What is the actual reason for Imperium ships being so massive?
Writer thought it would be cool. Next thread please.
>>92710746Bigger ships can carry more stuff in them for long voyages and are more efficient.
>>92710758Wrong
>>92710746Warp travel is unreliable, so ships need to be large enough to be self-sufficient more or less indefinitely.
>>92710746Looks cool
>>92710746Considering the ships of all races are of roughly similar size (sure, Eldar tend to use a lot of light escorts and Dark Eldar don't have capital ships larger than cruisers so the average size of their ships is smaller, but DE cruisers and Eldar battleships are still roughly the same size as the Imperial counterparts), presumably it's just necessary for ships to be that size to function. Like maybe the warp drive is massive enough you can't feasibly mount one on a ship smaller than several hundred meters in length and if you actually want to mount armor and guns as well the size scales up greatly.
>>92710746It's cool.
>>92710746Space is big so the ships have to be too.
>>92710838>>92710909These. When you could be in transit for four months, two years, or half a millennium, you want to err on the side of more supplies. More supplies but less guns and armor means pirates are going to attack you more likely than not, so you need those too, which in turn require their own space, and crews, and spare parts for everything as well as raw materials to make more parts for repairs, and you can see how the logistics snowballs from there.
>>92711149Doesn't the warp have set travel times?
>>92711160Warp. Realm of Chaos gods. Set time?
>>92711160It will in a few more editions when its reduced to being generic sci-fi FTL.
>>92710746Dune. Most questions as to why are that answer.
>>92710815The writer thought it didn't look cool?
>>927107461. Warp drives are massive and need a lot of energy. So do void shields. Thus a set size is necessary for Warp Travel.2. Like other anons pointed out, warp travel is unreliable and having enough spare parts and supplies is crucial to survive.3. Crew requirements and necessary size for macroweapons.
>>92710746Warp engines are large, hard to make and profoundly expensive. It's more economical to make the ship bigger since the warp drive on it's own probably costs as much as the entire rest of the ship.
>>92711682This. Warp drives are very large and the power plants needed to support them are also large. The smallest warp-capable craft (that isn't some super rare inquisition/throne specialty craft) are roughly 800-1100 meters in length depending on hull design. System ships or otherwise non-ftl voidships can be much smaller.
>>92711753Expanding a little more on that: warp drive size also scales with mass of the ship for warp translation. A larger craft requires a larger drive in order to enter the warp. Larger drives mean more space, and so on and so on. The best balance has your warp drive and power plant (including realspace drives) taking up roughly 40% of a ships mass and interior volume.
you arent restrained by gravity in space op. you can make ships as big as you like any shape you like, like a giant teapot
>>92710838The bigger the ship the larger the crew thou. Big ships are only "self-sustaining" if they're largely automated and only need a skeleton crew, which Imperium ships are not.
>>92710746MORE DAKKA FUR THEE EMPERAH
>>92711820>you can make ships as big as you like any shape you likeUntil you try to maneuver them and the centrifugal forces break the ship apart.
>>92710746Each navigator can pilot one ship and the supply of navigators is the biggest restriction on launching more ships. Ergo, make every ship as big as possible to maximise the cargo and troops you can transport.
>>92711820And are you never going to land this ship anywhere anon? Never gonna dock for maintenance, refueling, acquire new crew or to sell your goods?
>>92710746>What is the actual reason for Imperium ships being so massive?Miniaturisation, especially at the time bit also now, is a sign of high-tech efficiency. The theme of the Imperium is that it's hugely flamboyant and wasteful and that its technology is degrading, not improving. Naval history also conjures all sorts of imagery; slave rowers on galleons, class systems and chains of command on board ship, the ship outliving the crew and taking on a personality of its own. These fit pretty well with the idea of the Imperium, where billions are ground between the cogs of bureaucracy and "whatever happens, you won't be missed." If you're going to exaggerate these themes so that you have slave gangs who have spent generations just loading one cannon when called upon, you're gomna need a massive ship to make that work.Finally, as evidenced by edition and codex cover art (if not the game rules), regular 40K tries to evoke incomprehensible scales of warfare. The ships therefore meed to be massive because a) you need something massive and flamboyant to transport those millions of flamboyant troops, and b) the cover art for Battlefleet Gothic needed to be just as hyperdetailed and evocative of scale as that of the mainline game.
