Maybe I rely on outdated data, but to my understanding the max imperial ship are only 6 km long? In Star Wars the Super Star Destroyer Vader has are 12 km, that doesn't make sense when everything else in 40k universe are super duper extra bonus ultra light classic plus now with citrus flavor OP large!!!! Craft Worlds, titans, space critters etc etc!

...what went wrong?!?!

While I'm not super familiar with the numbers, i'll take the same general rule I take with all of GW's numbers they rarely add up or make any kind of sense

the largest on record may be smaller but the averages are MUCH bigger 1.6 KM is considered biiig by the standards of SW. yet it's very small by 40K standards

The Lunar class cruiser is (by memory) 3.2km or 3.6km long.

HexHammer wrote:
that doesn't make sense when everything else in 40k universe are super duper extra bonus ultra light classic plus now with citrus flavor OP large!!!!

Please, please, please, please don't start thinking like this.

The need for "oh, my setting has to have the biggest X" just results in a snowballing of sizes and a complete lack of internal consistency. Ultimately, it's a completely arbitrary number, so getting into a squabble over it just comes across like two kids playing the "biggest number game" - you know, the one that usually goes:

"I hate you"
"I hate you times two"
"I hate you times ten"
"I hate you times a million"
"I hate you times infinity"
"I hate you times infinity plus one"
"Nuh uh, infinity is the biggerest number"

It's better to stay consistent within the setting. Comparing to reality is perhaps reasonable, but don't get jealous because authors in other settings just happened to pick a bigger big number.

 MarcoSkoll wrote:
Please, please, please, please don't start thinking like this.

I really wish someone had told the BL authors this before they started giving us nine-foot marines and twelve-foot primarchs...

The BFG mailing list consensus was approximately 6km length for Imperial battleships. Andy Chambers (designer of BFG) used to be on this mailing list.

The size is also consistent with that of a Retribution class battleship, as given in the BL book Dark Disciple.

Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness...Six kilometres from stern to prow...

p. 31, Dark Disciple

This kind of thing is where 'headcanon' becomes so valuable.

Lets be frank GW writers probably don't know that much about engineering or firearms or space travel etc. When they give numbers in their publications its probably just something they've made up, or pulled from real life equivalents but has lost all relevance.

Just make the size whatever makes most sense to you, the universe becomes more enjoyable that way.

Imperial battleships top out at 12 kilometers, not 6. And that's just the battleships, other things are far larger such as Gloriana legion ships (~20m kilometers, each one was individually configured), or Star Forts which can range from just being the size of a battleship or a re-purposed asteroid to being full scale artificial planets.

 Wyzilla wrote:


Imperial battleships top out at 12 kilometers, not 6. And that's just the battleships, other things are far larger such as Gloriana legion ships (~20m kilometers, each one was individually configured), or Star Forts which can range from just being the size of a battleship or a re-purposed asteroid to being full scale artificial planets.

Imperial Navy battleships top out at 6km and I have quoted the evidence to that effect. There are also statements by Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, about the size and crew scale of BFG from the old BFG mailing list. Other BL novels give crew sizes that are more consistent with that scale, and I can quote those too if needed. While perhaps during the Great Crusade there were some Legion flagships that might have been larger, the standard battleships are 6km.

The issue of size inflation is not solely limited to those that think Titans have to be so big they literally have their heads in the clouds and are the size of mountain ranges. For example, the BFG novel author Gordon Rennie wrote a BFG short story once, but the editor thought a cruiser had to be longer than 3km (despite that being the consensus of the BFG list). The editor arbitrarily added a 0, making 30km for a cruiser, without telling the author, who later told the BFG list about this editing since it conflicted so greatly with ship sizes in later works.

I really wish people would think more about what these numbers actually mean instead of making up bigger numbers. Six kilometres long ship is insanely large.

It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it.

 Duskweaver wrote:

 MarcoSkoll wrote:
Please, please, please, please don't start thinking like this.

I really wish someone had told the BL authors this before they started giving us nine-foot marines and twelve-foot primarchs...

Yeah, the size creep of Marines, Primarchs, Titans, Ships, etc really kind of bugs me.

I actually spotted this thread shortly after going on something of a rant about "10ft Marines" in another thread, talking about why you actually want Space Marines to fit into cramped underhives. (And given that their creation is closely monitored and chemical/hormone levels carefully adjusted, much variation at all in Space Marine height doesn't make sense).

Titans are similar. Speaking as someone with a very slow burn project to build a 54mm scale Warhound (mostly as a display piece), the official size of ~15m is frelling huge - I've not redone this shot in a while (this was done during a fairly early scale check from back in 2012), but when the model scale gets big enough that you can really look up at one, you get a sense of just how soiled your undergarments would be:
(Note that the Battle Sister is also 54mm scale)

And this is a baby titan. With every titan class being about half as tall again as the last, I'm sure that the sight of a Warlord or Emperor on the horizon could easily make enemy armies flee.

"Big" doesn't have to be "biggest" to be big enough.

I agree. People lose sight of how big 6km actually is. I think there was a university paper on whether the Death Star could be built. They reached the conclusion that there wouldn't be enough iron on planet earth to build something that big.

A 6km long starship would be unimaginably huge. Which is why people maybe have a hard time picturing one.

Banville wrote:
A 6km long starship would be unimaginably huge. Which is why people maybe have a hard time picturing one.

Well, for demonstration purposes, I've crudely mocked up an image of a 5km long Lunar Cruiser as if it were over Central London, stretching from Westminster to Rotherhithe. (I'm not sure that 5km is the agreed upon figure for a Lunar cruiser, but it was the first figure I came across, and it will do for demonstrating the general concept of ships that are multiple kilometres long):

If I recall, the *average* battleship in 40k is 6 kilometers, in Star Wars a standard imperial star destroyer (their average battleship) would be 1.6. A Super Star destroyer would be more akin to a dreadnought than a battleship, and produced in much smaller numbers.

 Crimson wrote:
I really wish people would think more about what these numbers actually mean instead of making up bigger numbers. Six kilometres long ship is insanely large.

No, this is 40k where EVERYTHING is ludacris far out, and it makes no sense that Star Wars has 12 km ships when 40k should have least 15 km ships as standard. Everything SW has 40k always have had even bigger ..but navy.

Iracundus wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:


Imperial battleships top out at 12 kilometers, not 6. And that's just the battleships, other things are far larger such as Gloriana legion ships (~20m kilometers, each one was individually configured), or Star Forts which can range from just being the size of a battleship or a re-purposed asteroid to being full scale artificial planets.

Imperial Navy battleships top out at 6km and I have quoted the evidence to that effect. There are also statements by Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, about the size and crew scale of BFG from the old BFG mailing list. Other BL novels give crew sizes that are more consistent with that scale, and I can quote those too if needed. While perhaps during the Great Crusade there were some Legion flagships that might have been larger, the standard battleships are 6km.

The issue of size inflation is not solely limited to those that think Titans have to be so big they literally have their heads in the clouds and are the size of mountain ranges. For example, the BFG novel author Gordon Rennie wrote a BFG short story once, but the editor thought a cruiser had to be longer than 3km (despite that being the consensus of the BFG list). The editor arbitrarily added a 0, making 30km for a cruiser, without telling the author, who later told the BFG list about this editing since it conflicted so greatly with ship sizes in later works.

Scale is a variable in 40k - you have quoted a source but its not exclusive, there is non specific canon for 40k so its not posisble to pin down much definatively. Also

approximately 6km length for Imperial battleships. Andy Chambers (designer of BFG) used to be on this mailing list.

does not mean that they are all this big or there are not ones bigger, as others haev mentioned the Heresy ships are often bigger than "current" deisgns. Forgeworld - so offical GW - have conveyor ships that measure 20+ KM - I'll see if they have any other specific measurements.

Shorter answer is how big do you want the 40k (or whatever) universe ships to be - I have no issue with guiant ships as I do see them as literal cities in space but there is a lot of space to fill,

HexHammer wrote:
No, this is 40k where EVERYTHING is ludacris far out, and...

Again, if you try being the biggest at everything, it becomes completely stupid. Let's take a look at anime, where the "Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann" mecha is 52.8 billion light years tall. No, I'm not kidding - someone really did think it was a good idea to write a mecha more than half the size of the observable universe.

... and yet, it immediately loses its crown if I decide that my own completely imaginary mecha is 52.9 billion light years tall.

When the numbers are pulled out of the writer's butt anyway, it's beyond pointless trying to have the biggest number, because someone else can always think of a bigger number.

 MarcoSkoll wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
No, this is 40k where EVERYTHING is ludacris far out, and...

Again, if you try being the biggest at everything, it becomes completely stupid. Let's take a look at anime, where the "Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann" mecha is 52.8 billion light years tall. No, I'm not kidding - someone really did think it was a good idea to write a mecha more than half the size of the observable universe.

... and yet, it immediately loses its crown if I decide that my own completely imaginary mecha is 52.9 billion light years tall.

When the numbers are pulled out of the writer's butt anyway, it's beyond pointless trying to have the biggest number, because someone else can always think of a bigger number.

Yes. Absolutely this.

Iracundus wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:


Imperial battleships top out at 12 kilometers, not 6. And that's just the battleships, other things are far larger such as Gloriana legion ships (~20m kilometers, each one was individually configured), or Star Forts which can range from just being the size of a battleship or a re-purposed asteroid to being full scale artificial planets.

Imperial Navy battleships top out at 6km and I have quoted the evidence to that effect. There are also statements by Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, about the size and crew scale of BFG from the old BFG mailing list. Other BL novels give crew sizes that are more consistent with that scale, and I can quote those too if needed. While perhaps during the Great Crusade there were some Legion flagships that might have been larger, the standard battleships are 6km.

The issue of size inflation is not solely limited to those that think Titans have to be so big they literally have their heads in the clouds and are the size of mountain ranges. For example, the BFG novel author Gordon Rennie wrote a BFG short story once, but the editor thought a cruiser had to be longer than 3km (despite that being the consensus of the BFG list). The editor arbitrarily added a 0, making 30km for a cruiser, without telling the author, who later told the BFG list about this editing since it conflicted so greatly with ship sizes in later works.

What Andy Chambers thinks is irrelevant considering, as with most things, subsequent material has paved over the old. Nevermind the mailing list is what, over a decade, even fifteen or greater years old, making what information it contains barely even related to modern 40k. Meanwhile, back in the modern world-



That and things such as the artwork and comics have pretty clearly contradicted the idea that battleships are only six kilometers long since probably around BFG's own time of existence.

Also large ships are perfectly realistic, sensible even when you reach the Imperium's level of technology. You people seem to be forgetting that the Imperium throws fusion power around like candy and has the ability to literally stripmine entire planets of their ore. If the Imperium was remotely realistic they would have entirely abandoned planets altogether as a civilization, having no need for them. They are well within the logistical means of constructing world-ships, and possibly even a dyson sphere (gigantic web-work of metal used to catch and harvest the energy of a star with maximum efficiency).They even make miniature stars, not just fusion reactors, as a form of energy production. Then there's also issue of shipping. With planetary hive world populations in the trillions you need to ship around an unfathomable amount of food and water on a daily basis to prevent starvation. This also demands absolutely gigantic commercial ships (both in size of the ship itself and the flotilla) being constructed with regularity as hulls are lost over their centuries of use to warp phenomena, pirates, xenos, etc.

actually I've always thought the large size of ships was more a LIMIT of the Imperium's technology. Notably I suspect the warp drive is likely a VERY large piece of equipment, likely stretching out an entire kilometre or two by itself (this would explain why even the smallest star faring ships are so large) then you have the need for manual loading etc. basicly the IoM's ships are so big because their miniturization and automation tech SUCKS

I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

Well much of an Imperial ship's functions are automated by servitors. The guns are powered and aimed by humans converted into targeting computers, the navigation is handled by human brains converted into nav computers, etc. Probably would cut down on the numbers quite significantly, so all you have left is the Navy Troopers and the staff making decisions and repairing things. Although 40k does have a serious problem with low numbers in general. So you have planetary campaigns with just a couple hundred thousand people, a mere million marines, or gigantic ships with a sparse population.

Although at least it's not Abnett levels. His ships are practically ghost towns.

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

How much of that interior space is machinery that is outright hostile to human life though? also how many servitors are aboard a ship? As I said earlier I've personally suspected warp drives are HUUUGE and make up a decent chunk of a ships interior.

A quote about Great Crusade era ships is not really relevant to the 40k era because we know the Imperium has gone downhill technologically since then. Nor is citing examples of civilian cargo ships larger than 6km since the discussion was about warships, specifically battleships. Warships would be more heavily armored, have more durable redundant systems, larger power requirements, and have more crew than a comparable civilian freighter, which can be a nearly uninhabited flying box. Modern freighters vs modern warships shows this difference between ship and crew sizes. The attempts to handwave about the crew as all servitors also does not fit all the existing background of the ships using manual labor to load weapons, and being Hornblower in Space with the gun decks being flying ghettos.

The citing of the BFG list consensus and also of Andy Chambers’ crew and size scales is relevant as actually the BL novels have been remarkably consistent across years of novels by different writers in adhering generally to that scale. Size inflation is a thing though with more recent writers seemingly creeping the size up and inventing new previously unknown ship classses or individual ships. That does not make it any more reasonable than those previous depictions of a Warlord Titan as big as a mountain. As MarcoSkoll pointed out, it gets into stupid territory. Given the previous surprising consistency in BL with regards to ships it is tantamount to a writer suddenly writing bolters shooting out lasers or daisy flowers. I.e. they didn’t do their background research.

 MarcoSkoll wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
No, this is 40k where EVERYTHING is ludacris far out, and...

Again, if you try being the biggest at everything, it becomes completely stupid. Let's take a look at anime, where the "Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann" mecha is 52.8 billion light years tall. No, I'm not kidding - someone really did think it was a good idea to write a mecha more than half the size of the observable universe.

... and yet, it immediately loses its crown if I decide that my own completely imaginary mecha is 52.9 billion light years tall.

When the numbers are pulled out of the writer's butt anyway, it's beyond pointless trying to have the biggest number, because someone else can always think of a bigger number.

Imo it's a moot comparison, it's unreasonable to imagine an imperial spacecraft being that big, as no one could fund it, nor could it really fly anywhere or be practical in use.

12 km are still within reason.

Holy, just get your ships out a measure em boys!

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

No, quite the contrary. If you want space craft with void shields you have to have quite huge areas for engines to power those shields, not to mention cannons that have to penetrate enemy armor and shields.

The bigger the vessel the bigger areas for guns, engine and armor, also you can have thicker armor and bigger guns. Win/win!

HexHammer wrote:
Imo it's a moot comparison

You can't have it both ways. If you're comparing to any other setting, then you have to compare to all other settings, because any other line you draw in the sand is completely arbitrary. What if another setting has ships 20 km long? 50km? 100 km? 1000 km? 10,000km? Where should we say "actually, that's believable" or "no, that's complete tosh"?

The only argument you can prove for the line being in one place or another is what the canon says and, although this might surprise you, anything from other settings is not WH40K canon - it's just pointless cock measuring.
This entire argument boils down to "I want my imaginary space-going phallus to be bigger than their imaginary space-going phallus".

 MarcoSkoll wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
Imo it's a moot comparison

You can't have it both ways.

Says who? Grabbed out of thin air.

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

A Nimitz class carrier is extremely crowded, you can take it from someone who has been on one (but not served on one).

Imperial battleships are probably way less crowded, and possibly have much larger proportions of internal space dedicated to weapons and engines.

w1zard wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

A Nimitz class carrier is extremely crowded, you can take it from someone who has been on one (but not served on one).

Imperial battleships are probably way less crowded, and possibly have much larger proportions of internal space dedicated to weapons and engines.

I've not been aboard a Nimitz class but I've been aboard plenty of ships and I'll agree with w1zard here as a general rule. Ships are generally pretty compact, with small corridors (only wide eneugh to go through 1 at a time) lowish ceilings. etc. they're very compact. Compare this with what's been told about Imperial ships, they have sections with high ceilings, long wide passage ways etc. Imperium ships, put bluntly WASTE a lot of space

w1zard wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

A Nimitz class carrier is extremely crowded, you can take it from someone who has been on one (but not served on one).

Imperial battleships are probably way less crowded, and possibly have much larger proportions of internal space dedicated to weapons and engines.

You fail to grasp the magnitude of the problem. Even if there was hundred times as much space per person in 10 km long imperial battleship, it would still mean crew of 1,6 million. There is no way around that 'tens of thousands' makes no sense.

Super rough numbers here, but lets take as estimate for the volume of a Nimitz (numbers from wikipedia). 333*77*20 is roughly 512,820 cubic meters. With a crew of 6,000 this is 85.47 cubic meters per crewman.

Compare this to the rough volume of a 40k battleship which is say... 10KM long and using proportional height and width to the aircraft carrier. 10,000*2,312*600 is roughly 13,872,000,000 cubic meters. The crew is "tens of thousands of crewmen and soldiers" I am going to assume 90,000. This means that there is 154,133 cubic meters per crewman.

An Imperial battleship is roughly 1,800 times less crowded than a Nimitz aircraft carrier. For perspective, there would be 4 crewmen on the entirety of the Nimitz if that were to transfer over. However, assume that the Imperial battleship dedicates ten times as much internal space to armor, weapons, and engines. It would mean that the battleship is instead 180 times less crowded than the Nimitz, which would translate to about 33 crewmen on the Nimitz, which still sounds a little low, but a lot better.

Sorry, these numbers are extremely rough, but I am just spitballing.

w1zard wrote:
Super rough numbers here, but lets take as estimate for the volume of a Nimitz (numbers from wikipedia). 333*77*20 is roughly 512,820 cubic meters. With a crew of 6,000 this is 85.47 cubic meters per crewman.

Compare this to the rough volume of a 40k battleship which is say... 10KM long and using proportional height and width to the aircraft carrier. 10,000*2,312*600 is roughly 13,872,000,000 cubic meters. The crew is "tens of thousands of crewmen and soldiers" I am going to assume 90,000. This means that there is 154,133 cubic meters per crewman.

An Imperial battleship is roughly 1,800 times less crowded than a Nimitz aircraft carrier. For perspective, there would be 4 crewmen on the entirety of the Nimitz if that were to transfer over. However, assume that the Imperial battleship dedicates ten times as much internal space to armor, weapons, and engines. It would mean that the battleship is instead 180 times less crowded than the Nimitz, which would translate to about 33 crewmen on the Nimitz, which still sounds a little low, but a lot better.

Sorry, these numbers are extremely rough, but I am just spitballing.

Consider the 1 Kilometre + "highways" and large cathedral rooms in the Imperial vessels when discussing this, that'll proably adjust things a little.

BrianDavion wrote:
Consider the 1 Kilometre + "highways" and large cathedral rooms in the Imperial vessels when discussing this, that'll proably adjust things a little.

It already factors that in. Whether the internal space is a maze of corridors or a wide cathedral, usable internal space is usable internal space.

Andy Chambers gave the crew size scale at 1500-2000 people per damage point for capital ships and at 200-500 for escorts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160630040043/http://www.wolfedengames.com/battlefleetgothic/crew.htm

This scale is adhered to in BL publications published years apart by different authors:

Now, six years later, he was one of the most senior non-commissioned officers amongst a crew of almost thirteen thousand...
p. 62, Shadow Point , by Gordon Rennie

That was for a Dictator class cruiser with 6 damage points so that fits with the scale given by Andy Chambers.

"I cannot be everywhere, Warrant. There are ten thousand men aboard the Relentless."

http://www.richard-williams.com/relentless-notes.php

Exact page number not available as my paper copy of that book not at hand but that author's notes gives the quote. The Relentless was a Lunar class cruiser, so 6 damage points. Again that crew size falls within Andy Chambers' range.

Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches...
p. 95-96, Soul Hunter

That was for an Avenger class grand cruiser with 10 damage points. By Andy Chambers, that gives a crew of about 20,000 but an additional 5,000 might be those servitors referenced. An extra 25% crew inflation perhaps but still far less than the massive inflation by people claiming millions.

