Article · The Whole Timeline · 8 minutes of reading
The War in the Void
Fleets, the “Eisenstein”, the “Furious Abyss”, the Solar War — how to read the arrows, not the infantry.
A Route Is an Entity with a Lifespan
The atlas has 31 routes, and each has its own time window. These are not “roads forever”. The “Eisenstein” exists as an arrow while the news is flying. The “Furious Abyss” is a super-heavy ship of the XVII, bound for Macragge and destroyed on the way. Phall is the fleet of the VII under Alexis Polux, who does not yet know what the war has become.
Arrows appear and fade on their own as time passes: loyalist ones in gold, traitor ones in crimson. Practical control — no more than two or three live routes at once, otherwise Isstvan, Calth and Sol merge into a mush.
The Solar War — The Fleet as Walls
Before the Palace walls there are Pluto, Uranus and Luna. The traitor armada enters Sol on the first day of 014.M31 and first of all strikes the system’s two warp gates: the Khthonic Gate at Pluto and the Elysian Gate at Uranus; the lunar bases fall next, and within thirty days the system’s defence crumbles.
Khan fights in the void the way Dorn fights on stone. The Path of Heaven is the price the V Legion pays for coming home at all. On the galaxy map Sol is a point; the spheres unfold only in the phases of the Siege. If you look only at the “Siege of Terra”, you will miss the war without which the bombardment does not happen.
The Void Package
Fleet events are rare, and that is normal: the fleet war is patchier in the sources than the infantry one. Do not build it out.
Books: The Flight of the Eisenstein, The Solar War, The Path of Heaven, The Crimson Fist. Fleet events plus attention to the arrows give the view of an “admiral”, not a “marshal”.
What to remember
- Arrows are mortal: there are no eternal routes.
- Sol is a separate fleet theatre, not a suburb of the Palace.
- Fleet events are rarer than they seem “by the scale of the Imperium”.
How to look in the atlas
- The “Event type” rail → “Fleet”; the slider from 005.M31 (the “Eisenstein”) to 014.M31 (the Siege); there is no separate toggle for routes.
- The cards “Flight of the Eisenstein” and “Battle of Phall”: different news, different fleets.
- Siege mode is for the spheres of Sol.
Disputed in the canon
- The date on which the “Eisenstein” reached Terra is disputed: Garro’s flight begins in 005.M31, but a number of sources place the arrival at Terra itself in 006.M31 — the route lives longer than the event. The atlas holds the arrow from 005.M31 (“The Flight of the Eisenstein”, J. Swallow) and does not close the window with an exact arrival date.
Sources
- The Flight of the Eisenstein (J. Swallow)
- The Solar War (J. French)
- The Path of Heaven (C. Wraight)
- The Crimson Fist (J. French)
- Lexicanum: Solar War
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