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Has it been established anywhere how small a warp-capable ship can be?  Are mile-long dreadnaughts as small as they can get?

747 size?

F-14 size?

Anyone?  Bueler?

not that i am aware of...
however i can imagine the gellar field (ghellar maybe....forget which) is probably a hefty piece of machinery...and including the warp engine....

im thinking smallest possibly would probably be naval aircraft carrier size possibly even frigate sized
giving enough room for crew...engine...gellar field unit..astropath chorus etc etc

i would imagine no sane human would ever want to venture into the warp with out a MASSIVE gellar field unit...

Well here is a fun little link.

http://www.merzo.net/index.html

The Cobra destoryer is estimated at 1.5km.
The Retribution Class Battleship is around 7.5km

wow, imerial ships are biiiiiiiiiiiiiig

I love the Merzo site but don't put too much stock into the 40k stuff, GW authors are notoriously loose with their figures, I remember one BL book where the same ship was described as 1000 feet long and then 1000 yards long.

It seems to me that many of the Inquisitorial and Rogue Trader ships are quite a bit smaller than even the smallest Imperial Navy escorts.

Yards and Feet are easily mistaken when writing. I think 1 mile + for the mediam sized ones

As to the size of Warp capable ships, in one of the old (late 90's, early 00's) Eye of Terror by Bailey, it has an impoverished Rogue Trader's personal ship as warp capable. It's tiny, there's only room for one cot, and the only other srew member he has is a Navigator, who he needs to be able to get out of the system he's stuck in.

Posted By jlmb_123 on 05/15/2007 6:01 AM
As to the size of Warp capable ships, in one of the old (late 90's, early 00's) Eye of Terror by Bailey, it has an impoverished Rogue Trader's personal ship as warp capable. It's tiny, there's only room for one cot, and the only other srew member he has is a Navigator, who he needs to be able to get out of the system he's stuck in.

  But what about the thousands of guys plodding along on treadmills to make the thing go?  What about the huge gears with chains wrapped around them?  The incense?  The scented oils?  What about the gothic gak?

The smaller the ship is, the more Dark-Age tech it requires, the more exclusive its use. I'd say the smallest it could go would be around Space Shuttle size, and that'd be like a top-rank Inquisitor's ride.

I think the BFG images at Starship Dimensions are too big. However any artwork of anything bigger thann 40k scale is often way out of scale.

It is best to go by the miniatures, and then the artwork that most closely fit the minitures. This can be found in the short comic in the BFG boxset. A Dictator is about 2km long, scale everything to size by comparing the miniatures. With Planet Killer and maybe Blackstone fortresses as exceptions.

Posted By Pariah Press on 05/16/2007 6:42 AM

 But what about the thousands of guys plodding along on treadmills to make the thing go?  What about the huge gears with chains wrapped around them?  The incense?  The scented oils?  What about the gothic gak?

I can only guess the long treadmills we see are a sort of prayer wheel. They do use chains and pulleys to move some equipment, but a camshaft without an engine is too backwards even for the Imperium.

Some stuff is wayyyy off on that sight.


I always like to think of the imperial capital ships as being city sized. They are typically described that way in the fluff. Imperial ships are pretty massive. They would have to be to have the firepower to burn an entire planet.



Maybe the bigger the ship the more power the field needs. Or maybe that one book was pretty fast and loose with the requirements for TEARING A WHOLE IN SPACE AND THEN SURVIVING IN A DIMENSION OF CHAOS.

Posted By Orlanth on 05/18/2007 11:58 AM
I think the BFG images at Starship Dimensions are too big. However any artwork of anything bigger thann 40k scale is often way out of scale.

It is best to go by the miniatures, and then the artwork that most closely fit the minitures. This can be found in the short comic in the BFG boxset. A Dictator is about 2km long, scale everything to size by comparing the miniatures. With Planet Killer and maybe Blackstone fortresses as exceptions.

     I think the BFG ships are not really to scale...Its been a long time since I read the BFG rulebook but I remember something about if the ships were to scale you wouldnt be able to see the models. This makes sense from a verisimilitude standpoint too.

One of the stories I read, I dont remember which one, stated that warships of the Imperium are so large that sometimes conscripts get lost in them, and over time in the darkness become less than human, and they have to gas them out like rats.

In the BFG rule book it states that battleships are recovered from spacehulks, and in the pictures they often are 1/3 to 1/2 the length of those planitoids. The smallest lance turrets are suppossedly manned by thousands of men. Given that a single Imperial transport is enough to carry an entire IG Army with all its supporting vehicles and equipment, as well as include training facilities simulating different environments and firing ranges, an Imperial Battleship must be very large by comparison. Before the Great Heresy, all Naval Ships carried their own IG force with them to whatever battle zone they were detached to. These ships also contain their own factories and shops where they can build any needed equipment for said IG force.

Got into an argument over at Librarium about this topic. Had some guy saying that the standard Imperial Cruiser was 18 miles long.

I think Merzo's sizing isn't that bad. Take a look at how the Navy does things today. You take a standard Tarawa Class Ambibious Assualt ship. It can carry 2,000 Marines, with associated vehichles, as well as several helecopters. The ship is only 250m long.

Taking BFG Scale, an Imperial Transport is roughly the same size as an Escort. Merzo shows a Cobra coming in around 1500m. So we can figure a Transport ship will range from 1500-2000m. If you want to say it's capable of transporting 10,000 troops with accompanying armor, you could compare that to 5 Tarawa's or 1250m. You then have the left over 250-750m of space for training purposes like show in Dead Sky Black Sun. (btw, I incoporated engine space and stuff in there as well, since a significant portion of that Tarawa class is also devoted to such things. Gellar Field and Engines shouldn't require that much more space).

Doesn't seem that unrealistic in my opinion. Trying to get ships much larger then that though, does.

Well, Eisenhorn pootles around the galaxy in something the size of a cathedral and run by a small crew, mostly servitors, and that's made out to be pretty common and mostly cargo space.

So, really, I think the smallest a warp-capable ship can be is pretty small, but that'd have no useful payload. The size of maybe a football stadium would be the average for a rogue trader, whether that be a sleek black Inquisition ship stuffed full of ECM gear and astropaths, or a big bulk carrier.
Most common are probably the size of today's cargo ships up to supercarrier size, being biiig inter-system freighters escorted in packs by small warships.

I think the main limiting factor for 40K ships is the amount of availble raw materials. When you consider that a planet raising a guard regiment needs much of the support to go wth it that's a huge amount of raw material needed, on top of what has already been used to create hives etc based on the planet and orbiting defenses. Obviously there are many mining worlds to supllement this but the basic mining equipment would likly come from an 'up and coming' founding planet. I thinkn that the 1.5 km for escourts is probably about right, when also taking into consideration moving around the vessel. in many of the books transport trams/pops whatever are only metion rarely and then only in the larger vessels (that i'm aware of) meaning that the vessels are small enough for crew to be able to walk around without too much hinderence. I rekon that battleships (3km) would be right considering this. Crews may live relaltivly close to their workstations but there are common halls etc (heresy books) which are in walking distance of most of the ship. Take the distance and also the cramped crew spaces and it probably seems realistic in some ense of the word. After all, modern warships at the moment can take over an hour to walk from one end to the other below decks!

If a Retribution Class is 7.5km then the Soul Drinkers Brokenback(Sic?) Space Hulk/Chapter Base must be friggin Massive. How many ships were piled in together to make it again?