As shown by these quotes, the scale has been remarkably consistent over many years of BL publications. It wasn't until FFG came along that then people started trying to inflate the size for no apparent reason. It smacks of "It's 40K so things have to be stupidly big...just because". Just because there is volume does not mean it has to have crew. The inflation is no different really from those that insist Warlord Titans are as tall as mountain ranges based on exaggerated artwork. If an outlier BL author should write bolters shooting laser beams, we don't then go and say there is inconsistency about whether bolters shoot bolts or laser beams. We say the BL author didn't do their research and got it wrong.

A lot of the issues comes from many people not understanding the square-cube law. Writers think that ship twice as long has twice the space and twice the crew of the smaller ship, although actually it has eight times the space.

BrianDavion wrote:
I've not been aboard a Nimitz class but I've been aboard plenty of ships and I'll agree with w1zard here as a general rule. Ships are generally pretty compact, with small corridors (only wide eneugh to go through 1 at a time) lowish ceilings. etc. they're very compact. Compare this with what's been told about Imperial ships, they have sections with high ceilings, long wide passage ways etc. Imperium ships, put bluntly WASTE a lot of space

Sorry to be a party pooper, but Nimitz class ships are only carriers, without cannons, no engines for void shields, no area for cooling systems, no area tanks, etc that has to be dropped, etc etc.

So far as I've understood it, you have to have huge areas for engines dedicated for void shields, backup systems and cooling systems all things that contemporary carries doesn't have.

Iracundus wrote:
A quote about Great Crusade era ships is not really relevant to the 40k era because we know the Imperium has gone downhill technologically since then. Nor is citing examples of civilian cargo ships larger than 6km since the discussion was about warships, specifically battleships. Warships would be more heavily armored, have more durable redundant systems, larger power requirements, and have more crew than a comparable civilian freighter, which can be a nearly uninhabited flying box. Modern freighters vs modern warships shows this difference between ship and crew sizes. The attempts to handwave about the crew as all servitors also does not fit all the existing background of the ships using manual labor to load weapons, and being Hornblower in Space with the gun decks being flying ghettos.

It's pretty damn clear these are modern 40k ship classes too, which are no different from the "modern" ones, especially when ships can have multi-millennial lifespans. And I actually can't recall the massive press gangs showing up much in modern fluff, with that being more of an old BFG thing.

The citing of the BFG list consensus and also of Andy Chambers’ crew and size scales is relevant as actually the BL novels have been remarkably consistent across years of novels by different writers in adhering generally to that scale. Size inflation is a thing though with more recent writers seemingly creeping the size up and inventing new previously unknown ship classes or individual ships. That does not make it any more reasonable than those previous depictions of a Warlord Titan as big as a mountain. As MarcoSkoll pointed out, it gets into stupid territory. Given the previous surprising consistency in BL with regards to ships it is tantamount to a writer suddenly writing bolters shooting out lasers or daisy flowers. I.e. they didn’t do their background research.

No, consensus means nothing and all opinions regarding it is worthless because said conesnsus is held by people who don't own the IP. I don't care what any mailing list, or even GW writers on that mailing list think, because they have no say in what is or is not true. That people respect what is said is circumstantial until GW slaps that mailing list with the big ol' canon stamp, publishes it, and explicitly repeals prior fluff about ships exceeding the 6 kilometer limit by declaring them heretic tomes. Otherwise you're ultimately just clinging to old sources out of nostalgia that are no longer up-to-date.

 Crimson wrote:
A lot of the issues comes from many people not understanding the square-cube law. Writers think that ship twice as long has twice the space and twice the crew of the smaller ship, although actually it has eight times the space.

I think I understand the "square law" Isambard Kingdom Brunel proved it when sailing a steamship across the Alantic from Teadrinker Land to Gunslinger Land. People said it couldn't be done since a ship that size would use up too much coal, but they didn't understand the carrying capacity increased much greater than the "square law"

HexHammer wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
I've not been aboard a Nimitz class but I've been aboard plenty of ships and I'll agree with w1zard here as a general rule. Ships are generally pretty compact, with small corridors (only wide eneugh to go through 1 at a time) lowish ceilings. etc. they're very compact. Compare this with what's been told about Imperial ships, they have sections with high ceilings, long wide passage ways etc. Imperium ships, put bluntly WASTE a lot of space

Sorry to be a party pooper, but Nimitz class ships are only carriers, without cannons, no engines for void shields, no area for cooling systems, no area tanks, etc that has to be dropped, etc etc. So far as I've understood it, you have to have huge areas for engines dedicated for void shields, backup systems and cooling systems all things that contemporary carries doesn't have.

I don't quite see what you're trying to say? A carrier has to have space for it's fighters, some fuel and munitions for them (the carrier group will also have a supply ship), spare parts and workshops, and it does have large engines to keep it moving at a good clip. The ship itself needs 3200 crew to work but the air wing assigned to it is a further 2500 or so. And it's not expected to fight directly so there's only some light armament and not that much armor taking space - but it's still incredibly cramped!

An Imperial vessel does use a lot of volume on reactors, drives, armor and guns, but still seems to have space for cathedrals and stuff.

Spetulhu wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
Sorry to be a party pooper, but Nimitz class ships are only carriers, without cannons, no engines for void shields, no area for cooling systems, no area tanks, etc that has to be dropped, etc etc. So far as I've understood it, you have to have huge areas for engines dedicated for void shields, backup systems and cooling systems all things that contemporary carries doesn't have.

I don't quite see what you're trying to say? A carrier has to have space for it's fighters, some fuel and munitions for them (the carrier group will also have a supply ship), spare parts and workshops, and it does have large engines to keep it moving at a good clip. The ship itself needs 3200 crew to work but the air wing assigned to it is a further 2500 or so. And it's not expected to fight directly so there's only some light armament and not that much armor taking space - but it's still incredibly cramped!

An Imperial vessel does use a lot of volume on reactors, drives, armor and guns, but still seems to have space for cathedrals and stuff.

Isn't it so that the biggest ships in the Imperial Navy also doubles as carriers thus does exactly what Nimitz carrier does? So on top of those things you mentioned they also have to have cannons and void shields?

BrianDavion wrote:
Consider the 1 Kilometre + "highways" and large cathedral rooms in the Imperial vessels when discussing this, that'll proably adjust things a little.

I think this is the important point about 'useable internal space' - Imperial scale and tech requires a lot of that space for either logistics or scale of machinery, and a battleship might do the job of a gun platform, carrier and troop transport.

So, a single Imperial ship-to-ship gun requires, say, 100 pressed crew (from Legacy?) just to pull out the spent shells on ropes. Those are guns massively larger than a battleship gun, not just 10x. Warp drives are colossal. Battleships regularly transport Titan detachments and entire Imperial Armies, and then have highways big enough (in height as well as width) to march them down from their billet area to their loading bay area. Plus all the processionals, gothic stuff, etc.

The battleship in theory has a ton of extra 'unused space', but it needs to use that space for it's operations.

I don't see why having tons of enormous equipment is a reason for less crew. It's the opposite: that equipment is the reason the crew is there. You don't stuff crew onto a ship for no reason. If the engines are a kilometer long by themselves, that's a long stretch of machinery that needs constant maintenance to keep it operational, if it's like anything else in 40K.

I would imagine, if the writers went through every piece of equipment and duty on a battleship and listed the number of people it required, you'd get a crew of a million or more.

this thread reminds me that some one already did one of those giant size comparison thing.

a lot of the 40k stuff is massive. but its not always the biggest one.

but overall they are pretty dang big.
full sized spoiled

 Desubot wrote:


this thread reminds me that some one already did one of those giant size comparison thing.

a lot of the 40k stuff is massive. but its not always the biggest one.

but overall they are pretty dang big.
full sized spoiled

Spoiler:

Love that site - so much coolness.

Big is often beautiful

That pic has no craftworld . . . . ?

 Pancake5765 wrote:
That pic has no craftworld . . . . ?

I don't think you could fit a craftworld in that pic. They're the size of a flying continental plate - such as the entire British Isles. There'd just be this mass of golden baubles at the bottom of the image with no beginning or end.

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Pancake5765 wrote:
That pic has no craftworld . . . . ?

I don't think you could fit a craftworld in that pic. They're the size of a flying continental plate - such as the entire British Isles. There'd just be this mass of golden baubles at the bottom of the image with no beginning or end.

Yeah its like having the Death Star or large Culture ships

 Pancake5765 wrote:
That pic has no craftworld . . . . ?

Also the ID4 City Destroyer's in there but no Mothership?

In order for a 10KM battleship to feel as crowded as a modern day aircraft carrier you would need roughly 16,230,000 crewmen lol, again, accounting for 10 times larger weapons, engines, and armor.

According to the star wars wiki, a super star destroyer (the Executor, darth vader's flagship from the original movies) was 19KM in length and had a crew of 300,000 which is even more ridiculous.

w1zard wrote:
In order for a 10KM battleship to feel as crowded as a modern day aircraft carrier you would need roughly 16,230,000 crewmen lol, again, accounting for 10 times larger weapons, engines, and armor.

According to the star wars wiki, a super star destroyer (the Executor, darth vader's flagship from the original movies) was 19KM in length and had a crew of 300,000 which is even more ridiculous.

Most space in star wars ships is taken up by the reactors and hyperdrive, so in reality, especially with how thin they are, the Executor Class was functionally akin to a ship that's 9 kilometers long if it's anything like its smaller sisters.

 Wyzilla wrote:
Most space in star wars ships is taken up by the reactors and hyperdrive, so in reality, especially with how thin they are, the Executor Class was functionally akin to a ship that's 9 kilometers long if it's anything like its smaller sisters.

Even accounting for the thin profile and large engines, 300,000 crew is nowhere near enough. We would need to know the exact volume of an SSD (Super Star Destroyer) to get a really accurate comparison... But, even a 10 KM battleship with proportionally 10 times more space devoted to armor, weapons and engines than a modern aircraft carrier can fit millions of people on board, and tens of millions before it starts to feel crowded. 300,000 is nothing for a 19 KM long battleship.

https://imgur.com/gallery/zgIcrsz

That picture is for perspective.

w1zard wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:
Most space in star wars ships is taken up by the reactors and hyperdrive, so in reality, especially with how thin they are, the Executor Class was functionally akin to a ship that's 9 kilometers long if it's anything like its smaller sisters.

Even accounting for the thin profile and large engines, 300,000 crew is nowhere near enough. We would need to know the exact volume of an SSD (Super Star Destroyer) to get a really accurate comparison... But, even a 10 KM battleship with proportionally 10 times more space devoted to armor, weapons and engines than a modern aircraft carrier can fit millions of people on board, and tens of millions before it starts to feel crowded. 300,000 is nothing for a 19 KM long battleship.

https://imgur.com/gallery/zgIcrsz

That picture is for perspective.

I don't think there would even be 10 kilometers for "free" space (disregarding volume as we don't know it) simply because engines in Star Wars are GIGANTIC. They really take up a lot of space, as do hangars, when compared to RL ships which are fiendishly efficient when it comes to usage of available space. Living sections tend to just be a couple decks of the ship, while the engines and hangar space comprises the majority of a ship's volume. Hell the ships have such massive engines/reactors that those distinctive circular buldges you see in most GE ships? Those are reactors with a thin layer of armor slapped over them because they couldn't actually fit the reactor within the constraints of the hull design.

If anything Star Wars ships are too small, as they don't have enough armor over the important sections which might even be partially exposed to enemy fire when shields fail.

I think people are forgetting how small, geographically speaking, cities are. Dublin is about 100 km square (10x10 km) but has 1.2 million people in it. Quite comfortably and without crowding, including parks, housing estates etc etc.

w1zard wrote:
According to the star wars wiki, a super star destroyer (the Executor, darth vader's flagship from the original movies) was 19KM in length and had a crew of 300,000 which is even more ridiculous.

I think the "rotation" is different on such SSD, where people may have prolonged stay and you have to have civilian entertainers which requires service crew, administration, office workers, civilian shops, super markets, big relaxation halls, big areas for military personnel and vehicles etc.

Somehow it seems plausible to me, but maybe I'm just crazy.

I think SW won the game of stupid, implausible big with Starkiller and noone should even try to approach it.

 Earth127 wrote:
I think SW won the game of stupid, implausible big with Starkiller and noone should even try to approach it.

That's always been Star Wars's style: ships are as big as they need to be, and weapons as powerful as they need to be, to be visually impressive onscreen before any other consideration.

w1zard wrote:
Even accounting for the thin profile and large engines, 300,000 crew is nowhere near enough.

But it’s ‘enough’ that is the operative word there. We’re not necessarily trying to figure out how many crew CAN for aboard, but how many is a sensible number to run the ship at full complement.

As a comparison, the biggest supertankers we have today are within ⅓ to ½ a km in length, but only have 25-30 crew to run safely, because the main purpose of the ship is as a transport. We could expect similar of SW or Imperial ships, given that we probably don’t count the Stormtrooper regiments or Imperial Guard regiments they can definitely fit insiders as ‘crew’.

Even big machinery doesn’t necessarily need more crew to operate, if it’s the size of the machinery that makes the engines big rather than the complexity of components. I mean, the Death Star laser seems to require km of giant focus ‘barrel’ space, but only two little guys standing dangerously close to the beam to actually operate it.

 ArbitorIan wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Even accounting for the thin profile and large engines, 300,000 crew is nowhere near enough.

But it’s ‘enough’ that is the operative word there. We’re not necessarily trying to figure out how many crew CAN for aboard, but how many is a sensible number to run the ship at full complement.

As a comparison, the biggest supertankers we have today are within ⅓ to ½ a km in length, but only have 25-30 crew to run safely, because the main purpose of the ship is as a transport. We could expect similar of SW or Imperial ships, given that we probably don’t count the Stormtrooper regiments or Imperial Guard regiments they can definitely fit insiders as ‘crew’.

Even big machinery doesn’t necessarily need more crew to operate, if it’s the size of the machinery that makes the engines big rather than the complexity of components. I mean, the Death Star laser seems to require km of giant focus ‘barrel’ space, but only two little guys standing dangerously close to the beam to actually operate it.

Also droids. lots and lots of droids.

 Desubot wrote:

 ArbitorIan wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Even accounting for the thin profile and large engines, 300,000 crew is nowhere near enough.

But it’s ‘enough’ that is the operative word there. We’re not necessarily trying to figure out how many crew CAN for aboard, but how many is a sensible number to run the ship at full complement.

As a comparison, the biggest supertankers we have today are within ⅓ to ½ a km in length, but only have 25-30 crew to run safely, because the main purpose of the ship is as a transport. We could expect similar of SW or Imperial ships, given that we probably don’t count the Stormtrooper regiments or Imperial Guard regiments they can definitely fit insiders as ‘crew’.

Even big machinery doesn’t necessarily need more crew to operate, if it’s the size of the machinery that makes the engines big rather than the complexity of components. I mean, the Death Star laser seems to require km of giant focus ‘barrel’ space, but only two little guys standing dangerously close to the beam to actually operate it.

Also droids. lots and lots of droids.

which can apply to 40k through serviators as well

 ArbitorIan wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Even accounting for the thin profile and large engines, 300,000 crew is nowhere near enough.

But it’s ‘enough’ that is the operative word there. We’re not necessarily trying to figure out how many crew CAN for aboard, but how many is a sensible number to run the ship at full complement.

As a comparison, the biggest supertankers we have today are within ⅓ to ½ a km in length, but only have 25-30 crew to run safely, because the main purpose of the ship is as a transport. We could expect similar of SW or Imperial ships, given that we probably don’t count the Stormtrooper regiments or Imperial Guard regiments they can definitely fit insiders as ‘crew’.

Even big machinery doesn’t necessarily need more crew to operate, if it’s the size of the machinery that makes the engines big rather than the complexity of components. I mean, the Death Star laser seems to require km of giant focus ‘barrel’ space, but only two little guys standing dangerously close to the beam to actually operate it.

No, you aren't understanding the scales involved and how big a 19KM battleship is.

Let me modify my original numbers for an SSD.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Super rough numbers here, but lets take as estimate for the volume of a Nimitz (numbers from wikipedia). 333*77*20 is roughly 512,820 cubic meters. With a crew of 6,000 this is 85.47 cubic meters per crewman.

Compare this to the rough volume of a Super Star Destroyer... 19KM long and using proportional height and width to the aircraft carrier. 19,000*4,393*1,141 is roughly 95,235,847,000 cubic meters. The crew is 300,000. This means that there is 317,452 cubic meters per crewman.

A Super Star Destroyer is roughly 3,715 times less crowded than a Nimitz aircraft carrier. For perspective, there would be 2 crewmen on the entirety of the Nimitz if that were to transfer over.

Now, lets do something crazy and assume that 90% of the internal space of the star destroyer is taken up by engines, weapons, shields etc... 90 freaking percent. That means there is a total of 9,523,584,700 cubic meters of usable internal space, and roughly 31,775 cubic meters per crewman. Congratulations, the SSD is now roughly 372 times less crowded then an aircraft carrier. For perspective, there would be 16 crewmen on the entirety of the Nimitz if that were to transfer over.

A Super Star Destroyer with 90% of its internal space rendered unusable due to engines, weapons, etc could have a crew of 111,600,000 before it felt as crowded as an aircraft carrier.

Square cubed law is a b****.

w1zard wrote:
No, you aren't understanding the scales involved and how big a 19KM battleship is.

Let me modify my original numbers for an SSD.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Super rough numbers here, but lets take as estimate for the volume of a Nimitz (numbers from wikipedia). 333*77*20 is roughly 512,820 cubic meters. With a crew of 6,000 this is 85.47 cubic meters per crewman.

Compare this to the rough volume of a Super Star Destroyer... 19KM long and using proportional height and width to the aircraft carrier. 19,000*4,393*1,141 is roughly 95,235,847,000 cubic meters. The crew is 300,000. This means that there is 317,452 cubic meters per crewman.
[..]
A Super Star Destroyer with 90% of its internal space rendered unusable due to engines, weapons, etc could have a crew of 111,600,000 before it felt as crowded as an aircraft carrier.

Square cubed law is a b****.

Uhmmm, yearh likewise.
Comparing a SSD to a carrier is a moot comparison, a carrier is a specialized ship, with only 1 task, to carry airplanes, other ships are specialized too with destroyers, cruisers and battleships each their role, where a SSD are multirole.

Further your equation lacks the notion of engines for void shields, engines to power cannons, storage of deployable vehicles, civilian crew, entertainers, administrators, housing for diplomats etc etc.

HexHammer wrote:

w1zard wrote:
No, you aren't understanding the scales involved and how big a 19KM battleship is.

Let me modify my original numbers for an SSD.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Super rough numbers here, but lets take as estimate for the volume of a Nimitz (numbers from wikipedia). 333*77*20 is roughly 512,820 cubic meters. With a crew of 6,000 this is 85.47 cubic meters per crewman.

Compare this to the rough volume of a Super Star Destroyer... 19KM long and using proportional height and width to the aircraft carrier. 19,000*4,393*1,141 is roughly 95,235,847,000 cubic meters. The crew is 300,000. This means that there is 317,452 cubic meters per crewman.
[..]
A Super Star Destroyer with 90% of its internal space rendered unusable due to engines, weapons, etc could have a crew of 111,600,000 before it felt as crowded as an aircraft carrier.

Square cubed law is a b****.

Uhmmm, yearh likewise.
Comparing a SSD to a carrier is a moot comparison, a carrier is a specialized ship, with only 1 task, to carry airplanes, other ships are specialized too with destroyers, cruisers and battleships each their role, where a SSD are multirole.

Further your equation lacks the notion of engines for void shields, engines to power cannons, storage of deployable vehicles, civilian crew, entertainers, administrators, housing for diplomats etc etc.

yeah but a SSD does fill a carrier role.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
I think that passage shows exactly how the writers do not grasp the implications of the scale. Tens of thousands of crew and troops! Really? 330 metres long Nimitz class aircraft carrier has over 6000 personnel. Ten kilometres long ship would have roughly 27 000 times the volume of Nimitz! So if we scale the crew accordingly, we would get something like 160 million!

How much of that interior space is machinery that is outright hostile to human life though? also how many servitors are aboard a ship? As I said earlier I've personally suspected warp drives are HUUUGE and make up a decent chunk of a ships interior.

