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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.