>>92712940no
>>92710746They expect to lose part of the crew complement every time they engage in Warp.
>>92712913That's what space docks are for; fly your space ship into the space station that gets its own supplies from smaller craft ferrying it planetside.
>>92711974>The bigger the ship the larger the crew though.No. The opposite is true. The larger the ship, the less people compared to cargo you need. Even a relatively small imperial ship has a crew numbering in the thousands, but smaller ships can carry less cargo.This isn't rocket science, really. Cargo hulls need little to no crew to maintain.>>92711791IIRC it's not even size, but mass. Larger mass ships require stronger/better/bigger warp drives and the infrastructure and crew to maintain them. This is why (again, IIRC) cargo ships aren't skeleton-crew ships with infinitely lolhueg cargoes just strung along the ships.So there's a natural balance for ships based on power capabilities, warp core efficiency, and cargo size (which includes living quarters and crew), and the wide variance we see in the Imperium is entirely because of all the different kinds of generators and reactors and whatnot.
>>92714988This isn't even remotely true. At least in WH40k (no idea about nu41k and I don't care) most warp translations go off without incident.That being said, many ships *do* sacrifice a small part of the crew before warp translation as a kind of sacrificial ritual for safe voyage. These would be inconsequential in terms of cargo, though, and are often drawn by lots or by voiding the brigs.
>>92711160>Doesn't the warp have set travel times?No. Semi-stable routes that have been traveled for hundreds of years have projected travel times, but even these often vary by days or weeks, and time has to be re-synchronized before and after warp-travel (if possible).Uncharted deep warp travel over large distances is notoriously dangerous and chronologically unreliable, and it is not unheard of for ships to arrive years after projected arrival, and there has even been recorded cases in which ships have arrived on location before they have even translated from their original departure point.So, uh, no, the warp doesn't have set travel times. It has the opposite.
>>92712913>And are you never going to land this ship anywhere anon?The idea of "landing" space ships is idiotic. No standard ship of the Imperium has ever been meant to be landed on the ground, and would likely crush itself under its own weight if it would.
Ye it’s cool man
>>92715073It’s real cool.
>>92715081I really like that nebula effect with the cotton, is it?
>>92715073>>92715081Now match them up with Star Wars Armada models, should give us an estimated sizewhoever tells you 40k ships have a set dimension/size is retarded, there's nothing from GW that has come out and said sizes, they're anything from 2000 to 7000 meters
>>92714851>The theme of the Imperium is that it's hugely flamboyant and wasteful and that its technology is degrading, not improvingI finally understand why smartphones keep getting bigger.
>>92711149Actually 30k ships were designed for that (aka the Chaos ships). 40k ships are actually smaller, more compact, and designed so they could go shorter distances.
>>92715095Yeah , cheap and effective anon, you can dye it like pic, or put cute battery tea lights under it to look like nebulas, or wrap it around ships to represent hulks.Wargamers friend truly!>>92715128Yeah I agree, relative size v areas within the very universe especially when you consider how many people are supposed to be on these things, in my opinion it’s best not to go too deep here, just appreciate space ships/space creatures
>>92710746they arent even that big in hard sci fi terms they could be like 10x as big no problem
>>92712047simply not true at all. Its been calculated how large a ship would have to be before its own mass is a hinderance clue: as big as the moonSafe to say 40k Battleships fall well under that limit.
>>92715434>muh nu41k tho?!Nobody cares.
>>92712913No imperial spacefaring ship has ever been depicted as designed to land on planet. There’s been cases of a damaged ship desperately trying to survive reentry (usually to little success,) but that’s not so much landing as a controlled crash. The goal isn’t to keep the ship usable so they can take off again, but to try and keep some of the crew alive (helps if they’re space marines.)
>>92710746The bigger the ship the longer it takes Chaos to consume it if something goes wrong in the Warp
>>92710746Because bigger is better!
>>92715665battlefleet gothic is nu40k? lawl
>>92716412
>>92716430
>>92715025>This isn't rocket scienceIn a spaceship thread there should probably be some.