Farsight flies a Coldstar inside one, so yeah, I'd say Warp Engines are fairly huge.

BrianDavion wrote:
yeah but a SSD does fill a carrier role.

"also" fill a carrier role.

HexHammer wrote:
Further your equation lacks the notion of engines for void shields, engines to power cannons, storage of deployable vehicles, civilian crew, entertainers, administrators, housing for diplomats etc etc.

What part of "I considered 90% of the internal space of the super star destroyer 'unusable' " didn't you get?

Even with 90% of the internal space of a super star destroyer filled with concrete, it can still hold over 100 million people without feeling as crowded as modern day navy ships.

I know it's hard to imagine, but a 19KM long battleship is mindbogglingly massive.

w1zard wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
Further your equation lacks the notion of engines for void shields, engines to power cannons, storage of deployable vehicles, civilian crew, entertainers, administrators, housing for diplomats etc etc.

What part of "I considered 90% of the internal space of the super star destroyer 'unusable' " didn't you get?

Even with 90% of the internal space of a super star destroyer filled with concrete, it can still hold over 100 million people without feeling as crowded as modern day navy ships.

I know it's hard to imagine, but a 19KM long battleship is mindbogglingly massive.

Considering how big cities filles up the landscape, adding military bases, etc I'd say a SSD can easily be filled up.

HexHammer wrote:
Considering how big cities filles up the landscape, adding military bases, etc I'd say a SSD can easily be filled up.

Big cities fill the landscape, because generally, most buildings don't go past 2 or 3 stories so there is more horizontal sprawl. Imagine a city where every building is 20-30 stories (or higher, assuming a story ~4 meters, a Super Star Destroyer would be 285 stories high, and that is the super "thin" profile!). You can cram a lot more people into a comparatively smaller space and still make it feel as though it isn't as crowded as a big city.

 Earth127 wrote:
I think SW won the game of stupid, implausible big with Starkiller and noone should even try to approach it.

What, a single planet? Nah. It's significantly smaller than any dyson sphere described in fiction. The three biggest things I can think of are two of the mecha from the aforementioned Tengen Toppa Gurren Laggan, and Bolder's Ring from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence. The latter masses 10,000 times that of the Milky Way, and is ten million miles across. It's built as a fire escape from the universe.

w1zard wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
Considering how big cities filles up the landscape, adding military bases, etc I'd say a SSD can easily be filled up.

Big cities fill the landscape, because generally, most buildings don't go past 2 or 3 stories so there is more horizontal sprawl. Imagine a city where every building is 20-30 stories (or higher, assuming a story ~4 meters, a Super Star Destroyer would be 285 stories high, and that is the super "thin" profile!). You can cram a lot more people into a comparatively smaller space and still make it feel as though it isn't as crowded as a big city.

I spoke about more than just a city, but that are magically left out of your equation.

This is pretty cool

w1zard wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
Further your equation lacks the notion of engines for void shields, engines to power cannons, storage of deployable vehicles, civilian crew, entertainers, administrators, housing for diplomats etc etc.

What part of "I considered 90% of the internal space of the super star destroyer 'unusable' " didn't you get?

Even with 90% of the internal space of a super star destroyer filled with concrete, it can still hold over 100 million people without feeling as crowded as modern day navy ships.

I know it's hard to imagine, but a 19KM long battleship is mindbogglingly massive.

It is futile, I've tried this before in many threads, people just don't get it.

Me: 'It doesn't make sense that you could carry only four golf balls in a Jumbo Jet'
People: 'But you need to also bring the golf clubs and you golfing shoes, so it makes sense.'

Most people seem to be clinically unable to grasp the magnitude of the problem.

 Crimson wrote:


It is futile, I've tried this before in many threads, people just don't get it.

Me: 'It doesn't make sense that you could carry only four golf balls in a Jumbo Jet'
People: 'But you need to also bring the golf clubs and you golfing shoes, so it makes sense.'

Most people seem to be clinically unable to grasp the magnitude of the problem.

Or you're having the wrong conversation. Again, the point is not 'how many people CAN FIT on an Imperial Battlehip' but 'how many people are needed to run one'

You: 'It doesn't make sense that you could carry only four golf balls in a Jumbo Jet'
People: 'You can carry loads of golf balls on a Jumbo Jet, but we only need four'
You: 'Well, that's a very empty jumbo jet'
People: 'No, it's carrying a load of people, and a load of cargo, and the engines take up half the fuselage because they break into the Warp.'
You: 'You aren't grasping the magnitude of the problem - you can fit LOADS of golf balls in a Jumbo jet'
People: *sigh*

 Crimson wrote:
It is futile, I've tried this before in many threads, people just don't get it.

Me: 'It doesn't make sense that you could carry only four golf balls in a Jumbo Jet'
People: 'But you need to also bring the golf clubs and you golfing shoes, so it makes sense.'

Most people seem to be clinically unable to grasp the magnitude of the problem.

The gold course, the club house, the parking lots, housing for lawn mower, etc etc.

People doesn't think holistically, but clinically.

 ArbitorIan wrote:


Or you're having the wrong conversation. Again, the point is not 'how many people CAN FIT on an Imperial Battlehip' but 'how many people are needed to run one'

Have you ever seen the Battlefleet Gothic rulebook? Everything in these ships are operated by huge cadres of people. They're not some super automated things where a single crew member could wander in empty corridors for days without meeting anyone. These ships are depicted in art as being filled with people, but the numbers do not even remotely add up.

Maybe some of the crew numbers don’t count slaves and servotors. Maybe it only refers to skilled crew members, not the masses of folk turning big wheels.

 Crimson wrote:

 ArbitorIan wrote:


Or you're having the wrong conversation. Again, the point is not 'how many people CAN FIT on an Imperial Battlehip' but 'how many people are needed to run one'

Spoiler:

Have you ever seen the Battlefleet Gothic rulebook? Everything in these ships are operated by huge cadres of people. They're not some super automated things where a single crew member could wander in empty corridors for days without meeting anyone. These ships are depicted in art as being filled with people, but the numbers do not even remotely add up.

I think part of the problem here is that the concentration of people isn't going to be equal within the entire volume of the vessel, like you seem to be assuming. Sure, parts of the ship, some of the decks, based on their function, are going to be overcrowded and filled with hoards of people/serfs/slaves, etc. But, significant other areas and spaces are going to be very thin on people and filled with other things; such as engines, fuel, supplies, equipment, food & water, and cargo. Also, the upper/high class decks for officers, commanders, etc are probably much more spacious and luxuriant, with plenty of extra space for amenities and comforts, with very little-to-no crowding, vs. the lower decks packed to the brim with labourers/serfs/slaves, etc. Also the thought that slaves might not even be numbered as "crew" is a fair point and entirely possible.

 Anfauglir wrote:

I think part of the problem here is that the concentration of people isn't going to be equal within the entire volume of the vessel, like you seem to be assuming. Sure, parts of the ship, some of the decks, based on their function, are going to be overcrowded and filled with hoards of people/serfs/slaves, etc. But, significant other areas and spaces are going to very thin on people and filled with other things; such as engines, fuel, supplies, equipment, food & water, and cargo. Also, the upper/high class decks for officers, commanders, etc are probably much more spacious and luxuriant, with plenty of extra space for amenities and comforts, with very little-to-no crowding, vs. the lower decks packed to the brim with labourers/serfs/slaves, etc. Also the thought that slaves might not even be numbered as "crew" is a fair point and entirely possible.

But that has already been taken into account. I am not saying then kilometre Imperial battleship should have crew of 160 million (same crew density than on Nimitz, which by the way is not empty space occupied solely by crew quarters, it has engines, storage etc too), but even if there were hundred times the space per person (or 99% of the ship completely empty while the rest is packed) on such a ship compared to Nimitz, it would still have a crew of 1,6 million! Tens of thousands if completely absurdly off. The crew numbers for this size of ship should be in millions.

You're looking at the wrong numbers here.

The Super Star Destroyer is larger than the average Imperial cruiser. But the Galactic Empire had one Super Star Destroyer. The Imperium has so many Cruisers that it can lose them without any one even noticing.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
You're looking at the wrong numbers here.

No, I was referring my earlier math about ten kilometre long imperial ship.

And I was referring to something entirely different than your math.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
You're looking at the wrong numbers here.

The Super Star Destroyer is larger than the average Imperial cruiser. But the Galactic Empire had one Super Star Destroyer. The Imperium has so many Cruisers that it can lose them without any one even noticing.

Multiple Super Star Destroyers were manufactured over the course of the galactic civil war, but that doesn't change the fact that Super Star Destroyers supposedly having a crew of 300,000 is laughable. You can check my math if you want.

I agree, in all likelyhood that a Super Star Destroyer would probably need less people per unit of volume to run than a modern day navy ship due to automation. So lets redo the math again shall we?

Let's say that 90 PERCENT of an SSD's volume is unusable due to hangars, weapons, shields, engines, etc. And lets say that even accounting for that, that the usable space of an SSD is 50 TIMES less crowded than a modern day aircraft carrier.

That would mean that a super star destroyer would have a usable volume of 9,523,584,700 cubic meters and would need a crew of 2,228,521 to run effectively. Even being extremely generous the numbers still don't match up.

Equation: (9,523,584,700/X)=(85.47)*(50) and solve for X

w1zard wrote:
Multiple Super Star Destroyers were manufactured over the course of the galactic civil war, but that doesn't change the fact that Super Star Destroyers supposedly having a crew of 300,000 is laughable. You can check my math if you want.

I agree, in all likelyhood that a Super Star Destroyer would probably need less people per unit of volume to run than a modern day navy ship due to automation. So lets redo the math again shall we?

Let's say that 90 PERCENT of an SSD's volume is unusable due to hangars, weapons, shields, engines, etc. And lets say that even accounting for that, that the usable space of an SSD is 50 TIMES less crowded than a modern day aircraft carrier.

That would mean that a super star destroyer would have a usable volume of 9,523,584,700 cubic meters and would need a crew of 2,228,521 to run effectively. Even being extremely generous the numbers still don't match up.

Equation: (9,523,584,700/X)=(85.47)*(50) and solve for X

SSD has much greater halls, passage ways etc than a carrier. Where a carrier has minimal interior space and a SSD has lavish interior space. So it seems the SSD has a factor of 8 of space per person to a carrier.

HexHammer wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Multiple Super Star Destroyers were manufactured over the course of the galactic civil war, but that doesn't change the fact that Super Star Destroyers supposedly having a crew of 300,000 is laughable. You can check my math if you want.

I agree, in all likelyhood that a Super Star Destroyer would probably need less people per unit of volume to run than a modern day navy ship due to automation. So lets redo the math again shall we?

Let's say that 90 PERCENT of an SSD's volume is unusable due to hangars, weapons, shields, engines, etc. And lets say that even accounting for that, that the usable space of an SSD is 50 TIMES less crowded than a modern day aircraft carrier.

That would mean that a super star destroyer would have a usable volume of 9,523,584,700 cubic meters and would need a crew of 2,228,521 to run effectively. Even being extremely generous the numbers still don't match up.

Equation: (9,523,584,700/X)=(85.47)*(50) and solve for X

SSD has much greater halls, passage ways etc than a carrier. Where a carrier has minimal interior space and a SSD has lavish interior space. So it seems the SSD has a factor of 8 of space per person to a carrier.

Only if the assumption of 90% of the space in the ship is non-useable, which is an absurdly inefficient way to design a ship (as w1zard has already said numerous times). No amount of extra lavish interiors can account for the huge volumes in a ship that size. It's pretty simple maths, with the problem being the scales are too vast to be easy to comprehend. To give you an example of how stupidly large the useable volume calculated above is, it's equivalent to the space taken up by the footprint of Greater London, to a height of around 6km above the streets (London is 1583000 sq/m). That's...insane. You can't account for such a low population density by saying the halls are a bit wider or taller. The maths is a bit more involved than I'm willing to do but I think to get the numbers to work your hallways would have to be the width of a motorway at the very least.

I'm really trying not to be condescending here, but if you're trying to justify these numbers it means you haven't understood the problem. It's not that surprising - the human brain doesn't do well when imagining distances over about a km or numbers more than a thousand, we're not really evolved for that kind of thinking.

Slipspace wrote:

HexHammer wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Multiple Super Star Destroyers were manufactured over the course of the galactic civil war, but that doesn't change the fact that Super Star Destroyers supposedly having a crew of 300,000 is laughable. You can check my math if you want.

I agree, in all likelyhood that a Super Star Destroyer would probably need less people per unit of volume to run than a modern day navy ship due to automation. So lets redo the math again shall we?

Let's say that 90 PERCENT of an SSD's volume is unusable due to hangars, weapons, shields, engines, etc. And lets say that even accounting for that, that the usable space of an SSD is 50 TIMES less crowded than a modern day aircraft carrier.

That would mean that a super star destroyer would have a usable volume of 9,523,584,700 cubic meters and would need a crew of 2,228,521 to run effectively. Even being extremely generous the numbers still don't match up.

Equation: (9,523,584,700/X)=(85.47)*(50) and solve for X

SSD has much greater halls, passage ways etc than a carrier. Where a carrier has minimal interior space and a SSD has lavish interior space. So it seems the SSD has a factor of 8 of space per person to a carrier.

Only if the assumption of 90% of the space in the ship is non-useable, which is an absurdly inefficient way to design a ship (as w1zard has already said numerous times). No amount of extra lavish interiors can account for the huge volumes in a ship that size. It's pretty simple maths, with the problem being the scales are too vast to be easy to comprehend. To give you an example of how stupidly large the useable volume calculated above is, it's equivalent to the space taken up by the footprint of Greater London, to a height of around 6km above the streets (London is 1583000 sq/m). That's...insane. You can't account for such a low population density by saying the halls are a bit wider or taller. The maths is a bit more involved than I'm willing to do but I think to get the numbers to work your hallways would have to be the width of a motorway at the very least.

I'm really trying not to be condescending here, but if you're trying to justify these numbers it means you haven't understood the problem. It's not that surprising - the human brain doesn't do well when imagining distances over about a km or numbers more than a thousand, we're not really evolved for that kind of thinking.

Its clear from the size comparison website and video's posted earlier that big ships are common in fact almost expected in Sci-fi shows. games etc. 40K is even on the smaller side compared to some - Halo, The Culture, etc etc

They are this big "because" - trying to find in universe justifications may be fun but ultimately fruitless.

 Mr Morden wrote:


Its clear from the size comparison website and video's posted earlier that big ships are common in fact almost expected in Sci-fi shows. games etc. 40K is even on the smaller side compared to some - Halo, The Culture, etc etc

They are this big "because" - trying to find in universe justifications may be fun but ultimately fruitless.

Absolutely. Almost certainly because making these ships a more reasonable size would make them seem kind of puny, even without the existence of some of the more ridiculously large ships we currently see in fiction. A 2km-long battleship would be vast, but not too far from what we can imagine so a lot of writers just write bigger and bigger numbers so as not to seem like they're underselling things.

I think a problem is that we're assuming a comparison between an aircraft carrier and a spaceship. A fairer comparison would be with something like a submarine, an enclosed airtight environment designed for extended periods away from base.

Say an Ohio class with a crew of 150, about 150m long, 12 wide and 10 tall. Lots of which is taken up with planetary bombardment weapons.

In which case W1zards numbers are out by a factor of.... 2.

GW is really bad a numbers. I once calculated that the population of a hiveworld should be able to breathe the oxygen out of the atmosphere within a century.

 Mr Morden wrote:
I'm really trying not to be condescending here, but if you're trying to justify these numbers it means you haven't understood the problem. It's not that surprising - the human brain doesn't do well when imagining distances over about a km or numbers more than a thousand, we're not really evolved for that kind of thinking.

Its clear from the size comparison website and video's posted earlier that big ships are common in fact almost expected in Sci-fi shows. games etc. 40K is even on the smaller side compared to some - Halo, The Culture, etc etc

They are this big "because" - trying to find in universe justifications may be fun but ultimately fruitless.

Ok, aha, I see, hmmm, maybe, uhmmm.
..well you have to have big huge venting shafts various people can fall down in, nuff said!!

Crew exist to perform tasks, not to fill up volume. Given how so much else of the 40K Imperium's technology works, a large crew may not be necessary because much of the Imperial high technology items are effective black boxes. Tanks are mothballed for years or centuries yet somehow still work fine when taken out of storage. The STC technology produced by the Mechanicus and used in the Imperium seems to have incredible durability and longevity.

Therefore there is no reason to use modern crew requirements, and the need for constant maintenance and training. The Imperium explicitly is shown using unskilled human labor for common crew for certain tasks, but not necessarily for all others. All technical matters are left in the hands of Tech-Priests, who only make up a very small fraction of the total crew.

Nor is there a requirement that the same population density has to be achieved uniformly throughout a ship. So while the inhabited crew sections, gun decks, and critical areas might be warrens of unwashed humanity, there could equally be vast deserted decks and maintenance passages, filled with mysterious humming or clanking machines that nobody is expected to touch except when the ship is docked in a shipyard.

 Graphite wrote:
I think a problem is that we're assuming a comparison between an aircraft carrier and a spaceship. A fairer comparison would be with something like a submarine, an enclosed airtight environment designed for extended periods away from base.

Say an Ohio class with a crew of 150, about 150m long, 12 wide and 10 tall. Lots of which is taken up with planetary bombardment weapons.

In which case W1zards numbers are out by a factor of.... 2.

Excellent point.

According to wikipedia, your crew count and dimensions are slightly off, so here is the math replacing the Nimitz class aircraft carrier with an Ohio class submarine. 170*13*11 is 24,310 cubic meters with a crew of 155 that is 156.84 cubic meters per crewman, and is actually surprisingly more spacious than the aircraft carrier. I always thought subs were the most crowded and cramped of ships.

So... redoing my math for the SSD assuming 90% unusable internal space and 50 times less crowded than an Ohio submarine.

(9,523,584,700/X)=(156.84)*(50) and solve for X... The crew of the SSD would need to be 1,214,433 to be effective... about 4 times larger than the "stated" amount of crew.

 Graphite wrote:
I think a problem is that we're assuming a comparison between an aircraft carrier and a spaceship. A fairer comparison would be with something like a submarine, an enclosed airtight environment designed for extended periods away from base.

Say an Ohio class with a crew of 150, about 150m long, 12 wide and 10 tall. Lots of which is taken up with planetary bombardment weapons.

I beg to differ, in a sub it's even more cramped spaces than a carrier, so it's imo very poor comparison.

As other people have said, it doesn't really matter whether the fictional spaceship in one universe is supposed to be bigger than another. They're just pointless made-up numbers.

However, what's really important is that a Battlefleet Gothic battleship is around 7 inches long. FFG is about to sell a 24-inch-long super star destroyer for Armada. Advantage: Star Wars.

Oh yes!

The simple aspect of broad sides will eventually outgun the void shields faster on enemy ships with 12 km ship, than a 6 km ship, simple.

Slipspace wrote:

HexHammer wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Multiple Super Star Destroyers were manufactured over the course of the galactic civil war, but that doesn't change the fact that Super Star Destroyers supposedly having a crew of 300,000 is laughable. You can check my math if you want.

I agree, in all likelyhood that a Super Star Destroyer would probably need less people per unit of volume to run than a modern day navy ship due to automation. So lets redo the math again shall we?

Let's say that 90 PERCENT of an SSD's volume is unusable due to hangars, weapons, shields, engines, etc. And lets say that even accounting for that, that the usable space of an SSD is 50 TIMES less crowded than a modern day aircraft carrier.

That would mean that a super star destroyer would have a usable volume of 9,523,584,700 cubic meters and would need a crew of 2,228,521 to run effectively. Even being extremely generous the numbers still don't match up.

Equation: (9,523,584,700/X)=(85.47)*(50) and solve for X

SSD has much greater halls, passage ways etc than a carrier. Where a carrier has minimal interior space and a SSD has lavish interior space. So it seems the SSD has a factor of 8 of space per person to a carrier.

