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I had a thought the other day and my fluff knowledge isn't up to scratch on Titans, but...

Titans are obviously gigantic constructs able to move themselves from place to place and presumably are constructed on planet, my question is ... are these Titan's planet bound or do they have a method of transporting them to other worlds. Try as I might I simply can't find reference to any Imperial transport vessels large enough to house a Titan unless it was dismantled (which would make sense) and I doubt they could fit within an Imperial Cruiser from the BFG ships mentioned.

You thoughts?

They can fit inside most imperial transport ships. When you have spacecraft that are many miles long, transporting something that is a couple of humdread feet tall isnt really that much of a problem. I remember reading somewhere that they drop them from orbit in giant metal boxes that collapse once they hit the ground.
Presumably if they can build the ruddy things in the first place it wouldnt be too much effort to get them back into orbit again.

hellsguardian316 wrote:I had a thought the other day and my fluff knowledge isn't up to scratch on Titans, but...

Titans are obviously gigantic constructs able to move themselves from place to place and presumably are constructed on planet, my question is ... are these Titan's planet bound or do they have a method of transporting them to other worlds. Try as I might I simply can't find reference to any Imperial transport vessels large enough to house a Titan unless it was dismantled (which would make sense) and I doubt they could fit within an Imperial Cruiser from the BFG ships mentioned.

You thoughts?

Titans are not always constructed on planet. Some planets they fight on, are not forgeworlds and since only forgeworlds build titans...

Other than that, think about the Titan Legions.
They moved alongside the imperial forces in the great crusade. Their numbers may have dropped today, but its still possible and necessary to transport titans. Usually it would be a Ad mech transport, research at Imperial navy may not give you any results.

It is a common problem of GW and BL, they forget to describe the transports. If youre not interested in thunderhawks or aquila landers,
then you can only guess from those vague descriptions in fluff-books.

Back to the titans.
The armageddon campaign had several titans in the armageddon codex mentioned, some BL books had some lonely titans or small
cohorts of them, therefore it must be possible to transport 1 + X titans because the "theatre of war" ( often a planet ) had no
native Titans.

As far as i know, you can't find anything reliable about transports bigger than thunderhawks in GW/BL publications.
So please correct me and provide a source.

1hadhq wrote:It is a common problem of GW and BL, they forget to describe the transports. If youre not interested in thunderhawks or aquila landers,
then you can only guess from those vague descriptions in fluff-books.
....
As far as i know, you can't find anything reliable about transports bigger than thunderhawks in GW/BL publications.
So please correct me and provide a source.

It is a feature of GW & BL. I am not sure it is a problem that you don't have to read through boring technical & logistics manuals.

Anyway, at least one Horus Heresy book refers to a huge drop pod that reveals a titan. I am pretty sure another refers to boxing them back up.

In Legion they talk about leaving Titans behind due to not being able to devote the manpower to re-packaging them.

In short, yes, the Mechanicum has created transports capable of moving even the largetst of titans. In general the AM will deal with with the titans themselves, though the've been known to co-op Imperial transports for the job. As noted above, the standared Imperial space transport is 1-2km long, and at least 1/2 km high, making a titan not particularly difficult - in part because they don't have to be transported in a presurised evironment. (they're space-proof)

I thought Creed just outflanked them out of thin air.

This ones for you 1Hadhq - If i remeber corectly In Storm Of Iron it speaks of Legio Mortis being unload on the planet.
Dont quote me its has been a while since i read the book.

I'm not so concerned with the carrying capacity of any given interstellar transport myself. Finding space in... space... is easy to do. But how the hell do they manage to get the Titans out of a planet's gravity well?

It's one thing to take a bunch of easily packaged troops and stick them in an appropriate sardine-can transport. You can use a bunch of them easily and have minimal troubles (comparatively speaking) escaping orbit. But it's a very different ordeal getting a colossal, ungainly construct of several hundreds of thousands of tons of various hardened metals, to so much as budge in the vertical direction, especially if the planet has a high gravitational index. It's not as though you can simply strap it onto a giant rocket (or several... balance is important) and launch it into space. That's too much effort for what you can easily accomplish with a good precise location and some accurate orbital missiles.

