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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.