Only if the assumption of 90% of the space in the ship is non-useable, which is an absurdly inefficient way to design a ship (as w1zard has already said numerous times). No amount of extra lavish interiors can account for the huge volumes in a ship that size. It's pretty simple maths, with the problem being the scales are too vast to be easy to comprehend. To give you an example of how stupidly large the useable volume calculated above is, it's equivalent to the space taken up by the footprint of Greater London, to a height of around 6km above the streets (London is 1583000 sq/m). That's...insane. You can't account for such a low population density by saying the halls are a bit wider or taller. The maths is a bit more involved than I'm willing to do but I think to get the numbers to work your hallways would have to be the width of a motorway at the very least.

I'm really trying not to be condescending here, but if you're trying to justify these numbers it means you haven't understood the problem. It's not that surprising - the human brain doesn't do well when imagining distances over about a km or numbers more than a thousand, we're not really evolved for that kind of thinking.

It's not that 90% of the space us unusable, it's just filled with equipment, ammunition, primary, secondary, tertiary and point defence weapons, Shields, armour, life support, fuel, smaller spacecraft, food and other consumables, sublight engines, warp engines, geller field projectors, fire control, sensors, communications equipment and, if the crew are lucky, a few beds here and there. Oh, and structure. I would.imagine that the vast majority of the internal space is actually taken up with the ship superstructure to permit it to pull G's in any of 3 dimensions and to withstand the recoil of macrocannon batteries.

It's going to.get busy real quick.

One of my favorite bits about an imperial star ship was from a Gaunts Ghosts novel. His men we using the vast empty recesses between the armor and the “habitable” parts of the ship to perform cardio PT in.

HexHammer wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
I think a problem is that we're assuming a comparison between an aircraft carrier and a spaceship. A fairer comparison would be with something like a submarine, an enclosed airtight environment designed for extended periods away from base.

Say an Ohio class with a crew of 150, about 150m long, 12 wide and 10 tall. Lots of which is taken up with planetary bombardment weapons.

I beg to differ, in a sub it's even more cramped spaces than a carrier, so it's imo very poor comparison.

Well, if we assume that it's a nuclear missile launch sub then a huge part of it will be taken up with areas that the crew just don't go. Because I assume that you don't want lots of guys wandering around near Armageddon in a can. So the areas where the crew actually go are not going to be spacious, at all.

In Lords of Silence by Chris Wraight, released this month, on p. 21-22 the Cornius later renamed Repulsive class is described as having a crew of over thirty thousand ratings. The BFG rules show a Repulsive class grand cruiser is shown to have 10 damage points. Andy Chambers' guideline of 1.5-2k per damage point yields 20,000. So saying 30,000 a 50% increase over that, but still far from the magnitude of hundreds of thousands or millions that some have been claiming.

The pedantic might try to argue that "more than 30,000" does not explicitly rule out hundreds of thousands or millions, but then the writer (who is one of BL's better ones) could then have written "more than 300,000" or whatever. The fact 30,000 was chosen seems to at least indicate the crew size magnitude is in the tens not hundreds of thousands.

You've got to wonder what proportion of these ships is

a) Space Hulk size corridors

b) Vast open air cathedrals

If you look at a Gothic miniature, 1/3 of it is engine. If that really is all engine, the 90% unusable space thing seems fair. But it also seems fair to say that the number of people you CAN fit in a ship is less than the number of people you NEED in a ship, and the massive overcrowding of people sleeping in a gun turret is a more related to the fact that the Imperium doesn't care about peoples comfort, but very much does care about them not having to walk for half an hour from hypothetically spacious crew quarters to the big chain they pull to make the gun turn.

 Crimson wrote:

 ArbitorIan wrote:


Or you're having the wrong conversation. Again, the point is not 'how many people CAN FIT on an Imperial Battlehip' but 'how many people are needed to run one'

Spoiler:

Have you ever seen the Battlefleet Gothic rulebook? Everything in these ships are operated by huge cadres of people. They're not some super automated things where a single crew member could wander in empty corridors for days without meeting anyone. These ships are depicted in art as being filled with people, but the numbers do not even remotely add up.

Those pictures actually prove how fething HORRIABLE comparing a modern sea ship to a 40k ship are.

Modern ships tend to be cramped affairs, with small narrow passageways etc. with low ceilings. 40k ships from the interior clearly have very high ceilings and wide corridors.
I'm not saying crew sizes are too alrge, or too small or that they're just right, but you CANNOT compare modern sea ships to 40k ships.

And there may be good reason for it. You need air, so either you have very efficient air filtration units that can scrub out the CO2 at a sufficient rate to keep your crew of tens of thousands breathing, or you have big inefficient filters (or greenhouses!) and lots of air so that the percentage of CO2 never reaches problematic levels.

And food. Assume you're going to be in deep space, by yourself, for YEARS. Either grow it or store it.

And ammunition. You need somewhere to keep those skyscraper sized torpedos.

W1zard is right, at the same crew density (or a 10th of it) as a modern ship crews would be massive. But there may be logistical reasons that you actually need massive empty areas of the ship.

Also, don't forget that there may be no reason at all for the empty space. The Imperium uses technology it doesn't understand to build things it doesn't need, so it's entirely possible that the ships are that size because it's the only way the Imperium knows how to build them. The resulting product is probably highly inefficient and poorly organized.

Personally, I think the explanation is both that the lore writers fail to understand the problem of scale and that the Imperium's space ships operate with a different set of concerns than a 21st-century naval vessel.

 Graphite wrote:
You've got to wonder what proportion of these ships is

a) Space Hulk size corridors

b) Vast open air cathedrals

If you look at a Gothic miniature, 1/3 of it is engine. If that really is all engine, the 90% unusable space thing seems fair. But it also seems fair to say that the number of people you CAN fit in a ship is less than the number of people you NEED in a ship, and the massive overcrowding of people sleeping in a gun turret is a more related to the fact that the Imperium doesn't care about peoples comfort, but very much does care about them not having to walk for half an hour from hypothetically spacious crew quarters to the big chain they pull to make the gun turn.

For the last time... my calculations take into account wide open corridors and massive cathedrals. Usable Space is usable space, regardless of whether you use that for tiny cramped corridors or massive stories high cathedrals. In fact, massive open internal space might make the ship feel LESS crowded because it gives people more space to move around and means less internal space dedicated to airtight bulkheads and compartmentalization.

Let me put it this way. You can still put just as much people on an aircraft carrier designed with 2 or 3 massive corridors running the length of the ship as you could a traditional aircraft carrier designed with twisty, small, cramped spaces. The only difference is you can see everyone on the 2 or 3 massive corridors aircraft carrier vs the traditional one where you cannot.

Yes. I understand that. But the fact that there's a 3 cubic kilometre empty space cathedral in the middle of the ship isn't going to make Joe the Rating, sleeping in his bunk with a hundred other people in a gun turret with the hatches sealed shut because the navy wants to keep people contained where they work at all times feel less crowded.

Heck, the inside of the thing could be like Babylon 5, one massive open area, but if you never get to go there then the place you live and work is going to feel very crowded.

Your golfballs in an airliner analogy is good, but if the transport safety rules state that all golfballs in that airliner must be contained in one eggbox then the eggbox will be crowed while most of the airliner is completely empty.

The Machine Spirit demands big open spaces!

Thing to remember about SW ships is the amounts of automated systems the ships should have, along with the Storm Trooper complements they would be carrying.

We could also give them the benifit of the doubt and assume they aren't taking Pilots and Flight Crew into account for crew sizes. We could go further and say they probably don't count the Imperial Intelligence personnel and ISB on the crew either. So then we go with the number given as the base needed to run the ship with the rest of the personnel space being taking up by Ground Troops, Intelligence, ISB, Pilots and the Support Crews. To support my thinking this, they do have Gunners listed separately from the Crew for the Imperial-II Class Star Destroyer.

We could apply that to the 40k ships as well, that their numbers are just those crew required for the ship to work, but not everyone on board.

Sure it doesnt help much, but looking at it that way helps abit in my mind.

Personally for some of the ships the Empire uses, I think the crew requirements are too high for something with that level of automation available to the people that make it. Thats only for the smaller side of things, for the 19km Executor or even the 3km Resurgent Class I dont know what to tell you.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And lets not get started on the Rebels, whose 1.2km long MC80 is listed as only requiring 5k Crew maximum, vs the Empire's 1.6km Imperial-II needing a 5k minimum crew and a 36k maximum.

true, minimum crew is differant from actual crew, If I wanted to sail a nimitz class from point a to point b I bet I could do it with 100 people or less

Someone needs to draw a chart of the largest ship in imperial navy so we can better see for ourselves.

 Graphite wrote:
Yes. I understand that. But the fact that there's a 3 cubic kilometre empty space cathedral in the middle of the ship isn't going to make Joe the Rating, sleeping in his bunk with a hundred other people in a gun turret with the hatches sealed shut because the navy wants to keep people contained where they work at all times feel less crowded.

Heck, the inside of the thing could be like Babylon 5, one massive open area, but if you never get to go there then the place you live and work is going to feel very crowded.

Your golfballs in an airliner analogy is good, but if the transport safety rules state that all golfballs in that airliner must be contained in one eggbox then the eggbox will be crowed while most of the airliner is completely empty.

The calculation was also assuming 90% of the overall space of the interior of the vessel was unusable.

Look, you can be generous as you want thinking up excuses like "large amounts of internal space dedicated to equipment", "automation", and "listed crew not counting auxiliary personnel". Even with all of those excuses the listed crew is still off by a factor of 5 at BEST, and off by a factor of 500 or so at WORST.

My argument is that large amounts of internal space are dedicated to nothing. They're just gaps.

Look at the Endevour pattern light cruisers. These things have a prow and gun deck, and an engine and bridge section. Between the two is a narrow corridor flanked by two massive armour plates. They don't seem to have any performance issues with a huge chunk of their internal space being, well, space.

The design basis that these ships work on is not the same as a modern surface ship or submarine. You're not trying to make it small - once you get above a certain level of displacement (The jump from escort to capital ship) you aren't any easier to target until you get to be truly, space hulk size massive.

So you work out the size of the systems, and unlike a sub or carrier you armour it as you expect it to take hits.

Then you add the crew you need to make the thing work. The systems these ships use are enormous, so crew space is an infinitesimal proportion of the used space. Unlike modern ships, where miniaturisation means that the crew will often be the largest component.

So yes, an Imperial cruiser could have massive areas of parkland, recreation decks, luxurious cabins and transportation systems. It could be a fantastic, airy place to live and work. No doubt in the Dark Age of Technology, when a lot of these things were built, it was like that. Presumably Eldar ships still are.

But the Imperium doesn't care about your comfort or personal space. So in all this potential luxury you're crammed into a bunk the size of a coffin.

Grimdark, isn't it?

w1zard wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
Yes. I understand that. But the fact that there's a 3 cubic kilometre empty space cathedral in the middle of the ship isn't going to make Joe the Rating, sleeping in his bunk with a hundred other people in a gun turret with the hatches sealed shut because the navy wants to keep people contained where they work at all times feel less crowded.

Heck, the inside of the thing could be like Babylon 5, one massive open area, but if you never get to go there then the place you live and work is going to feel very crowded.

Your golfballs in an airliner analogy is good, but if the transport safety rules state that all golfballs in that airliner must be contained in one eggbox then the eggbox will be crowed while most of the airliner is completely empty.

The calculation was also assuming 90% of the overall space of the interior of the vessel was unusable.

Look, you can be generous as you want thinking up excuses like "large amounts of internal space dedicated to equipment", "automation", and "listed crew not counting auxiliary personnel". Even with all of those excuses the listed crew is still off by a factor of 5 at BEST, and off by a factor of 500 or so at WORST.

You assume 40k/SW ships "have to have same crew density per dimensions as IRL to be effective". Who says they have to? Less crew needed, more empty space just for reasons because STC told them to build it like that with original intention forgotten(maybe storage space for humongous warmachines in dark age of technology for example)

tneva82 wrote:
You assume 40k/SW ships "have to have same crew density per dimensions as IRL to be effective". Who says they have to? Less crew needed, more empty space just for reasons because STC told them to build it like that with original intention forgotten(maybe storage space for humongous warmachines in dark age of technology for example)

Again, look at the numbers. Even assuming 90% unusable internal space and 50 TIMES less crowded than modern day naval vessels (3 people on an entire submarine for reference) the numbers are still about 5 times too few.

Let me put it this way, if we wanted to fill a entire Super Star Destroyer to a capacity that is comparable to a Nimitz it would require 1,114,260,524 people. 1 BILLION PEOPLE, currently one eighth of the population of earth. Feel free to check my calculations if you wish.

w1zard wrote:
Even assuming 90% unusable internal space and 50 TIMES less crowded than modern day naval vessels (3 people on an entire submarine for reference) the numbers are still about 5 times too few.

I'm sure it's due to the Machine Spirit needing space, 'nuff said!!

HexHammer wrote:
Maybe I rely on outdated data, but to my understanding the max imperial ship are only 6 km long? In Star Wars the Super Star Destroyer Vader has are 12 km, that doesn't make sense when everything else in 40k universe are super duper extra bonus ultra light classic plus now with citrus flavor OP large!!!! Craft Worlds, titans, space critters etc etc!

...what went wrong?!?!

Yeah but Imperial ships go far above that like the furious abyss. Those dwarfed Emperor and Gloriana ships, plus there is the Phalanx that can dock battleships in its deck. It even had its own echosystem, its far larger than any star wars ship. The max is not 6km at all though, on average the largest are 6km.

A super star destroyer is said to be 19KM long.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor-class_Star_Dreadnought/Legends

w1zard wrote:
A super star destroyer is said to be 19KM long.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor-class_Star_Dreadnought/Legends

in fairness the crew figures where given during the height of the "8 mile fallacy"

Remember that a normal ISD, albeit a crashed one, has sufficient gigantic gaps in it to fly a light freighter inside. At speed.

These ships are big because they're EMPTY.

Plus the OP got it wrong, the lore states that battleships are 'generally' 6km-12km long.

Probably a better comparison than an aircraft carrier is something like Royal Carribean's Oasis-class cruise liners (cruise liners in general were probably more of an inspiration for the ships than actual warships, just looking at the layouts). If you multiply it's main dimensions by 20 you get something sufficiently approximating a 40k battleship, so about 6km long and 1.2km wide. An Oasis-class can pack in about 6,300 people in decently spacious (for a ship) cabins (and assuming double occupancy of each cabin). Multiply that figure by 20 and you get 126,000 passengers and crew. An Oasis-class has basically a giant empty gash running right up the middle of it to make way for a (sort of) park and amenities, so between our 20 Oasis-class we should have enough room for a sizable cathedral already. But once you factor in the massive size of the engines on a 40k BS, the insane amount of fuel storage that would be required, the ridiculous size of the gun batteries and the torpedo tubes and their suitably ridiculous ammo storage, plus dead space, the listed crew figures probably aren't that bad, especially as the ship likely has to have a significant margin built in space and accomodation wise for carrying troops/tanks/Titans and all their associated gak.

For reference the Oasis-class are carrying something like 2,000 crew, but that includes, waiters, laundry staff, people that run the shops, cooks, barmen etc. Not sure the Imperium holds its ship crew in high enough regard to give them bars or a laundry service. It's also unclear how many of the stated crew are slaves, or whether slaves even qualify as crew? What about servitors.

Most importantly though this is 40k, which means none of it is supposed to add up. This thread probably constitutes 100x the amount of thought that anyone at GW put into the idea and that's likely being generous.

Your cruise ship example is exactly what the other guy arguing for a billion crew members is complaining about. People don't get simple things like the difference between length and volume. Your super cruise ship would have 8000 times the space, so you could put 50,400,000 people on it in equally spacious cabins, with 8000 times the engine space, 8000 times the fuel, and 8000 times everything else that you would measure in mass or volume.

And I am not even going to entertain the idea of the Imperium building massive warships that are mostly just empty space. That's not the Imperium I know and enjoy.

Pink Horror wrote:
Your cruise ship example is exactly what the other guy arguing for a billion crew members is complaining about. People don't get simple things like the difference between length and volume. Your super cruise ship would have 8000 times the space, so you could put 50,400,000 people on it in equally spacious cabins, with 8000 times the engine space, 8000 times the fuel, and 8000 times everything else that you would measure in mass or volume.

And I am not even going to entertain the idea of the Imperium building massive warships that are mostly just empty space. That's not the Imperium I know and enjoy.

the Imperium you know and enjoy isn't one that does horrifcly wasteful things due to beurcratic intertia and and age old "this is how things where always done"?

bouncingboredom wrote:
Probably a better comparison than an aircraft carrier is something like Royal Carribean's Oasis-class cruise liners (cruise liners in general were probably more of an inspiration for the ships than actual warships, just looking at the layouts). If you multiply it's main dimensions by 20 you get something sufficiently approximating a 40k battleship, so about 6km long and 1.2km wide. An Oasis-class can pack in about 6,300 people in decently spacious (for a ship) cabins (and assuming double occupancy of each cabin). Multiply that figure by 20 and you get 126,000 passengers and crew.

Thank you for demonstrating not understanding the square-cube law in practice! I am sure this is how the writers came up with these numbers too.

As pointed out, the ship which has 20 times the dimensions, will have 8000 times the volume, not 20 times! So with the same crew density it would be fifty million people!

 Crimson wrote:

Thank you for demonstrating not understanding the square-cube law in practice! I am sure this is how the writers came up with these numbers too.

As pointed out, the ship which has 20 times the dimensions, will have 8000 times the volume, not 20 times! So with the same crew density it would be fifty million people!

But you don't need the same crew density. The size of the crew is not a function of the volume of the ship (20x the crew was just a vague example. Reading that all back I appreciate I worded some of that really poorly). For example, no matter how many times bigger the ship is, it only needs one Captain. It only needs one Executive officer. A military ship might have two people on the helm per watch (3 watches per day). Just because one ship is significantly bigger, doesn't mean that it suddenly needs a small army piled up around the wheel to steer it, it can get by just fine with two people per watch still. This is why you have intercontinental tankers and container ships carrying crews not much bigger than some North Sea trawlers. The ship carries as many people as it needs to carry to perform its function, not to arbitrarily fill up space.

Most warships are designed with the crew about 5th or 6th on the list of priorities. They're squeezed in after you've housed all the really important bits like weapon systems, sensors, engines, where to store the toilet duck etc.

The GW motto on everything:

"When in doubt, shout bigger numbers!"

As I stated on the previous page, crew exist to perform tasks, not to fill up volume. Given how so much else of the 40K Imperium's technology works, a large crew may not be necessary because much of the Imperial high technology items are effective black boxes that are not expected to be fiddled with or maintained outside of shipyards or other specialized Adeptus Mechanicus facilities.

There is also no specific need for uniform crew density. Large open spaces seem to be a thing at least for some parts of the ship. Devastation of Baal depicts part of a strike cruiser with a main corridor running down the spine of the ship as 40 yards wide and nearly as high. Andy Chambers' views about crew also showed he envisioned Imperial Navy ships as also having troop transport capacity equal to 1/3 to 1/2 their crew size. Obviously such facilities would be empty when there are no embarked troops.

The Imperium's ships seem to consist of densely populated sections, but with other sections virtually deserted. That is how there can be infiltrators like Lictors or even a lone daemon (as depicted in one of the BFG novels) that go undetected. More than 90% of the total volume of the ship may be actually uninhabited or uninhabitable.

 Graphite wrote:
Remember that a normal ISD, albeit a crashed one, has sufficient gigantic gaps in it to fly a light freighter inside. At speed.

These ships are big because they're EMPTY.

You mean the crashed star destroyer that had been gutted repeatedly by scavengers for decades and probably had entire decks torn out by said scavengers looking for metal and electronics? Not the best example.

Iracundus wrote:
As I stated on the previous page, crew exist to perform tasks, not to fill up volume. Given how so much else of the 40K Imperium's technology works, a large crew may not be necessary because much of the Imperial high technology items are effective black boxes that are not expected to be fiddled with or maintained outside of shipyards or other specialized Adeptus Mechanicus facilities.

There is also no specific need for uniform crew density. Large open spaces seem to be a thing at least for some parts of the ship. Devastation of Baal depicts part of a strike cruiser with a main corridor running down the spine of the ship as 40 yards wide and nearly as high. Andy Chambers' views about crew also showed he envisioned Imperial Navy ships as also having troop transport capacity equal to 1/3 to 1/2 their crew size. Obviously such facilities would be empty when there are no embarked troops.

