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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