.
Then birth of Slaanesh happened, and the warp storms and so on, which made warp travel almost impossible.

Only after that, we have the unification wars, and the birth of IoM, and the Astronomican.

So in the "modern" age, navigators use Astronomican as a reference point for long range navigation, but in theory, the short range navigation should still be possible even without them, just with much higher probability of bad results.

Also, both navigators and tech priests can be corrupted by chaos, and they too can have loose morals, and cooperate with pirates, or find justifications why that is OK.
For example, on Footfall, we can meet a priest who was serving on a pirate ship. If ecclesiarchy can be convinced that that's "OK", so could others too.

[Aranador]

There is also xenos, xenotech, heresy, archotech, and blind luck, as options for navigating the warp.

[jonoliveira12]

You can also get a daemon to possess your ship, or part of it, and navigate it through the Warp.
It is THEIR domain, afterall.

[Morgian]

Found it again: Ember Nostromo, former navigator of House Nostromo, became herself a pirate captain on the Monarch of Whispers after eliminating the old captain. There is a huge bounty on her from the Navis Nobilite. So there you have her, the dreaded pirate lady from the Koronus Expanse.

[G Willikers]

Originally posted by Tias Terror:

You'll find it explained in the Navis primer for the roleplaying game.

In short, as has already been somewhat adequately explained: Navis houses are extremely powerful and extremely corrupt, and having a junior navigator fall off the back of the bus to aid someone they're allied to or their pirate servants, isn't a stretch.

The strict lifestyles the navigators are meant to follow all while being disdained and ostracized can also push some of the younger ones to become outlaws. Some pirate crews are mutants who just wouldn't be accepted by anyone but each other.