The Imperium's ships seem to consist of densely populated sections, but with other sections virtually deserted. That is how there can be infiltrators like Lictors or even a lone daemon (as depicted in one of the BFG novels) that go undetected. More than 90% of the total volume of the ship may be actually uninhabited or uninhabitable.

Which is perfectly fine, but then the ships are being depicted in the lore pretty wrong. In the ships you propose you could walk the corridors for days and not run into anyone. The ships would feel massive and empty, even though there are hundreds of thousands of people on the ship with you, you would feel alone.

All of the ships in star wars and 40k are depicted as cramped and crowded, much like modern day ships.

bouncingboredom wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Thank you for demonstrating not understanding the square-cube law in practice! I am sure this is how the writers came up with these numbers too.

As pointed out, the ship which has 20 times the dimensions, will have 8000 times the volume, not 20 times! So with the same crew density it would be fifty million people!

But you don't need the same crew density. The size of the crew is not a function of the volume of the ship (20x the crew was just a vague example. Reading that all back I appreciate I worded some of that really poorly). For example, no matter how many times bigger the ship is, it only needs one Captain. It only needs one Executive officer. A military ship might have two people on the helm per watch (3 watches per day). Just because one ship is significantly bigger, doesn't mean that it suddenly needs a small army piled up around the wheel to steer it, it can get by just fine with two people per watch still. This is why you have intercontinental tankers and container ships carrying crews not much bigger than some North Sea trawlers. The ship carries as many people as it needs to carry to perform its function, not to arbitrarily fill up space.

Most warships are designed with the crew about 5th or 6th on the list of priorities. They're squeezed in after you've housed all the really important bits like weapon systems, sensors, engines, where to store the toilet duck etc.

I don't think a 40K warship needs the same crew density as a modern aircraft carrier, but there's no way Royal Caribbean would build a cruise ship with 8000 times the space and only pack in 20 times the passengers, so your comparison was flawed.

AegisGrimm wrote:The GW motto on everything:

"When in doubt, shout bigger numbers!"

Basically this. GW has zero restraint in its lore, but that's part of the charm I guess, that half of it is so pants on head stupid it's funny.

w1zard wrote:
Which is perfectly fine, but then the ships are being depicted in the lore pretty wrong. In the ships you propose you could walk the corridors for days and not run into anyone. The ships would feel massive and empty, even though there are hundreds of thousands of people on the ship with you, you would feel alone.

All of the ships in star wars and 40k are depicted as cramped and crowded, much like modern day ships.

It depends on the lore. Some of it focuses on sections of a ship that will be crowded during battle. Equally there have been times when a character is just sitting alone in a cavernous room. The story of a lone hull inspector wandering miles of empty corridor with his floating head/drone thing, checking the integrity of all the bulkheads for any signs of cracks is probably not the sort of story they want to sell (though personally I could see that being the basis of something interesting). They want the action parts, when the command centre is teeming full of people or the slaves are loading some absurdly oversized shell into an equally absurdly oversized cannon.

It's also worth remembering, for head cannons sake, that each ship of the Imperial fleet is a relic in its own right. It's thousands of years old, both a symbol of the Imperium's longevity and its might. It was probably designed in an era when the crew and/or transportation requirements might have been much higher. Imagine taking a ship like the USS Independence or HMS Victory to sea now, but with GPS navigation and a semi-automated system for the sails. We wouldn't need a throng of sailors to risk life and limb climbing the yardarms to set the sails when we could push a set of buttons and have automatic winches unfurl the sails and set them automatically.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Pink Horror wrote:


I don't think a 40K warship needs the same crew density as a modern aircraft carrier, but there's no way Royal Caribbean would build a cruise ship with 8000 times the space and only pack in 20 times the passengers, so your comparison was flawed.

I did note above that I worded all that out quite poorly. It was like half four in the morning and I couldn't sleep so I was a bit bleary eyed at the time. My main thrust was supposed to be about the crew and how many of them are there basically just to service the guests, meaning that a massive ship like that can actually be run by quite a skeleton "sailing" crew.

Nimitz class carrier - 330m long, crew of 5,000+

Seawise Giant suposedly.largest ship ever built - 450m long, crew of about 40.

It's not the size it's what you need to have people do.

Why this obsession to compare 40k with Star Wars?

There will always will be a sci-fi setting with bigger nonsense, you are ignorant if you believe 40k or Star Wars are even close to the high end of sci-fi dick waving.

Tyran wrote:
Why this obsession to compare 40k with Star Wars?

There will always will be a sci-fi setting with bigger nonsense, you are ignorant if you believe 40k or Star Wars are even close to the high end of sci-fi dick waving.

Because it's out of place that in 40k EVERYTHING is super, extra, ultra, plus, bonus, classic ..now with citrus flavor large and overpowered!!!! ..then suddenly their navy is puny compared to SW and other space brands.

It's a combination of having some big empty spaces, and life support not being cheap.

The ships need to be a certain size in order to mount the weapons, power and engines they have, and the storage space to keep these things running (and a crew alive) for months if not years long journeys.

However you don't need people everywhere, and having them being able to go everywhere means gigatons of extra mass for your engine to move, which means more fuel, which means more weight...

So you just have enough people to do the stuff you need doing, and just enough life support to keep them alive. No sense if flooding huge chambers with breathable air if they can exist well enough in the rat runs that lie under the skin of the ship (or more likely in the deeper habitable layers).

It's not like a terrestrial vessel scaled up, no reason for people to be elsewhere than where you need them.

HexHammer wrote:

Tyran wrote:
Why this obsession to compare 40k with Star Wars?

There will always will be a sci-fi setting with bigger nonsense, you are ignorant if you believe 40k or Star Wars are even close to the high end of sci-fi dick waving.

Because it's out of place that in 40k EVERYTHING is super, extra, ultra, plus, bonus, classic ..now with citrus flavor large and overpowered!!!! ..then suddenly their navy is puny compared to SW and other space brands.

A setting is not a competition.
The point of a setting is not to have the things within it be the biggest or best compared to other settings. That's a moving target, and a very silly thing to aim for.
Everything within a setting is exactly as big as it needs to be to work within its own stories. Not someone elses.

Arson Fire wrote:

HexHammer wrote:
There will always will be a sci-fi setting with bigger nonsense, you are ignorant if you believe 40k or Star Wars are even close to the high end of sci-fi dick waving.

Because it's out of place that in 40k EVERYTHING is super, extra, ultra, plus, bonus, classic ..now with citrus flavor large and overpowered!!!! ..then suddenly their navy is puny compared to SW and other space brands.

A setting is not a competition.
The point of a setting is not to have the things within it be the biggest or best compared to other settings. That's a moving target, and a very silly thing to aim for.
Everything within a setting is exactly as big as it needs to be to work within its own stories. Not someone elses.

w1zard wrote:

Which is perfectly fine, but then the ships are being depicted in the lore pretty wrong. In the ships you propose you could walk the corridors for days and not run into anyone. The ships would feel massive and empty, even though there are hundreds of thousands of people on the ship with you, you would feel alone.

All of the ships in star wars and 40k are depicted as cramped and crowded, much like modern day ships.

Some sections of 40K ships are depicted as cramped and crowded. Those would be the areas where the action takes place such as the bridge, gun decks, or main reactor/engine control areas. Also many times the portrayal is when there is combat so these would be the most highly manned areas. Other non-critical areas though would be virtually deserted unless there a very specific reason existed to go there.

For example, a piece of black box machinery that only gets accessed by Techpriests when docked at a shipyard would still have access corridors but nobody would go there during normal operations.

Iracundus wrote:
Some sections of 40K ships are depicted as cramped and crowded. Those would be the areas where the action takes place such as the bridge, gun decks, or main reactor/engine control areas. Also many times the portrayal is when there is combat so these would be the most highly manned areas. Other non-critical areas though would be virtually deserted unless there a very specific reason existed to go there.

For example, a piece of black box machinery that only gets accessed by Techpriests when docked at a shipyard would still have access corridors but nobody would go there during normal operations.

No, I mean 40k ships in general are portrayed as cramped and crowded, not just certain areas. Under your system, things like mess halls and living quarters should be as functionally as large as people would want them, but are always shown in the lore as tiny and "just enough" almost as if space was at a premium.

Also, having crew members concentrated in certain areas during a battle is a really bad move, as it means large portions of the crew can be taken out by an unlucky hit, or a single section being subjected to explosive decompression. It would make much more sense to spread the crew out as much as possible and as deep as possible within the ship.

The depiction of 40k ships (and most sci-fi ships for that matter) is not consistent with your proposed "large ship with sparse population due to automation" theory.

w1zard wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
Some sections of 40K ships are depicted as cramped and crowded. Those would be the areas where the action takes place such as the bridge, gun decks, or main reactor/engine control areas. Also many times the portrayal is when there is combat so these would be the most highly manned areas. Other non-critical areas though would be virtually deserted unless there a very specific reason existed to go there.

For example, a piece of black box machinery that only gets accessed by Techpriests when docked at a shipyard would still have access corridors but nobody would go there during normal operations.

No, I mean 40k ships in general are portrayed as cramped and crowded, not just certain areas. Under your system, things like mess halls and living quarters should be as functionally as large as people would want them, but are always shown in the lore as tiny and "just enough" almost as if space was at a premium.

Also, having crew members concentrated in certain areas during a battle is a really bad move, as it means large portions of the crew can be taken out by an unlucky hit, or a single section being subjected to explosive decompression. It would make much more sense to spread the crew out as much as possible and as deep as possible within the ship.

The depiction of 40k ships (and most sci-fi ships for that matter) is not consistent with your proposed "large ship with sparse population due to automation" theory.

except 40k ships routinely mention large open empty spaces. Vegenfeul spirit managed to describe an entire strike team landing in a ship and making their way deep in side before being detected.

Bane Blade is super enormous huge for a tank!!

Landraider is insanely huge for a transport!!

........everything is huge but ships........so what you say doesn't account for anything.

No it's not. the Baneblade is fething TINY compared to some Sci-fi. M assing at 319 Metric tons, the Baneblade sounds big yes and is certainlky big compared to the M1A1 (which weighs 62 tons) but the Mark XXXIII Bolo Tank masses in at 32,000 tons.

HexHammer wrote:

Tyran wrote:
Why this obsession to compare 40k with Star Wars?

There will always will be a sci-fi setting with bigger nonsense, you are ignorant if you believe 40k or Star Wars are even close to the high end of sci-fi dick waving.

Because it's out of place that in 40k EVERYTHING is super, extra, ultra, plus, bonus, classic ..now with citrus flavor large and overpowered!!!! ..then suddenly their navy is puny compared to SW and other space brands.

For starters the average 40k ship is far larger than the average Star Wars ship. Sure the Super Star Destroyers are large, but they are incredibly rare and the infinitely more common Star Destroyer is "only" kilometer and half in length. In addition, there are ships in 40k that easily dwarf the Super Star Destroyers.

There are countless sci-fi settings that make mockery of 40k, but Star Wars isn't among them.

BrianDavion wrote:
...except 40k ships routinely mention large open empty spaces. Vegenfeul spirit managed to describe an entire strike team landing in a ship and making their way deep in side before being detected.

If you mean the Emperor boarding Horus' flagship, that could very well be the Emperor psychically shielding the presence of the strike team. Regardless, one example doesn't nullify the fact that sci-fi ships are often portrayed more like submarines than cargo-container ships when it comes to free space.

BrianDavion wrote:

the Imperium you know and enjoy isn't one that does horrifcly wasteful things due to beurcratic intertia and and age old "this is how things where always done"?

A big empty ship is just wasteful, or maybe even useful for cargo. A horrifically wasteful ship would be filled with counter-productive machinery that needs a ton of crew to keep maintained.

The Imperium is wasteful. Having ornate statutes on ships means they carry a lot of pointless mass, but it is done anyway because it is tradition and religion. The nature of the Imperium is also that of grandiose public spaces to enforce a sense of the individual's own insignificance and worthlessness and to exhort sacrifice for the glory of the Imperium, while having cramped private spaces (unless high up on the social/rank hierarchy).

w1zard wrote:
If you mean the Emperor boarding Horus' flagship

He doesn't. He's referring to Garviel Loken and a bunch of Knights Errant infiltrating the eponymous flagship in the Vengeful Spirit novel.

And can you provide any references to (reasonably modern) fluff describing 40K ships as being cramped/crowded in toto as opposed to just certain sections being cramped/crowded? Are we sure this isn't one of those things that just somehow became accepted among the fanbase without ever being officially stated?

EDIT: For another example of 40K ships having vast empty areas, Konrad Curze manages to hide from (expert tracker!) Lion El'Jonson in the uninhabited areas of the Lion's own flagship for (IIRC) several months before escaping onto Macragge (The Unremembered Empire).

 Duskweaver wrote:

w1zard wrote:
If you mean the Emperor boarding Horus' flagship

He doesn't. He's referring to Garviel Loken and a bunch of Knights Errant infiltrating the eponymous flagship in the Vengeful Spirit novel.

And can you provide any references to (reasonably modern) fluff describing 40K ships as being cramped/crowded in toto as opposed to just certain sections being cramped/crowded? Are we sure this isn't one of those things that just somehow became accepted among the fanbase without ever being officially stated?

EDIT: For another example of 40K ships having vast empty areas, Konrad Curze manages to hide from (expert tracker!) Lion El'Jonson in the uninhabited areas of the Lion's own flagship for (IIRC) several months before escaping onto Macragge (The Unremembered Empire).

If you want examples of cramped ships in 40K:

Ciaphas Cain Novels
Gaunts Ghost Novels
The Lord Solar Macharius novels
The one Mechanicus novel where they find an old DAOT battleship.
etc...

For Star Wars:
See the movies and watch the shows

I don't see how you are seriously arguing that sci-fi medias (including 40k and SW) portray their ships as anything else than a scaled up version of a modern day navy ship. That is like making the statement "the sky is blue" and the response being "prove it".

The Lord Solar Macharius novels (aka the BFG novels by Gordon Rennie) do not portray a uniformly crowded ship. In Execution Hour there is an entire subplot where a daemon manages to hide aboard the ship for an extended time precisely because there are deserted areas.

Iracundus wrote:
The Lord Solar Macharius novels (aka the BFG novels by Gordon Rennie) do not portray a uniformly crowded ship. In Execution Hour a daemon manages to hide aboard the ship for an extended time precisely because there are deserted areas.

Again, there are always deserted areas on a ship, even modern day naval vessels. The fact that you are giving me singular examples of a lone individual or small teams being able to hide successfully on sci-fi ships does not prove your assertion that these ships are so sparsely populated you could walk for days without meeting anyone. My assertion is that the opposite is true, that living quarters and work spaces on ships are often portrayed as cramped and built as if space is at a premium in almost every sci-fi universe you care to mention. I hate to sound arrogant here but my assertion is obviously true if you care to read almost any sci-fi novels or watch the shows/movies (there are some exceptions obviously). Your assertion is not.

No one has argued that the living quarters of Imperial ships are not crowded and cramped. However that does not apply to necessarily other sections of the ship. You seem to be arguing a point that no one is contesting about the inhabited areas of the ship. The crew stick to those parts where they live and work, and the depictions of ships show those places so obviously they seem like warrens of humanity. Just because there theoretically could be volume spent on the crew doesn't mean it is. The Imperium doesn't care about housing or feeding its ratings in luxury so their facilities are the bare minimum deemed necessary. It is the officer class that lives like nobles, just like how hive nobles live atop a vast oppressed population. Lord Admiral Ravensburg is rumored in the BFG novels to have a suite of palatial apartments with concubines aboard his flagship for example. The Imperium spends great volume on religious spaces like cathedrals or numerous small shrines scattered around such as Andy Chambers' description of life in a lance turret because the Imperium is a religious place and such spaces are seen as necessary for the safety of the ship and the souls aboard it. It is again a question of the Imperium's priorities. Nobles, war, and religion are high up, while the general population is way down.

However it is also a known and indeed major plot point of several cited stories by now that it is possible to hide undetected for extended periods on a ship. That is not possible if a ship is the heaving mass of humanity, the flying ghetto, that is being claimed it is throughout. We are talking about stowaways that stand out like a sore thumb. In Execution Hour it was a daemon of Nurgle.

Iracundus wrote:
No one has argued that the living quarters of Imperial ships are not crowded and cramped. However that does not apply to necessarily other sections of the ship. You seem to be arguing a point that no one is contesting about the inhabited areas of the ship. The crew stick to those parts where they live and work, and the depictions of ships show those places so obviously they seem like warrens of humanity. Just because there theoretically could be volume spent on the crew doesn't mean it is. The Imperium doesn't care about housing or feeding its ratings in luxury so their facilities are the bare minimum deemed necessary. It is the officer class that lives like nobles, just like how hive nobles live atop a vast oppressed population. Lord Admiral Ravensburg is rumored in the BFG novels to have a suite of palatial apartments with concubines aboard his flagship for example. The Imperium spends great volume on religious spaces like cathedrals or numerous small shrines scattered around such as Andy Chambers' description of life in a lance turret because the Imperium is a religious place and such spaces are seen as necessary for the safety of the ship and the souls aboard it. It is again a question of the Imperium's priorities. Nobles, war, and religion are high up, while the general population is way down.

However it is also a known and indeed major plot point of several cited stories by now that it is possible to hide undetected for extended periods on a ship. That is not possible if a ship is the heaving mass of humanity, the flying ghetto, that is being claimed it is throughout. We are talking about stowaways that stand out like a sore thumb. In Execution Hour it was a daemon of Nurgle.

You just aren't getting it. You don't seem to have any perception of how massive these internal spaces are. Your assertion that the entire crew is somehow locked into 1% of the ship and never leaves it are ludicrous. Even with massive multi-story apartments for EVERY CREWMAN, even with mile long mess halls and other ridiculous crap, even with 90% of the internal space of the ship considered unusable, even needing 50 times less crewmen than a modern day naval vessel to run, the number of listed crew for the larger ships in sci-fi are often at least four or five times less than what they should be.

Yeah. This is just ludicrous. People who do not understand what numbers mean are bending over backwards until they turn into pretzels to defend the writers who do not understand what the numbers mean. Guys, just accept that the writers made a mistake.

The argument is going a bit circular. Do GW writers pick random numbers that sound big because they can? Yes they do. Is much thought put into.justifying those numbers in the fluff? Not really. Are imperial ships described with large areas devoid of anyone doing anything much? Yes.

Hooray, everybody wins!

w1zard wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
No one has argued that the living quarters of Imperial ships are not crowded and cramped. However that does not apply to necessarily other sections of the ship. You seem to be arguing a point that no one is contesting about the inhabited areas of the ship. The crew stick to those parts where they live and work, and the depictions of ships show those places so obviously they seem like warrens of humanity. Just because there theoretically could be volume spent on the crew doesn't mean it is. The Imperium doesn't care about housing or feeding its ratings in luxury so their facilities are the bare minimum deemed necessary. It is the officer class that lives like nobles, just like how hive nobles live atop a vast oppressed population. Lord Admiral Ravensburg is rumored in the BFG novels to have a suite of palatial apartments with concubines aboard his flagship for example. The Imperium spends great volume on religious spaces like cathedrals or numerous small shrines scattered around such as Andy Chambers' description of life in a lance turret because the Imperium is a religious place and such spaces are seen as necessary for the safety of the ship and the souls aboard it. It is again a question of the Imperium's priorities. Nobles, war, and religion are high up, while the general population is way down.

However it is also a known and indeed major plot point of several cited stories by now that it is possible to hide undetected for extended periods on a ship. That is not possible if a ship is the heaving mass of humanity, the flying ghetto, that is being claimed it is throughout. We are talking about stowaways that stand out like a sore thumb. In Execution Hour it was a daemon of Nurgle.

You just aren't getting it. You don't seem to have any perception of how massive these internal spaces are. Your assertion that the entire crew is somehow locked into 1% of the ship and never leaves it are ludicrous. Even with massive multi-story apartments for EVERY CREWMAN, even with mile long mess halls and other ridiculous crap, even with 90% of the internal space of the ship considered unusable, even needing 50 times less crewmen than a modern day naval vessel to run, the number of listed crew for the larger ships in sci-fi are often at least four or five times less than what they should be.