>>92710746When your engines are the size of cities and your munitions are the size of skyscrapers you kind of have to make the ship equally large
>>92716449Dauntless class barely 2km? Isn't that their most common ship?
>>92716489Most common is the Lunar Class.
>>92715434>30k ship >aka the chaos ships A lot of them were from after that. There was a shift in imperial ship design and naval warfare doctrine which caused the change from older designs to newer heavy armoured prows, lots of the older design was slighted and defected over time. Or had weird designs, or etcetcetc. Not many are from the heresy if you actually go back and read the bfg book as you claim to reference here. >>92716414and there is no reference to landing a cruiser on a planet or anything like that iirc.
>>92716489>>92716449That graph is wrong. The Lunar Cruiser is around 5km long, while the Dauntless is around 4.5km long. Only the smallest Warp ships are less than 1km long. The Sword Frigate is for example 1.6km long. The other graph on top are accurate while this one is not.
>>92716525>>92716489The most common ship of the Imperial Navy is the Sword Frigate but the Lunar is the most common Cruiser sized ship of the Navy.
>>92715081Dropfleet is better
>>92716575Sword-class looks like it'd be 300 to 400 meters.
>>92716564You sure?>>92716575I thought we talk about cruisers. All the smaller vessels like destroyers are produced in high quantities. More than cruisers.
>>92716430>>92716449No Lunar-class? Ya dumb?
>>92716663>>92716762In both Rogue Trader RPG and Battlefleet Gothic the Sword Frigate is 1.6 km long.
>>92717071It looks way smaller than that, though.
>>927172291.6 km is the length were are given by the various books. The Shell FLNG looks tiny compared to the Old Reliable (Sword Frigate) despite being earth's biggest ship at 488 meters length.
>>92717046>No Lunar-class?Sorry, but you misclicked with >>92716430 Lunar is right bottom above the Dictator!>>92717071Thanks for that info.
prayer chapels for every switch and button
>>92710746Big ship means bigger guns, more carrying capacity, better range and extension if power Remember these vessels no only were war ships, but they were ships that were meant to build an empireSo not only did they have to carry weapons and fight they had to carry the shit to repair vehicles and other ships, to build the machines needed to build a city and planetary infrastructure
>>92716414No. Learn to read.>>92716450Fair.
>>92719566Nope. That's you.
>>92710746Everything in 40k is over the top and metal as fuck
>>92710746The usual stated reason is the size of the gellar field generatorThe Rogue Trader RPG seems the only source that insists most ships are in the 1 km plus size range. Smaller ships appear in various novels and are hinted at in the Dark Heresy RPG, the BFG Core Rulebook, and the Blackstone Fortress game among other sources
>>92717229it has 25000 crew
>>92715069In my rogue trader campaign the ship is fitted with totally not xeno-tech gravsails that allow low orbit maneuvering. Calling it landing would be a bit of a stretch but semi-controlled crashing is definitely an option. Also I don't care how lore accurate it is. That being said:Rogue Trader actually has a ship background called "planet bound for millennia" which states that the ship has spent time on the surface of a planet. So it's not entirely out of question.
>>92711974People are resources. Also, it's the Imperium: people can literally be the resources. E.g. corpse starch and servitorsSkeleton crews really struggle to manage the labour budget. People have an incredibly diverse range of caloric and dietary needs, recreational needs, skills and talents, etc, there's a huge amount of flexibility there, but the one thing that is set in stone is that a human being cannot have any less than 2/3 of their time to themselves, including eating, sleeping, recreation, everything. In the modern working culture we run on the (theoretical) principle of 8-8-8.Work 8 hours, relax 8 hours, sleep 8 hours.In high intensity environments this is expanded to 11-11-11, such as submarines, subterrain, space, and the polar regions, specifically because of other hard limits on the labour budget, and even that is very hard on people even though it follows the rule of 3 equal parts (the fact that it flows over a 24 hour day is basically irrelevant because in these environs there isn't a 24 hour "day" as our bodies perceive it).But these rules exist because of a chronic labour deficit. Something is setting a hard limit that prevents more labour. Usually something like "it costs $10MM to send a jug of milk to them".Because ultimately it's always a benefit to have more people. "More hands to work, not less mouths to feed".
