Event · M15–M25
Dark Age of Technology
The Dark Age of Technology was the era, from roughly M15 to M25, in which humanity reached its zenith of scientific and technological power, its reach centred upon Terra and Mars, the twin worlds that would later anchor the Imperium. The period followed the Age of Terra, when sub-light "Long March" vessels carried the first colonists outward from the Sol system. Those ships, generations in transit, founded isolated settlements later known as Knight Worlds, each forced by distance from Terra to become self-sufficient in food, technology and governance. This slow, sub-light dispersal of the fifteenth to eighteenth millennia is remembered as the First Expansion, and it laid the foundations on which the later, faster colonisation of the galaxy was built. Everything changed with the invention of the warp drive, conventionally dated to around M18, which allowed vessels fitted with a Gellar field to cross interstellar distances in a fraction of the time taken by sub-light travel. Early voyages remained perilous until the cultivation, by the turn of M19, of the Navigator gene, giving rise to the mutant Navigators, whose extrasensory perception allowed them to chart a safe course through the immaterium. Navigator families grew into powerful Houses controlling trade and industry, and, aided by the Standard Template Construct archives that preserved the accumulated technical knowledge of the age, humanity colonised the galaxy at a furious pace, encountering and reaching accommodation with alien peoples including the Aeldari and the Orks. Humanity also created the Men of Iron, artificial intelligences built to labour and fight on its behalf, and experimented widely with genetic modification of its own kind.
See where Dark Age of Technology occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.