These two things don't necessarily follow - just because there is potential space doesn't mean it's used. And if you're not planning to use it, why make it habitable?
Why do people live in tiny apartments in New York and London, when there is tons of places people don't live - spread out we could have around 14/sq km. But a lot of it is sea, and spreading people out isn't very useful when you need them to do something somewhere - and if you need them to do something somewhere, and have to pay for all the space they use - why make lots of space available?

They're not hollow boxes, they're great big warp drives with air filled tubes connecting a few large, but distant, rooms together. Plenty of space to be alone outside of the tubes, but nobody really wants to go there.

w1zard wrote:
If you want examples of cramped ships in 40K:

I was hoping for specific quotes. I'm aware there are lots of bits of fluff describing certain areas of 40K ships being crowded. But I can't recall any describing a whole ship being crowded throughout.

For Star Wars:

I only really care about the 40K part of this argument, to be honest.

I don't see how you are seriously arguing that sci-fi medias (including 40k and SW) portray their ships as anything else than a scaled up version of a modern day navy ship.

I think 40K ships are portrayed as more like a scaled-up version of Age of Sail ships than any modern navy vessel, but point taken. Age of Sail ships were even more cramped.

FWIW, I agree with you and Crimson that the official numbers given for crew complements in 40K Imperial vessels are ludicrous. I'm a biologist by training, so I'm fully cognisant of the hilarity that ensues when sci-fi and fantasy authors forget about the square-cube law (giant spiders are way stupider than undercrewed warships). And those numbers were almost certainly a mistake originally. But I am pretty sure GW/BL's current writers have become aware of this and are now writing ship descriptions with the idea that they have vast empty regions. I doubt you will find any recent fluff that doesn't take that into account.

40K is full of ludicrous things. And some of the coolness of the setting comes from taking the ludicrous things and running with them. Saying "oh, the crew numbers are just wrong" is boring. It's much better (IMO) to say "OK, these crew numbers seem ridiculously low, but let's assume they're accurate: what would that mean?"

That is like making the statement "the sky is blue" and the response being "prove it".

It really isn't. For a start, I wasn't demanding proof of anything. I just wonder if your subjective impression of the fluff is actually what the fluff writers intended. God knows, there are things I've always vaguely felt are 'true' in the 40K setting that, on examination, turned out not to actually have much basis in the official fluff.

Second, we can actually see the sky. We're not depending on written descriptions of a wholly fictional sky.

 Duskweaver wrote:

w1zard wrote:
If you want examples of cramped ships in 40K:

I was hoping for specific quotes. I'm aware there are lots of bits of fluff describing certain areas of 40K ships being crowded. But I can't recall any describing a whole ship being crowded throughout.

I doubt you will get a quote as he seems to be arguing based on preconception and on what he feels things "should" be. Even when presented with textual evidence that ships are not uniformly crowded ghettos, such as the aforementioned plot points from the novels, he seems to just simply toss out any evidence that doesn't agree with those preconceptions. Any claims of the crew being "50% smaller than it should be" mean nothing because those are purely arbitrary numbers based on assumptions about the universe that could very well be incorrect. It is use of the fallacy of appeal to common sense, with "common sense" being used to mean anything that person believes. It tries to avoid the need for evidence while simultaneously discarding anything contradictory as ridiculous. Since this is a fictional universe, and one with a high number of fantastic elements, there is no such thing as common sense. There should be a requirement to provide some textual proof on both sides. Thus far only one side has provided textual proof for its position.

The thing is there is no such thing as "should" when it comes to a fictional universe's technology and crew requirements, particularly one like 40K. There is no basis to claim the crew is smaller than it "should" be since we have no equivalent for the flying space cathedrals that are 40K Imperial ships. There is even less lack of basis for comparison when 40K has mixes of high technology with the very low. We have depictions and plot points in novels showing crew pulling on chains to load massive shells fired at fractions of the speed of light, while having other crew members wired into their stations to deal with the data flow and the computers taking over to direct point defense fire. There is a mixture of low automation alongside high automation.

The argument from volume gets the point back to front. Just because there is big volume doesn't mean it has to be filled. Nor does portrayal of density mean it is the same throughout the ship. Hong Kong has extremely high population density, yet it is possible to go places where one can be the only person in sight. The population is unevenly distributed and crammed into a small space due to other factors than purely available space, and the same holds true for crew. Again crew are needed to perform tasks, not purely to fill up volume. Though some aspects of the ship seem to use low automation, there is no indication that that is the case throughout. If anything, the way 40K Imperial high technology seems to work would indicate the opposite.

 Duskweaver wrote:

w1zard wrote:
If you want examples of cramped ships in 40K:

I was hoping for specific quotes. I'm aware there are lots of bits of fluff describing certain areas of 40K ships being crowded. But I can't recall any describing a whole ship being crowded throughout.

'Submarine cramped', which encompasses the scenario nicely, certainly doesn't occur in any of the HH era books up to this point, Gaunts Ghosts, Ciaphas Cain, Ravenor/Eisenhorn, the Soul Drinkers Saga, Ben Counter's Grey Knights or the Inquisition war - so if you're looking you won't find them there

At most you'll get throwaway lines about 'refugees crammed in cargo holds' in, say Unremembered Empire and some of the short stories set after Molech ( Wolf Mother for example), but no writers develop it or make it much of a plot point. In the above group, the concept of utterly crammed people (regardless of environment) has only been a plot point twice - once in the second HH Dark Angels book in a proto-arcology, and once in the Soul Drinkers book as a type of chaos bio weapon with zombies piled so high in a ships spaces that when it breaks up on reentry it uses them as explosive paratroopers.

Iracundus wrote:
I doubt you will get a quote as he seems to be arguing based on preconception and on what he feels things "should" be. Even when presented with textual evidence that ships are not uniformly crowded ghettos, such as the aforementioned plot points from the novels, he seems to just simply toss out any evidence that doesn't agree with those preconceptions. Any claims of the crew being "50% smaller than it should be" mean nothing because those are purely arbitrary numbers based on assumptions about the universe that could very well be incorrect. It is use of the fallacy of appeal to common sense, with "common sense" being used to mean anything that person believes. It tries to avoid the need for evidence while simultaneously discarding anything contradictory as ridiculous. Since this is a fictional universe, and one with a high number of fantastic elements, there is no such thing as common sense. There should be a requirement to provide some textual proof on both sides. Thus far only one side has provided textual proof for its position.

You are right, crew concentrations are probably higher in some areas of the ship than others. You are also correct in pointing out the possibility that due to automation that much fewer crew is needed to operate a vessel than normal. The numbers still don't add up... unless you are arguing that 40k ships are so large that large sections of the ship are uninhabited (as in walking for days and not seeing anyone uninhabited), which I have never seen in 40k except when talking about space hulks which are something else entirely. If you are making that assertion I would like YOU to provide some evidence of that in the lore. And no... a single person managing to hide out on a ship, or a strike team being able to board undetected is NOT proof of this.

w1zard wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
I doubt you will get a quote as he seems to be arguing based on preconception and on what he feels things "should" be. Even when presented with textual evidence that ships are not uniformly crowded ghettos, such as the aforementioned plot points from the novels, he seems to just simply toss out any evidence that doesn't agree with those preconceptions. Any claims of the crew being "50% smaller than it should be" mean nothing because those are purely arbitrary numbers based on assumptions about the universe that could very well be incorrect. It is use of the fallacy of appeal to common sense, with "common sense" being used to mean anything that person believes. It tries to avoid the need for evidence while simultaneously discarding anything contradictory as ridiculous. Since this is a fictional universe, and one with a high number of fantastic elements, there is no such thing as common sense. There should be a requirement to provide some textual proof on both sides. Thus far only one side has provided textual proof for its position.

You are right, crew concentrations are probably higher in some areas of the ship than others. You are also correct in pointing out the possibility that due to automation that much fewer crew is needed to operate a vessel than normal. The numbers still don't add up... unless you are arguing that 40k ships are so large that large sections of the ship are uninhabited (as in walking for days and not seeing anyone uninhabited), which I have never seen in 40k except when talking about space hulks which are something else entirely. If you are making that assertion I would like YOU to provide some evidence of that in the lore. And no... a single person managing to hide out on a ship, or a strike team being able to board undetected is NOT proof of this.

The first ship in the night lords omnibus, which has a larger than average contingent of crew, there are whole unused floors of decks. The humans don’t go down there because there’s warp stuff running around killing people and the night lords go down there to hunt crewmen they pick out or the warp beasts when they get too rowdy. Whole decks of non essentials just left to rust without negatively impacting the ship. That’s a significant amount of space that isn’t used and isn’t needed, as the ship repeatedly outmaneuvers, overwhelms, and destroys larger craft, groups of crafts and crafts that outgun it without issue.

One thing to consider is many of these ships are relics of older times, eaither relics of the great crusade, or great crusade era designs that where just copied. Dark Imperium specificy calls this out re Macragge's honor when Gulliman notes that it had a MUCH higher number of people aboard in the heresy era and that now it feels like a ghost town. I suspect this is likely the case with a LOT of ships (case in point, the blood angels have 2 battle barges, and 7 strike cruisers, capable of carrying 1300 marines in total. clearly their ships aren't full staffed with Marines) So yeah I suspect there are a lot of decks on a number of ships that just don't get used because "times have changed"

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The GW motto on everything:

"When in doubt, shout bigger numbers!"

Battlefleet Gothic did a pretty good job of never mentioning numbers at all; blame the novelists.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The GW motto on everything:

"When in doubt, shout bigger numbers!"

Battlefleet Gothic did a pretty good job of never mentioning numbers at all; blame the novelists.

yeah BFG was pretty good about being "vague as feth" heck it never even listed the exact weapons of the ships.

From Relentless, a story set upon a Lunar class cruiser, one of the most bog standard ships of the Imperial Navy:

As they passed through the portal and stepped onto the deck, Becket heard each man before him gasp in astonishment. A dozen vast towers rose up before them, soaring thirty metres into the air. THe ceiling loomed far above their heads, almost lost to view in haze and smoke.

p. 117-118, Relentless

On a ship over three kilometres long with over six hundred decks the deck-crews had to patrol hundreds of kilometres of corridors...

Ferrol's crew, meanwhile, was further down the ladder. In leaner times, when crew numbers dwindled, they would be left fighting a losing battle against the advancing decrepitude in the lowest reaches. In such circumstances the costs of keeping sections functional would outweigh their utility. The decision would be made to mothball some so that others could be kept in decent repair. Some decks had been left closed for years, decades even. The longer a deck was left closed, the harder it was to reclaim when it was needed once more. A few, perhaps, had been used only rarely in the Relentless's thousand year history...

With the current glut of men aboard, however, Ferrol's crew was working to expand the habitable decks. The sections that had been most recently been closed down were being renovated and reopened. The work was hard. They were distant from the conveniences of the more established decks, it was heavy work with little recognition, and, so near the ghost-decks, there were the stories. Some of Ferrol's men had tried to scare the newcomers with tales of the daemons that lurked in the darkness...

Ferrol thrived on it all...Down in the depths they could operate with little supervision...

The deck-crews were not only responsible for the decks, but also for the spaces in between... The ship was riddled with inter-deck service levels, crawl spaces, shafts and ducts. It was a labyrinth, accessible only by those with the necessary equipment...

p. 188-190, Relentless

From the above we can see several things. One, is that there are chambers within an Imperial ship that are vast, and high enough to accommodate a Reaver Titan (height 22.3m) with room to spare. So not everything is a rat's warren of tight passages, though the second part shows such spaces do exist.

The second section shows that even for a ship in active service, there are large sections of it sealed off and unused for years or decades at a time. Meanwhile the "inter-deck" spaces are inaccessible unless equipped with proper equipment. Thus trying to calculate crew requirements based on volume is a mistaken and hopeless exercise because it shows that a ship does not need all its volume crewed or even functional for the ship as a whole to still work.

Both those sections also amply demonstrate how even in the same ship there can be the co-existence of both vast internal spaces and also a rat's warren of tight passages.

It also says Lunar class is over three kilometres long (so presumably less than four) so that doesn't really jibe with twelve kilometre battleships...

 Crimson wrote:
It also says Lunar class is over three kilometres long (so presumably less than four) so that doesn't really jibe with twelve kilometre battleships...

Lunar class is a cruiser, not a battleship, so there is no conflict there.

Also on page 1 of this thread Tygre quotes Lunars as being 3.2 to 3.6km in length. All consistent so far

 Flinty wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
It also says Lunar class is over three kilometres long (so presumably less than four) so that doesn't really jibe with twelve kilometre battleships...

Lunar class is a cruiser, not a battleship, so there is no conflict there.

Also on page 1 of this thread Tygre quotes Lunars as being 3.2 to 3.6km in length. All consistent so far

Have you played BFG? Battleships are not almost four times as long as cruisers, at most they're 50% longer.

Ok, let me just barge in here since it's a BFG sort of, discussion, the latest numbers come from Battlefleet Koronus as to canon ship lengths and widths.

And yes there is insanity there too as the ships would have such a low density as to float on water, which was spoofed in Faith and Coin.

Anything out of a mailing list, Word of God, or anything else is retconned.

Koronus numbers will probably be retconned again with the re-release of BFG.

 Crimson wrote:

 Flinty wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
It also says Lunar class is over three kilometres long (so presumably less than four) so that doesn't really jibe with twelve kilometre battleships...

Lunar class is a cruiser, not a battleship, so there is no conflict there.

Also on page 1 of this thread Tygre quotes Lunars as being 3.2 to 3.6km in length. All consistent so far

Have you played BFG? Battleships are not almost four times as long as cruisers, at most they're 50% longer.

Ships are not to scale in BFG - they are vaguely so but no more.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Ok, let me just barge in here since it's a BFG sort of, discussion, the latest numbers come from Battlefleet Koronus as to canon ship lengths and widths.

And yes there is insanity there too as the ships would have such a low density as to float on water, which was spoofed in Faith and Coin.

Anything out of a mailing list, Word of God, or anything else is retconned.

Koronus numbers will probably be retconned again with the re-release of BFG.

Lords of Silence came out this month and depicts crew sizes for a Repulsive class grand cruiser more in keeping with the mailing list/Andy Chambers crew scale than the inflated Koronus scale. On p. 21-22 the Cornius later renamed Repulsive class is described as having a crew of over thirty thousand ratings. The BFG rules show a Repulsive class grand cruiser is shown to have 10 damage points. Andy Chambers' guideline of 1.5-2k per damage point yields 20,000. So 30,000 is a 50% increase over that, but still far from the magnitude of hundreds of thousands or millions that some have been claiming.

If it is an issue of what is the latest publication taking precedence, then Lords of Silence is clearly the most recent and could therefore be viewed as retconning the retcon.

FFG stuff is really not 'canon' even in loose 40K sense. It is licensed material not GW material.

 Crimson wrote:
FFG stuff is really not 'canon' even in loose 40K sense. It is licensed material not GW material.

According to GW it's as canon as codecies. Since, you know, it's written by guys like Andy Chambers and Ross Watson, of FFG, worked on BFG's 2010 FAQ.

I have not read Lords of Silence yet, and using BL for a fluff source is generally a bad idea, since they lack the sort of constraints about canon that even licensees do.

Last source I read said about 7.5 km long and 134,000 crew.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Iracundus wrote:
Andy Chambers' guideline of 1.5-2k per damage point yields 20,000. So 30,000 is a 50% increase over that, but still far from the magnitude of hundreds of thousands or millions that some have been claiming.

That's great, but Chambers was one of the authors of the 134,000 source, so...

Iracundus wrote:
From Relentless, a story set upon a Lunar class cruiser, one of the most bog standard ships of the Imperial Navy:

On a ship over three kilometres long with over six hundred decks the deck-crews had to patrol hundreds of kilometres of corridors...

Ferrol's crew, meanwhile, was further down the ladder. In leaner times, when crew numbers dwindled, they would be left fighting a losing battle against the advancing decrepitude in the lowest reaches. In such circumstances the costs of keeping sections functional would outweigh their utility. The decision would be made to mothball some so that others could be kept in decent repair. Some decks had been left closed for years, decades even. The longer a deck was left closed, the harder it was to reclaim when it was needed once more. A few, perhaps, had been used only rarely in the Relentless's thousand year history...

With the current glut of men aboard, however, Ferrol's crew was working to expand the habitable decks. The sections that had been most recently been closed down were being renovated and reopened. The work was hard. They were distant from the conveniences of the more established decks, it was heavy work with little recognition, and, so near the ghost-decks, there were the stories. Some of Ferrol's men had tried to scare the newcomers with tales of the daemons that lurked in the darkness...

Ferrol thrived on it all...Down in the depths they could operate with little supervision...

The deck-crews were not only responsible for the decks, but also for the spaces in between... The ship was riddled with inter-deck service levels, crawl spaces, shafts and ducts. It was a labyrinth, accessible only by those with the necessary equipment...

p. 188-190, Relentless

From the above we can see several things. One, is that there are chambers within an Imperial ship that are vast, and high enough to accommodate a Reaver Titan (height 22.3m) with room to spare. So not everything is a rat's warren of tight passages, though the second part shows such spaces do exist.

The second section shows that even for a ship in active service, there are large sections of it sealed off and unused for years or decades at a time. Meanwhile the "inter-deck" spaces are inaccessible unless equipped with proper equipment. Thus trying to calculate crew requirements based on volume is a mistaken and hopeless exercise because it shows that a ship does not need all its volume crewed or even functional for the ship as a whole to still work.

Both those sections also amply demonstrate how even in the same ship there can be the co-existence of both vast internal spaces and also a rat's warren of tight passages.

Again you aren't getting it. A few (4-5? out of what 40?) decks being unused because of the crew being under capacity is one thing. We are talking about something like 90+% of the decks of a 12-19 KM long battleship being unused... so bring me a lore example of a ship that has only 15 of its 285 decks being used at FULL crew complements and I will shut up, because that is what you are proposing in order to get the numbers to match up.

That 30m high cathedral you were talking about? The super thin SSD can have THIRTY of those stacked on top of each other at its THINNEST point.

https://www.deviantart.com/unusualsuspex/art/Super-Star-Destroyer-ortho-Executor-412758702

 Mr Morden wrote:

Ships are not to scale in BFG - they are vaguely so but no more.

What? Yes they are. The small craft and the planets obviously are not to scale, but the ship are in scale with each other. Cruisers and battleships even use the exact same weapon port bits, so they definitely were designed to be in the same scale. Which means that if Lunar is a bit over three kilometres, Gothic battleships are about 5 km long (which is much more sensible size.)

w1zard wrote:
Again you aren't getting it. A few (4-5? out of what 40?) decks being unused because of the crew being under capacity is one thing. We are talking about something like 90+% of the decks of a 12-19 KM long battleship being unused... so bring me a lore example of a ship that has only 15 of its 285 decks being used at FULL crew complements and I will shut up, because that is what you are proposing in order to get the numbers to match up.

Well, wait a minute... I thought the 90+% of unused space was supposing that space was unusable in the first place, i.e. used for things other than crew? Now all of a sudden it's all crew decks and we have to prove/account for 90+% of them being empty/abandoned?

As an aside for the debate in general, GW and most BL aurthors have always had their scale totally out of whack in terms of personell, in pretty much every instance and capacity. I call it the "missing zero syndrome". Basically, you're forced to add at least another zero or two onto pretty much all of GW/BL's fluff when it comes to personell. I don't see why their spaceship crew figures are any different.

What is Faith and Coin?

 Anfauglir wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Again you aren't getting it. A few (4-5? out of what 40?) decks being unused because of the crew being under capacity is one thing. We are talking about something like 90+% of the decks of a 12-19 KM long battleship being unused... so bring me a lore example of a ship that has only 15 of its 285 decks being used at FULL crew complements and I will shut up, because that is what you are proposing in order to get the numbers to match up.

Well, wait a minute... I thought the 90+% of unused space was supposing that space was unusable in the first place, i.e. used for things other than crew? Now all of a sudden it's all crew decks and we have to prove/account for 90+% of them being empty/abandoned?