>>92710746They don't use AI or any kind of automated systems. Those massive cannons are hand-cranked when they need to re-aim them. It takes a shit ton of crew to hand-crank those guns in a timely manner.
>>92711160No. Quite the opposite. You never know how long a warp journey is going to take. There are even instances of ships travelling backwards in time while in the Warp.
>>92712913>And are you never going to land this ship anywhere anon?Anon, do you think those gigantic cargo tankers or aircraft carriers could land on any beach all nilly willy?
>>927223842nd and 3rd edition are no longer canon. Sorry, cuh.
>>92723193Base
>>92712100Dubs of truth. It's also why titans are as big as they are, in addition to void shields. The limiting factor for the Imperium are the number of psykers able to operate the tech needed.Other races that don't use psykers or warp travel will build large ships anyway to deal with the Imperium. In the case of Tyranids, large ships are actually large organisms and their size allows them to survive the vacuum of space.Eldar, Necrons, and Tau can use smaller, more efficient ships because they don't (or can't) rely on warp travel.
>>92721297The fans insisted with the numbers given in the RPG book - a third party book! - and produced lots of graph to the point where it became a truth that 40k ship are 5+km. If you go by BFG the Emperor class embarks 8 squadrons of fighters and has a cumulative firepower of 22. Going by the drawing of the ship, it seems 22 is the number of turrets. The space marine battle barge is even costlier than the Emperor class and it embarks 3 squadrons of Thunderhawks, and it can famously carry 3 companies of space marines, so 300 warriors. It is completely dumb to assume that those ships are longer than 1 km!
>>92715145well that and porn is easier to watch on a bigger screen, anon
>>92724784To give them the benefit of the doubt, I'd put it as Lunar-class at 2km, Battle Barge and Emperor-class at 4 or maybe 5km. This would mean Sword-class is somewhere around 600? 700? meters. These are more sensible numbers.
>>92710746To compensate for the Emperor's tiny dick.
>>92724784>>92724874The ship sizes from various books from Black Library are in accordance with the sizes from Rogue Trader. The Gloriana class size, for examples is officially set by several books, set at 26km like Maccrage Honour. I don't know why you still insist on your numbers. By several Black Library books, Rogue Trader, and the Horus Heresy series, the ship sizes are multi-kilometer. 1.6km for Sword. 5km for Lunar and 4.5km for Dauntless cruiser, these are the official sizes by different books.
>>92724874>Battle Barge and Emperor-class at 4 or maybe 5km5km for 22 turrets, 32 small crafts and 300 combat personel is the least armed battleship ever made. I cannot fathom that this was the authorial intent behind BFG. Ultimately this is a clash between two eras: the olde times where 40k was written by dudes who fanfic-ed their favorite historic battles and where numbers were sensible, and now where it's written by sci-fi authors who write in a vacuum where numbers can be whatever.
>>92725030The original Battle Barge and Emperor-class are pegged at 8km, that's even more insane. 4-5km is a decent compromise between the FUCKHUEG crowd and those who want a more sensible approach.
>>92725019>>92725127The issue with FUCKHUEG is whenever you want to game a campaign it tastes different. What is nice with old numbers is that it actually fits in a table. The original Damocles crusade had 12 capital ships in the imperial fleet. In a few games of BFG you can actually cycle through 12 300-400 points ships plus some escorting vessels. The imperial ground forces were something along 5 companies of space marines plus a dozen guard regiments, about 3,000 men strong each. You can keep track of casualties and build a narrative along several 2,000 points 40k matches with those numbers, and even track their location on a hex map. When a 28km long ship is carrying billions of guardsmen, you gain a sense of overwhelm but you loose a sense of completeness.
>>92725578What were old numbers?
>>92710746To not get fucked with. The reason most huge things are huge.
>>92727731After reading through my 2000's era rulebooks, we don't have a given length. As per >>92724784, and if 26km is truly written in some Black Library bullshit, we must admit that the Imperium is truly dumb enough to put 1 small craft and 1 turret per km of length on their capital ship.
Gellar engines are absolutely massive and need thousands of workers to function properly. the smallest warp-capable ship in WK40 has a crew of 15k people. there are some very unique, miniaturized Gellar engines that can fit into tiny vessels of 4-5 people, but theres maybe 3 or 4 in the entire galaxy. unfortunately there is no millenium falcon equivalent in 40k
>>9272942526 guns? That means a frigate from Wars or Trek would be able to make short work of their biggest ship.
>>92710746There are smaller ones, but Imperial ships are meant to be moving planetary amounts of cargo around, they have to be huge because you have to be able to carry on them not merely the means to survive, but the means to fabricate, operate, and staff entirely new installations. Even the smallest Imperial Frigate is like a city, complete with industries, commercial enterprises and residential areas, the fact that they're also warships is just a quirk of their local economy. It should be pretty obvious why this is: They were originally intended for space colonization.
>>92711160I mean the technology involves opening a gate to Hell and then flying into it. The whole thing works because the Warp is without dimension or measure and this is both in terms of distance and time.It's also not an issue of choosing to make fewer big ships over multiple small ones, because the limiting factor for Imperial warships has nothing to do with the ships themselves--each one requires a Navigator, which means that each one requires a eugenically engineered psychic mutant from a (relative) handful of families. Both a big ship and a small ship still only need one Navigator, so the tendency is towards larger vessels that can use this requirement to maximize the amount of mileage they get out of each Navigator.
>>92731433Why are warships moving cargo?
>>92733041Because planetary invasion is a long, expensive process. With the unreliability of warp a siege has to be mostly self-sufficient and no force that could fit on anything even aircraft carrier sized would be even pissing in the wind against a fortified world.
>>92721297Nah, we got explicit mention of mile long destroyers (the smallest escort class) well before RT and consensus on its release was that it had lowballed numbers based on earlier bfg writings.40k ships have always been huge.>>92721464In regards to planet landing. In bfg planetary assault missions Escorts (frigates/destroyers) and Ttansports (mostly escort sized but up to Light Cruiser size) can land on the planet. Anything bigger crashes if it runs into the planet surface.
>>92734085That implies much smaller scales than what is presented. Light Cruiser, according to some lorelets, is a gigantic 5km long. That can't land on a planet.
>>92734321This is 40k, you can't expect strong adherence to reality. It just how it is, imperial ships that depending on depiction strong 3-5km (probably something like that massive craft on one of the old IG codex covers) long can explicitly land on planets.
>>92734321What's the smallest sort of size you would expect to land in a planet?
>>92735048NTA, but in Caves of Ice Cain mentions promethium tankers using cargo shuttles over 500m long landing on Simia Orichalcae and the heavy lifters of the first company planetside were big enough to have half a dozen temporary decks for the company troops, its Chimeras, Sentinels and a load of supplies so it makes me think those were fairly big as well. Something like an LST in space.
>>92711219>DuneAnd Nemesis The Warlock, anon.
>>92734321None of these are landing on planets honey, if they dock anywhere it's in orbit.
>>92711160>Doesn't the warp have set travel times?Haha. No.
>>92710746Cawl designed most of them, and he's fucking stupid, basically.
>>92733041Protect important cargo against rival forces.
>>92710746To encourage the kind of retards seriously discussing 40k lore in this very thread to buy overpriced plastic.
>>927343215 km is the size typically given to normal cruisers (CA instead of CL). Imperial light cruisers are 3 to 4 km long and quite a bit less massive. >>92735409We know there are landing ships big enough to carry titans, and in BFG rules transports and escort ships (usually between 1 and at most 2 km long) could enter atmosphere in planetary assault scenarios. I have never seen a depiction of a capital ship intentionally landing on a planet, though. It'd probably be possible to build one that could but it wouldn't be worth the trouble (all that structural reinforcement takes space from guns and void shield). Better just to let them remain spacebound and use specialized transport ships built to get in and out of a gravity well and land on a planet without collapsing under their own weight if you need to move entire titan legions at once.
>>92744800>I have never seen a depiction of a capital ship intentionally landing on a planet, though. It'd probably be possible to build one that could but it wouldn't be worth the trouble (all that structural reinforcement takes space from guns and void shield).In the novel Titanicus the legion arrive in lander thats described as comparable in size to "entire hive stacks" and generally suggests a size of more than just a few km