Of course I expected this would happen. It is goalpost shifting to invalidate or demand more textual evidence, while conveniently avoiding presenting any evidence of their own. Both sides have to present evidence and one cannot just sit there endlessly demanding evidence and raising the bar to an impossible standard, and claiming that if it is not meant that therefore they are right.

The textual evidence from Relentless showed the internal layout can be wasteful of space with high ceilings, and that the ship's necessary crew requirements may not be as large as one might think based purely on volume, since the ship functions even when originally inhabitable decks are sealed off and abandoned for up to decades or more at a stretch. In other words, only a fraction of the potential inhabitable space is actually needed for ship functionality.

 Crimson wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

Ships are not to scale in BFG - they are vaguely so but no more.

What? Yes they are. The small craft and the planets obviously are not to scale, but the ship are in scale with each other. Cruisers and battleships even use the exact same weapon port bits, so they definitely were designed to be in the same scale. Which means that if Lunar is a bit over three kilometres, Gothic battleships are about 5 km long (which is much more sensible size.)

That was the original piece of artwork by a member of the BFG mailing list based on the BFG mailing list consensus when Andy Chambers was part of it and responding. However there are copies elsewhere online where the scale is different. The original artist has in the past come out and said the scale was modified and enlarged without his permission.

The author of the novel Relentless also went online and stated the BL authors worked on a scale of 3km for the cruisers on the old BL forums.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
FFG stuff is really not 'canon' even in loose 40K sense. It is licensed material not GW material.

According to GW it's as canon as codecies. Since, you know, it's written by guys like Andy Chambers and Ross Watson, of FFG, worked on BFG's 2010 FAQ.

I have not read Lords of Silence yet, and using BL for a fluff source is generally a bad idea, since they lack the sort of constraints about canon that even licensees do.

First I would ask for proof of that claim of GW stating so. Also, FFG was the licensee so Andy Chambers was not writing as a member of GW when he was involved, whereas he was a member of GW when he wrote BFG. As an individual contributing member, he would have had to toe whatever FFG line he was given. In other words, Andy Chambers as GW writer is Word of God, but Andy Chambers as independent freelancer is not.

Actually BL has been remarkably consistent over many different authors and different years of publication:

Now, six years later, he was one of the most senior non-commissioned officers amongst a crew of almost thirteen thousand...
p. 62, Shadow Point , by Gordon Rennie (for the crew of a Dictator class cruiser)

Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness...Six kilometres from stern to prow...
p. 31, Dark Disciple

Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches...
p. 95-96, Soul Hunter

As shown by these quotes, the scale has been remarkably consistent over many years of BL publications by multiple different authors. Now throw on Lords of Silence by Chris Wraight which also is more in keeping with the above scale. Execution Hour was 2001. So 4 authors across 17 years have kept to the scale, and that is just the ones I have remembered offhand and cited. BL has done worse on consistency for other things.

It is FFG that is the outlier. FFG inflated crew sizes also gives the ridiculous situation where transport ships end up having crews far larger than their passenger capacity, which defeats the whole idea of a transport in the first place. We know the approximate passenger capacity of the "standard" transport ships as shown in BFG, because we have an example from Imperial Armour in the Taros campaign, where it required multiple ships to embark the regiments. That would not be the case needed if ships were at the inflated size and crew scales.

When it comes to BFG ship scale, FFG is like C.S. Goto. I.e. Wildly off on its own in ignoring previous canon and also ignored later by other writers.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
What is Faith and Coin?

Last Rogue Trader RPG book put out (IIRC). Covers mostly the ecclesiarchy but does have locations around the Koronus Expanse and a short canned adventure.

 Anfauglir wrote:
Well, wait a minute... I thought the 90+% of unused space was supposing that space was unusable in the first place, i.e. used for things other than crew? Now all of a sudden it's all crew decks and we have to prove/account for 90+% of them being empty/abandoned?

Yes, its 90% unused space ON TOP OF 90% of the decks of the remaining space being unused as well to make the numbers for the stated crew line up. Which is why I am so skeptical. People just aren't getting how LARGE these spaces are.

Iracundus wrote:
That was the original piece of artwork by a member of the BFG mailing list based on the BFG mailing list consensus when Andy Chambers was part of it and responding. However there are copies elsewhere online where the scale is different. The original artist has in the past come out and said the scale was modified and enlarged without his permission.

The author of the novel Relentless also went online and stated the BL authors worked on a scale of 3km for the cruisers on the old BL forums.

Yeah, I know. And in any case it shows the correct relative sizes of the ships. If cruisers are a bit over three kilometres long, then battleships cannot be nearly twelve kilometres long!

I would be careful with using FFG Rogue Trader RPG as cruisers are very underpowered compared to smaller ships, which could potentially outgun them.

Crimson, you state that the battleships and cruisers must be in scale because the gun deck parts are identical on both models, then ... show a picture where the gun decks on the battleship are larger than on the cruiser?

My personal belief is that the miniatures are roughly in scale with each other. The stuff from FFG, Black Library and other sources is quite variable, and it's never entirely clear which is correct; Apart from anything else, "battleship" is a very vague term, and the Horus Heresy books from Forge World (book 3, in particular) demonstrates that some capital ships can be significantly larger than the Retribution and Emperor-class ships depicted in miniature form. 3km for that pattern of cruiser seems good enough for me. Makes the Sword frigate about the same size as a Star Destroyer from Star Wars, and a Cobra destroyer twice the length of the USS Enterprise D.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Crimson, you state that the battleships and cruisers must be in scale because the gun deck parts are identical on both models, then ... show a picture where the gun decks on the battleship are larger than on the cruiser?

It is artistic interpretation, details obviously do not match the models exactly.

My personal belief is that the miniatures are roughly in scale with each other. The stuff from FFG, Black Library and other sources is quite variable, and it's never entirely clear which is correct; Apart from anything else, "battleship" is a very vague term, and the Horus Heresy books from Forge World (book 3, in particular) demonstrates that some capital ships can be significantly larger than the Retribution and Emperor-class ships depicted in miniature form. 3km for that pattern of cruiser seems good enough for me. Makes the Sword frigate about the same size as a Star Destroyer from Star Wars, and a Cobra destroyer twice the length of the USS Enterprise D.

Yeah, I think sizes in that chart are fine. It is a bit weird if there are drastically larger battleships though. If there are ships that are relatively as much bigger than Retribution than retribution is bigger than Dauntless, then it would be weird if both of those were classed as battleships. Over ten kilometre ship should be called something else. (Too bad 'Dreadnought' in 40K already refers to a walker.)

It is also a problem that FFG just made up numbers and there are now all sorts of wild size figures floating around. FFG numbers are mostly nonsense, as even the relative sizes of the ships are all wrong.

Well, at least this discussion has made me once again hope that GW would bring back BFG, the ships are a really cool aspect of the setting.

 Flinty wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
It also says Lunar class is over three kilometres long (so presumably less than four) so that doesn't really jibe with twelve kilometre battleships...

Lunar class is a cruiser, not a battleship, so there is no conflict there.

Also on page 1 of this thread Tygre quotes Lunars as being 3.2 to 3.6km in length. All consistent so far

There are plenty of sources that put the Lunars as being much larger.

Rogue Trader Core Rulebook wrote:Lunar-class cruiser Dimensions: 5 km long, 0.8 km abeam at fins approx. Mass: 28 megatonnes approx. Crew: 95000 crew, approx. Accel: 2.5 gravities max sustainable acceleration The Lunar class cruiser makes up the backbone of Battlefleet Calixis. Its (relatively) uncomplicated design dates back to the dawn of the Imperium, and it can be constructed at worlds normally unable to build a ship of the line. Its variety of weapons batteries, lances, and torpedoes make it both a versatile combatant and dangerous foe. Most Rogue Traders remove the torpedo tubes to add more cargo space instead. Speed: 5 Manoeuvrability: +10 Detection: +10 Hull Integrity: 70 Armour: 20 Turret Rating: 2 Space: 75 SP: 60 Weapon Capacity: Prow 1, Port 2, Starboard 2

Planetkill wrote:THE RELENTLESS, A Lunar-class cruiser, warship of the most-revered Emperor's Navy, hung in silent orbit as the Imperial departure from Bahani continued apace. From the tip of its heavy prow, with armour metres thick, to the mighty engines at its stern it measured more than eight kilometres long and over a mile high.

Horus Heresy Book Three: Extermination wrote:Light Cruisers and Heavy Cruisers are medium-sized warships ranging in general terms between 4 km and 6 km in length[...].

Well, it is pretty pointless to attempt to discuss any ship related details if even one specific class of ship can be anything from three to eight kilometres long...

I just love the bit where it's km long but miles in height

It is actually pretty surreal that these things are not nailed down at all and every novel writer seems to be able to independently decide what the sizes are. Madness. If they don't want to have set official sizes then they should instruct the writers to avoid mentioning concrete numbers at all.

 Crimson wrote:
Well, it is pretty pointless to attempt to discuss any ship related details if even one specific class of ship can be anything from three to eight kilometres long...

It is even sillier than that.

My second quote is the Relentless, the same ship that in the previous page was quoted to be over 3 kilometers in length. It literally went from 8 kilometers in one story to 3 km in the next.

Maybe it had an extremely unfortunate engagement and came home with 5km missing

I suppose some of these authors could be proceeding from the assumption that a "Lunar Class Cruiser" is the designation for any ship with a certain set of capabilities, as opposed to being a specific ship design. Kind of like referring to a car as a "family sedan" rather than a "Ford Taurus".

Well the newish HH book I'm reading specifically mentions ship being so fast large parts of it rarely experiences foot steps...

So large parts of ships are...well just sitting unused with rare forays for whatever reason there.

 Crimson wrote:
It is actually pretty surreal that these things are not nailed down at all and every novel writer seems to be able to independently decide what the sizes are. Madness. If they don't want to have set official sizes then they should instruct the writers to avoid mentioning concrete numbers at all.

That stuff is the bits I skim over, generally. It's very rarely relevant.

Wait.

This thing is 5000x800x800m, approx. 3.2x10^9 m cubed

It weighs 28 Megatonnes, 2.8x10^10 kg

It's density is therefore 8.75 kg/m3

Steel has a density of 7850kg/m3.

This is 1/1000th the density of steel. That's properly absurd.

Only if you assume it's solid...

No they are right, it is absurd.

Ships do have empty space, but not 99.9% empty space.

Even naval ships have densities above the hundreds of kilograms per cube meter(they need a density less than a thousand kilograms per cube meter, the density of water).

Basically it should be at least three OoM heavier.

Seawise giant, when empty, would appear to.have had a density of about 82kg/cu.m. Graphite wins the engineers attention to detail prize once again

Seawise Giant was an oil tanker. It was basically a giant empty box to fill with oil, which increased its weight eight times.

Very different from a warship that is supposed to have armor and weapons.

That was kind of my point. A.space warship with a density of.1/10 of.an empty oil.tanker seems.a bit off.

 Flinty wrote:
That was kind of my point. A.space warship with a density of.1/10 of.an empty oil.tanker seems.a bit off.

Further proof that the people making these numbers up have no idea how the square cubed law works, or what the numbers they are throwing out actually mean. Anyone who says these numbers are plausible in any way is either willfully ignorant or purposely disingenuous.

I really wish that lore writers for 40k would just stop talking about numbers entirely. If they do decide to be concrete on something they should hire an engineer as a temporary consultant for some realistic numbers.

 Graphite wrote:
Wait.

This thing is 5000x800x800m, approx. 3.2x10^9 m cubed

It weighs 28 Megatonnes, 2.8x10^10 kg

It's density is therefore 8.75 kg/m3

Steel has a density of 7850kg/m3.

This is 1/1000th the density of steel. That's properly absurd.

Not defending FFG's inflated dimensions in any way but those calculations are a bit off simply based on the shape of the ship. An Imperial cruiser is not a solid block, and is instead cruciform in shape. That width and height is inclusive of the sensor fins protruding from the hull. The actual hull proper is more like 1/3 to 1/2 that in height and width. So those above numbers include volumes of space that are outside of the ship entirely. If the height and width are only a 1/3, then the volume is reduced to a ninth.

Using Andy Chambers' BFG list scale, while maintaining aspect ratio, gives a slightly better result if one were to keep the mass constant, yielding about 366 kg/m3

Oh, yeah, they're an approximation at best, and an extremely rough one. But it does go to show that GWs numbers are generally absolutely bonkers and any engineer with a calculator will be able to hammer out something more plausible in minutes.

Hire me, GW.

I still maintain, though, that the crew numbers for an Imperial ship aren't really that demented because after a certain number of people, you run out of stuff for them to actually DO. So leaving huge tracts of your ship abandoned makes sense.

Boarding actions must be bizarre, though. You could patrol down a corridor for an hour without meeting a soul, then suddenly run across a hundred strong naval-armsman party heading the other way. You're looking to put some charges on the engine room, but out and out guerilla war in the depths of a cruiser may be a better tactic.

Wasn't that the plot of Battle for the Abyss? I've kindof blanked that book out of my mind.

 Graphite wrote:

Hire me, GW.

You don't want that.


Believe me, i thought I wanted it once, and then I saw it, and I didn't want it anymore.

You will watch people demand that you make the crunch bad, because the fluff says the group in question sucks, so it must be bad, and making it balanced (or even adding variety) is against fluff, and therefor wrong. and if you point to new fluff found in a codex that's already been printed (Not BL because they don't count), then that codex writer sucks and is bad too.

Because the tester's headcanon is more important than game balance or improving the options available. Ah, the joys of FAQs...

 Graphite wrote:
I still maintain, though, that the crew numbers for an Imperial ship aren't really that demented because after a certain number of people, you run out of stuff for them to actually DO. So leaving huge tracts of your ship abandoned makes sense.

There is always something for crew to do. I agree that there are limited positions for actually running the ship but why have 90% of your ship uninhabited? Fill up that space with soldiers so you have a formidable defense against boarders. Hell, even have a spare 100,000 crewmen lying around doing nothing so that they can fill the positions caused by inevitable casualties. You can always find a use for a person on a ship, even if it means they sit and do nothing but train.

The spare space can also be used to make accommodations more comfortable for the existing crewmen. But having 90% of your decks not be in use is ridiculously wasteful unless you are running a skeleton crew with no means to replenish your ranks.

Reemmber too that (ugh) thousands of crew are required to haul each and every individual multi megatonne shell up to the breach and load it, because while autoloaders are an actual thing for voidship weapons, they're not grimdark enough to come standard.

Also remember that according to both BFG and FFG, 1/3 of the ship is the engines

 Graphite wrote:
Oh, yeah, they're an approximation at best, and an extremely rough one. But it does go to show that GWs numbers are generally absolutely bonkers and any engineer with a calculator will be able to hammer out something more plausible in minutes.

Hire me, GW.

I still maintain, though, that the crew numbers for an Imperial ship aren't really that demented because after a certain number of people, you run out of stuff for them to actually DO. So leaving huge tracts of your ship abandoned makes sense.

Boarding actions must be bizarre, though. You could patrol down a corridor for an hour without meeting a soul, then suddenly run across a hundred strong naval-armsman party heading the other way. You're looking to put some charges on the engine room, but out and out guerilla war in the depths of a cruiser may be a better tactic.

Wasn't that the plot of Battle for the Abyss? I've kindof blanked that book out of my mind.

I too have stated already several times that crew exist to perform tasks. Some things on an Imperial ship seem to require lots of manpower but others much less, maybe even next to none. Many of the big volume occupying black box machinery on a starship may not need anyone other than a TechPriest when the ship is in dock. During normal ship operations, the behemoth piece of machinery might just keep chugging away at its mysterious task in a deserted cavernous chamber.

As for boarding actions, very vastness of the ship makes extended guerilla operations ineffective in the timeframe of the average pitched space battle. Any boarders need to inflict significant damage and then get out. However there seems to be massive redundancy in systems as most of the BFG “critical hits” are repairable, representing rerouting of power and information flows. Truly critical areas would also be the most likely to be well manned and defended. So a boarding party doing guerilla warfare might not be able to make a significant impact on the ship.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Reemmber too that (ugh) thousands of crew are required to haul each and every individual multi megatonne shell up to the breach and load it, because while autoloaders are an actual thing for voidship weapons, they're not grimdark enough to come standard.

Also remember that according to both BFG and FFG, 1/3 of the ship is the engines

Even with 90% of the larger vessels taken up with "stuff" and being completely unusable, you'd still have 90% of the remaining space uninhabited with the listed crew numbers, and with the crowded-ness levels generally portrayed in the lore. Things like bunk beds and communal quarters (which are nessecary on modern navy ships) would be laughably pointless on such a large ship... yet they still exist in the lore.

 BaronIveagh wrote:


Because the tester's headcanon is more important than game balance or improving the options available. Ah, the joys of FAQs...

Wait, is this legit? You did some work for GW and codice balance is decided by tester's favoritism?

 Wyzilla wrote:


Wait, is this legit? You did some work for GW and codice balance is decided by tester's favoritism?

I was one of the people who worked on BFG's 2010 FAQ. The idea of giving SM strike cruisers the option to swap the bombardment cannon with a str 2 lance at cost was so polarizing it caused a 72 page thread. The eventual compromise was a str 1 lance at 5 points (iirc) so that it would be 'so gakky no one would ever take it and it would be forgotten in an edition or so' to quote one tester.

This was back in 2009-2010.

All because BFG: Armada (the book, not the game) had a single throw away line in it that the IN was concerned about the Nova class frigate being too good a ship killer. Somehow this became a total ban in the Imperium on anti ship weaponry for SM.

Not sure how other GW things work, ours got swallowed up in the Specialist Games cancellation, but the BFG Rules committee went ahead and released it into the wild anyway so that the new rules could be used at Tournies, etc.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:


Wait, is this legit? You did some work for GW and codice balance is decided by tester's favoritism?

I was one of the people who worked on BFG's 2010 FAQ. The idea of giving SM strike cruisers the option to swap the bombardment cannon with a str 2 lance at cost was so polarizing it caused a 72 page thread. The eventual compromise was a str 1 lance at 5 points (iirc) so that it would be 'so gakky no one would ever take it and it would be forgotten in an edition or so' to quote one tester.

This was back in 2009-2010.

All because BFG: Armada (the book, not the game) had a single throw away line in it that the IN was concerned about the Nova class frigate being too good a ship killer. Somehow this became a total ban in the Imperium on anti ship weaponry for SM.

Not sure how other GW things work, ours got swallowed up in the Specialist Games cancellation, but the BFG Rules committee went ahead and released it into the wild anyway so that the new rules could be used at Tournies, etc.

I always thought the lance thing was silly, Yes Space Marines having Lances on their ships was looked at poorly by the navy but that didn't mean some space faring chapters wouldn't do it.

BrianDavion wrote:

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:


Wait, is this legit? You did some work for GW and codice balance is decided by tester's favoritism?

I was one of the people who worked on BFG's 2010 FAQ. The idea of giving SM strike cruisers the option to swap the bombardment cannon with a str 2 lance at cost was so polarizing it caused a 72 page thread. The eventual compromise was a str 1 lance at 5 points (iirc) so that it would be 'so gakky no one would ever take it and it would be forgotten in an edition or so' to quote one tester.

This was back in 2009-2010.

All because BFG: Armada (the book, not the game) had a single throw away line in it that the IN was concerned about the Nova class frigate being too good a ship killer. Somehow this became a total ban in the Imperium on anti ship weaponry for SM.

Not sure how other GW things work, ours got swallowed up in the Specialist Games cancellation, but the BFG Rules committee went ahead and released it into the wild anyway so that the new rules could be used at Tournies, etc.

I always thought the lance thing was silly, Yes Space Marines having Lances on their ships was looked at poorly by the navy but that didn't mean some space faring chapters wouldn't do it.

Sure some space faring chapters with political connections or former Legion status might get away with it, but then it becomes a slippery slope since part of the reason for the Imperial Navy was supposedly to keep in check the Imperial Guard by being their sole means of interstellar transport, and the Space Marines by being able to outfight them in a pitched space battle.

However then there is the issue of Space Marine supremacist fans who seem to find it insufferable for the Space Marines to be anything than the best at everything. Ruleswise, the Space Marine ships are already more all round heavily armored, with superior ordnance, superior boarding, superior hit and run abilities, better Ld, and bombardment cannons which outperform regular weapon batteries in power if not range. Then add on lances which outperform bombardment cannons? You would end up with a fleet that consists of pretty much all strengths and no weaknesses save maybe points cost, and that should not be the sole or primary balancing factor as demonstrated by the fiasco of the Necron rules. If Space Marine fleets became basically the Imperial Navy+1, then it would upstage the role of the Imperial Navy in both lore and the BFG game itself.

Having a near complete ban on lances may be a bit of a kneejerk backlash too far in the opposite direction, but I can see why if lances are almost a no-brainer superior option. Paying a premium for lances (i.e. overpriced lances like the above) was probably a reasonable compromise, though clearly 1 lance at 5 points is so overpriced it becomes a clearly inferior option.

w1zard wrote:

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Reemmber too that (ugh) thousands of crew are required to haul each and every individual multi megatonne shell up to the breach and load it, because while autoloaders are an actual thing for voidship weapons, they're not grimdark enough to come standard.

Also remember that according to both BFG and FFG, 1/3 of the ship is the engines

Even with 90% of the larger vessels taken up with "stuff" and being completely unusable, you'd still have 90% of the remaining space uninhabited with the listed crew numbers, and with the crowded-ness levels generally portrayed in the lore. Things like bunk beds and communal quarters (which are nessecary on modern navy ships) would be laughably pointless on such a large ship... yet they still exist in the lore.

And the same is true of pretty much every Sci-fi show, book, game , computer game. Trying to think of a franchise where this is not the case? 40k ships are pretty small really compared to many universes.

Culture ships can be the size of a continent - do they need to be that big? probably not. Do they have a massive crew - nope because the crew are mainly there because the Ship's Mind likes having a crew.

Sci-fi ships are big - thats just what people tend to write/draw/make/create/animate/CGI.

The size of the ship fits the narrative, thats pretty much it.

 Mr Morden wrote:
And the same is true of pretty much every Sci-fi show, book, game , computer game. Trying to think of a franchise where this is not the case? 40k ships are pretty small really compared to many universes.

Culture ships can be the size of a continent - do they need to be that big? probably not. Do they have a massive crew - nope because the crew are mainly there because the Ship's Mind likes having a crew.

Sci-fi ships are big - thats just what people tend to write/draw/make/create/animate/CGI.

The size of the ship fits the narrative, thats pretty much it.

Sure, but I at least acknowledge that reality and don't disingenuously try to argue that the crew numbers are anything close to realistic because I'm not an idiot or a contrarian. (I am not implying you are either)

BrianDavion wrote:

I always thought the lance thing was silly, Yes Space Marines having Lances on their ships was looked at poorly by the navy but that didn't mean some space faring chapters wouldn't do it.

THe issue is that it has nothing to DO with lances. The Nova was looked askance on because it's so grotesquely superior to the equivalent ship in the same role in IN service, Firestorm. particularly since it can fire it's lance FLR compared to the Firestorm's F only.

The lance thing is just people's headcanon because they don't understand that it's not 'just' having a lance that makes the Nova viewed this way. Lances are, in canon, vaslty superior to Bombardment cannons for, well, bombardment, able to accurately hit the target (and everything else for a km) rather than saturating a twenty mile wide area with fire.

If you have any doubts about this, Seditio Opprimere should set them to rest, but the same people raged so hard we had to completely redo the ship, from a lance boat to a bombardment cannon boat. So that their idea of canon fit.

At the end, the design team allowed Desolators to be taken as Venerable battle barges. I suspect this was intended as a massive middle finger.

And don't even get me started on Jovian: I spent weeks arguing to keep it in the game because some players felt that the IN having access to any carrier that did not suck (See Defiant and the problems it STILL suffers from) somehow detracted from the fleet. The compromise was Jovians current bizarre rules for when you can take it.

You know, rather than good, balanced, well thought out rules.

O nthe flip side, at the same time we had IA:10 come out and a Fortress Monastery that couldn't turn before flying off the end of the board, Oh, and the Cardinal class, which people besides me flew into a rage about, even though FW forgot to put stats in the book for it. The stats from BFGM gave it FLR torps. Cue screaming.

BrianDavion wrote:One thing to consider is many of these ships are relics of older times, eaither relics of the great crusade, or great crusade era designs that where just copied. Dark Imperium specificy calls this out re Macragge's honor when Gulliman notes that it had a MUCH higher number of people aboard in the heresy era and that now it feels like a ghost town.

Indeed. Made this point as well. With some modern tech and a bit of thought you could probably sail a Nelson-era ship like HMS Victory with a very skeleton crew. Let's say we're repurposing the ship to to hydrographic work - because we're a bit mad - we wouldn't need the gun decks. They would essentially become large, empty spaces. You might let the crew walk in them, they might be used for storing stuff, whatever, but essentially it's just dead space. I imagine a lot of the IN ships are like this. Once they needed massive crews, were probably teeming with individuals and acted like space faring cities, perhaps supporting colonisation efforts. But now they're used for more limited purposes and they don't need such large crews anymore.

w1zard wrote:Again you aren't getting it. A few (4-5? out of what 40?) decks being unused because of the crew being under capacity is one thing. We are talking about something like 90+% of the decks of a 12-19 KM long battleship being unused... so bring me a lore example of a ship that has only 15 of its 285 decks being used at FULL crew complements and I will shut up, because that is what you are proposing in order to get the numbers to match up.

The dude you were replying to literally provided you with a quote where whole sections of a ship were considered derilict and abandoned, to the extent that the crew under normal circumstances couldn't keep on top of surveying and patrolling it, so they just sealed off whole sections in order to concentrate on patrolling other bits.

w1zard wrote:Yes, its 90% unused space ON TOP OF 90% of the decks of the remaining space being unused as well to make the numbers for the stated crew line up. Which is why I am so skeptical. People just aren't getting how LARGE these spaces are.

People are more than aware from what I can see of how big the ships are. You're simply not getting what people are saying about how whole sections of ships are virtually abandoned because they're not needed anymore. You're not understanding that roles like Navigator and Helmsman etc don't scale with the size of the ship. Just because an IN battleship might be 10,000 times the size of a WW2 battleship, that doesn't mean it suddenly needs 10,000 extra crew just to steer it.

Crimson wrote:It is actually pretty surreal that these things are not nailed down at all and every novel writer seems to be able to independently decide what the sizes are. Madness. If they don't want to have set official sizes then they should instruct the writers to avoid mentioning concrete numbers at all.

Outside of this thread, I doubt the size of the ships causes that much consternation. Most people will just read it and go "oh, cool, it's 6km long" or whatever. It's basically not that big of a deal unless you make it as such.

w1zard wrote:I really wish that lore writers for 40k would just stop talking about numbers entirely. If they do decide to be concrete on something they should hire an engineer as a temporary consultant for some realistic numbers.

Why would you spend money to hire a consultant for something so utterly insignificant?

w1zard wrote:Things like bunk beds and communal quarters (which are nessecary on modern navy ships) would be laughably pointless on such a large ship... yet they still exist in the lore.

Go to a modern army training barracks. Note the buildings where soldiers are often squeezed 6-8 to a room despite there being more than adequate space for them to not have to do that. There are other reasons why you might keep a crew on such a large ship bottled up in relatively confined spaces, such as keeping an eye on them; for their own sake as much as for yours. You're also going to have problems if a crew member who might be needed in an emergency has his living quarters 3km away from his post. The biggest problem seems to be that you're just lacking in a bit of imagination, coupled with being too concerned on the practicality of the dimensions and not on the practicality of the crew. Fantasy and Sci-fi routinely require us to fill in some of the blanks ourselves and let our creativity flesh out the universe.

Whatever, I'm done arguing. If anyone wants to believe crap that 300,000 crew is anywhere near enough to realistically have a presence on something the size of a Super Star Destroyer, go ahead. It's all just a make believe setting anyway and doesn't really affect me. But people who actually have a clue are just going to laugh at you if you are seriously going to make the argument that it is anywhere close to plausible from a real life perspective. I don't have the energy to argue with contrarians who use the "but it's a fantasy setting things don't have to make sense" during an argument about real life feasibility.

For what it is worth, I am not arguing that 300,000 people aren't enough to run the ship. I am arguing that 300,000 people aren't enough to make the ships be as crowded as they are portrayed, and having 90% of the decks of the ships not be in use is pointless and a waste of space. If you are going to do that, just fill in the unused decks with armor and have a more combat capable vessel with less space for boarders to hide.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

I always thought the lance thing was silly, Yes Space Marines having Lances on their ships was looked at poorly by the navy but that didn't mean some space faring chapters wouldn't do it.

THe issue is that it has nothing to DO with lances. The Nova was looked askance on because it's so grotesquely superior to the equivalent ship in the same role in IN service, Firestorm. particularly since it can fire it's lance FLR compared to the Firestorm's F only.

The lance thing is just people's headcanon because they don't understand that it's not 'just' having a lance that makes the Nova viewed this way. Lances are, in canon, vaslty superior to Bombardment cannons for, well, bombardment, able to accurately hit the target (and everything else for a km) rather than saturating a twenty mile wide area with fire.

If you have any doubts about this, Seditio Opprimere should set them to rest, but the same people raged so hard we had to completely redo the ship, from a lance boat to a bombardment cannon boat. So that their idea of canon fit.

At the end, the design team allowed Desolators to be taken as Venerable battle barges. I suspect this was intended as a massive middle finger.

And don't even get me started on Jovian: I spent weeks arguing to keep it in the game because some players felt that the IN having access to any carrier that did not suck (See Defiant and the problems it STILL suffers from) somehow detracted from the fleet. The compromise was Jovians current bizarre rules for when you can take it.

You know, rather than good, balanced, well thought out rules.

O nthe flip side, at the same time we had IA:10 come out and a Fortress Monastery that couldn't turn before flying off the end of the board, Oh, and the Cardinal class, which people besides me flew into a rage about, even though FW forgot to put stats in the book for it. The stats from BFGM gave it FLR torps. Cue screaming.

It was to do with the Astartes having 'dedicated fleet combat ships' rather than stuff 'primarily for planetary assault' that just happened to be awesome/acceptable for fleet combat because of the astartes crew and generally higher tech level.

The bombardment cannon's real original role was taking out orbital defences (because when you're lobbing it at the 'defences' column on the gunnery table the number of dice you throw makes it much better than an equivalent 'power' lance mount).
I don't 'like' marine ships with lances but don't mind them; the point is that the Imperial Navy (and probably the Inquisition Ordo Astartes) don't like marine lance boats, but since when has that ever stopped first founding chapters - especially the Dark Angels (noted as the primary user of the Cobra-but-better Hunter-class) and Space Wolves - doing what the feth they want and bugger the political fallout?
I disliked Seditio Opprimere because the first version (in the Ultramarines article) had 6 60cm lances in its broadside (better than a lance-armed 'true battleship' of the same weight) and most importantly didn't cost nearly enough points for its capability in game.
The actual idea - post Macragge, the Ultramarines say "lets not do that again, eh, Marneus?" and rebuilt a battle barge for fleet combat makes sense and is something I'm fine with. Lances on astartes ships should be the exception not the rule, but they should be an option.

I do actually find the Dictator-class okay (I'm wierd, I know) but that's specifically because it's capable of delivering bomber and torpedo strikes in a single turn off a single ship (good for punching past turrets) when used aggressively. It is catastrophically expensive compared to the Devastation-class, though.

w1zard wrote:
Whatever, I'm done arguing. If anyone wants to believe crap that 300,000 crew is anywhere near enough to realistically have a presence on something the size of a Super Star Destroyer, go ahead.

For Star Wars ships (which, as I said before, I'm not that fussed about anyway) I actually agree with you. Because we have footage from inside those ships in the SW movies. They're clearly much more densely populated than the official numbers would imply.

I just think you're wrong when it comes to 40K ships. I think Imperial ships being 99% empty is perfectly fine and in keeping with the overall feel of the fluff for 40K. The Imperium is ludicrously inefficient and builds things much bigger than they need to be. Packing a ship's crew into cramped living quarters that take up an infintessimal fraction of a massive vessel, while leaving Titan-scale processional avenues and cathedral-like spaces completely uninhabited for centuries at a time just feels like the sort of thing the Imperium would do.

We don't have hours of film of various bits of the interior of a 40K ship, just some highly subjective text descriptions written by (mostly) second-rate authors, plus a couple of vague bits of artwork of specific (small) areas of what may or may not be a typical Imperial Navy vessel.

It's all just a make believe setting anyway and doesn't really affect me.

I feel bad that you feel you've been pushed into pretending you don't really care any more. People are perhaps being more... abrasive than necessary in this thread.

contrarians who use the "but it's a fantasy setting things don't have to make sense" during an argument about real life feasibility.

This is a bit of a strawman, though. The argument is more like "there are actually reasons why these numbers could be accurate that make sense in the context of this fantasy setting". It's entirely your prerogative to feel those reasons are just silly post-hoc rationalisations of something that's clearly just an error. But that's just, like, your opinion, man.

and having 90% of the decks of the ships not be in use is pointless and a waste of space. If you are going to do that, just fill in the unused decks with armor and have a more combat capable vessel with less space for boarders to hide.

But filling the empty space with armour would cost resources. Filling them with spare crew or additional military personnel or combat servitors to fight off boarders also costs resources (more food, water and air needs to be provided/recycled). Just leaving those spaces empty doesn't cost anything. Once you already have a ridiculously huge battleship, the most efficient thing you can do once you've put all the crew you really need on board is to just leave the rest empty. And you already have a ridiculously huge battleship because it was built millennia ago by people who didn't really understand battleship design, working from a possibly incomplete or corrupted (but sacrosanct and unalterable!) STC design. So it makes sense within the context of the 40K setting. At least to me.

None of that applies to Star Wars ships, of course. Which I still agree with you about. But still don't really care very much about.

Dark Imperium specificy calls this out re Macragge's honor when Gulliman notes that it had a MUCH higher number of people aboard in the heresy era and that now it feels like a ghost town.

In fairness, that's also because you could carry multiple chapters/grand companies/hosts/whatever of a legion on a Glorianna class. As a result, you could pack the entire ultramarines chapter into the troop decks and it'd still feel empty.

The Soul Drinkers series makes the same observation about the Phalanx.

locarno24 wrote:

Dark Imperium specificy calls this out re Macragge's honor when Gulliman notes that it had a MUCH higher number of people aboard in the heresy era and that now it feels like a ghost town.

In fairness, that's also because you could carry multiple chapters/grand companies/hosts/whatever of a legion on a Glorianna class. As a result, you could pack the entire ultramarines chapter into the troop decks and it'd still feel empty.

The Soul Drinkers series makes the same observation about the Phalanx.

You could easily pack entire Ultramarines chapter in a Gladius class frigate...

 Graphite wrote:
Wait.

This thing is 5000x800x800m, approx. 3.2x10^9 m cubed

It weighs 28 Megatonnes, 2.8x10^10 kg

It's density is therefore 8.75 kg/m3

Steel has a density of 7850kg/m3.

This is 1/1000th the density of steel. That's properly absurd.

Most areas would logically have light weight alloys and not steel, which would weigh unnecessarily much.

HexHammer wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
Wait.

This thing is 5000x800x800m, approx. 3.2x10^9 m cubed

It weighs 28 Megatonnes, 2.8x10^10 kg

It's density is therefore 8.75 kg/m3

Steel has a density of 7850kg/m3.

This is 1/1000th the density of steel. That's properly absurd.

Most areas would logically have light weight alloys and not steel, which would weigh unnecessarily much.

Yeah, because making it out.of aluminium at only 2700kg/cu.m makes the calculation look much better... Also I'm not convinced you could rely on a space ship.made out of.lithium.

So I've been reading the Space Wolves books mostly and there was a throw away line where Rangar refers to someone as "actual crew, not just an indentured servant" so it's possiable the crew count only considers assigned crew not the "press ganged masses" seems suitably grimdark "yeah those macro cannon loaders don't count as people!"

 Duskweaver wrote:
But filling the empty space with armour would cost resources. Filling them with spare crew or additional military personnel or combat servitors to fight off boarders also costs resources (more food, water and air needs to be provided/recycled).

And I suppose filling in the decks with life support, grav-plating, and airtight bulkheads that nobody is going to use is free?

 Duskweaver wrote:
I feel bad that you feel you've been pushed into pretending you don't really care any more. People are perhaps being more... abrasive than necessary in this thread.

I really don't care, people can have their headcanon about the setting and that is fine. It's when they try to pretend like their headcanon makes any kind of real life sense that I start to take issue. I suppose you can argue that the setting itself doesn't make real life sense either, but I am very into suspension of disbelief.

 Duskweaver wrote:
It's entirely your prerogative to feel those reasons are just silly post-hoc rationalisations of something that's clearly just an error. But that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Those ARE just silly post-hoc rationalizations and that is a fact, not an opinion. I have done the math to prove it earlier in the thread, feel free to go back and check it out if you'd like. But thank you for at least being civil.

I always assumed alot of the excess space was due to the imperiums overbuilding habit. If they can use dimensions suitable for a cathedral in the place of a house they will.

After some thought I came to the conclusion that alot of the space would be filled with stores. A large long range ship like an aircraft carrier or submarine would have what, a years supply as a guess? 3 at most.

An imperium ship is likely to have supplies for a decade probably more including hydroponics and so on, with equivelent times worth of munitions and fuel. They have to account for warp shinanigans - suddenly finding your ship stuck in warp for a long time, getting out of warp where ever/whenever and the rest. Thank god we dont have to!

BrianDavion wrote:
So I've been reading the Space Wolves books mostly and there was a throw away line where Rangar refers to someone as "actual crew, not just an indentured servant" so it's possiable the crew count only considers assigned crew not the "press ganged masses" seems suitably grimdark "yeah those macro cannon loaders don't count as people!"

This was always my interpretation, the “crew” is everyone with an actual rank, and who gets a pay stub of some kind to spend when/if they make shoreleave. Other than those luck you bastards, the ship could otherwise be a heaving mass of indentured slaves that were pressganged/tithes. I imagine there is an overseer rank in the official crew that sees to the discipline of the rabble, the best of which might be elevated to full crew to fill in losses on a long haul.

So you got something like:

CREW:

Captain

Officers (navigators, lieutenants, master of ordnance, etc...)

Petty-Officers (mid-shipmen, overseers, engineers...)

Specialists (armsmen, perhaps pilots for bombers, fighters....)

Ratings (skilled laborers)

NOT-CREW

Servitors (programed for tasks that are to menial or dangerous for skilled crew (work inside the plasma reactor?)

Slave-Serfs (the mass majority of humanity on the ship, used for everything from hauling munitions, to cleaning the decks)

w1zard wrote:
And I suppose filling in the decks with life support, grav-plating, and airtight bulkheads that nobody is going to use is free?

Who says they do that, though? Completely unused sections of the ship might not have any of those things. And if they do, they'll have been there since the ship was originally built, so they are sunk costs. Quite different from adding additional personnel or filling spaces with solid armour later on. You still seem to be looking at 40K ships as though they are designed and purpose-built to be as they are, and expecting rational, logical reasons for that design. But that is not how anything works in 40K. Everything is an ancient relic, based on designs that have become viewed as holy scripture. "We should redesign this to be more efficient" is a thought that will literally get you executed for tech-heresy.

(And if your gut reaction to that is "But that's stupid!" then I'd suggest, without rancour, that maybe 40K is just not the setting for you.)

I have done the math to prove it earlier in the thread, feel free to go back and check it out if you'd like.

No, you've done the maths to prove that the crew density of a 40K ship is much lower than the crew density of a 21st century naval vessel. I don't think anyone is even arguing against that point. The issue is whether such a low crew density is plausible in the context of the 40K setting. And that's necessarily subjective because we don't know enough to compare how a 40K ship works to how a 21st century naval vessel works.

Considering how long voyages can take and the possibility of Warp storms throwing you off course it wouldn't surprise me if an extremely large portion of the vessel were simply dedicated to life support: food, water, and air.

IIRC they typically carry six months worth of provisions, etc.

Life support systems seemingly take up a fairly small amount of space, though they get bigger as they get 'newer'.

https://www.deviantart.com/dirkloechel/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-Spaceships-398790051