But for those rare situations where orbital missiles aren't possible or optimal, I could see the adeptus mechanicus transporting the titan in pieces and assembling it on the planet before beginning operations with it.

The other titans all have a good excuse. Tyranids are simply grown or are deployed through the chimney stacks. Eldar use Webway portals. Chaos Daemons can be summoned. CSM uses same technique described above (maybe summons it???). Orks.... I'm not sure about them... Maybe good ol' Stompa is simply assembled then forgotten? Flies around on the space hulk?

Huge rockets or other thrusters. This is in the distant future, they found a way to get titans off a planet.....

Sgt Bilko wrote:This ones for you 1Hadhq - If i remeber corectly In Storm Of Iron it speaks of Legio Mortis being unload on the planet.
Dont quote me its has been a while since i read the book.

Actually that's true, I remember it because of what was transporting them (a Tyranid hive ship infected with the obliterator virus), dropping them off reqired the transport ship to drop down to just above the planets surface. just because it's practical doesn't mace it tactical, and nobody has ever accused the Adeptus Mechanicus of being practical (unless when refering to human life).

Dreadwinter wrote:Huge rockets or other thrusters. This is in the distant future, they found a way to get titans off a planet.....

I'll grant you the distant future argument, but even so, how expensive is it for the Imperium of Man to collect and utilize the fuel required to lift the titan off the planet? Even using the fantastic Promethium fuel (which, I might add, is a Lanthanide element), you would need an inordinate amount of fuel and several rockets for proper liftoff. They're lifting several hundred thousand tons of material.

For comparison, the space shuttle weighs, empty, 165,000 pounds and has an effective payload of 65,000 pounds. The rest of the weight involved in launch is about 4 million pounds of fuel and rockets.

Supposing that this Promethium is 10x more efficient than liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, that would still require 400,000 pounds of Promethium to lift a mere 230,000 pounds of payload. Promethium is almost certainly not cheap or easy to come by. I'm sure that, if pressed, the Imperium of Man could find something more efficient than rockets to transport their titans. What if they installed independent, planetary warp engines on the titans?

tuatha1337 wrote:

Dreadwinter wrote:Huge rockets or other thrusters. This is in the distant future, they found a way to get titans off a planet.....

I'll grant you the distant future argument, but even so, how expensive is it for the Imperium of Man to collect and utilize the fuel required to lift the titan off the planet? Even using the fantastic Promethium fuel (which, I might add, is a Lanthanide element), you would need an inordinate amount of fuel and several rockets for proper liftoff. They're lifting several hundred thousand tons of material.

For comparison, the space shuttle weighs, empty, 165,000 pounds and has an effective payload of 65,000 pounds. The rest of the weight involved in launch is about 4 million pounds of fuel and rockets.

Supposing that this Promethium is 10x more efficient than liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, that would still require 400,000 pounds of Promethium to lift a mere 230,000 pounds of payload. Promethium is almost certainly not cheap or easy to come by. I'm sure that, if pressed, the Imperium of Man could find something more efficient than rockets to transport their titans. What if they installed independent, planetary warp engines on the titans?

Are you talking about creating a new technology?

HERETIC!

PS: Imperium doesn't pay for gak. So they probably have massive amounts of Prometheum floating around that they can use just from the massive amount of manpower they have getting it.

The Mechanicum also has anti-gravity technology. Which is to say, the ability to make something weightless. Most particularly, this is used on their space transports who, dispite their massiveness (as noted above) are able to land and take off from a planet.

GrrBear wrote:

Sgt Bilko wrote:This ones for you 1Hadhq - If i remeber corectly In Storm Of Iron it speaks of Legio Mortis being unload on the planet.
Dont quote me its has been a while since i read the book.

Actually that's true, I remember it because of what was transporting them (a Tyranid hive ship infected with the obliterator virus), dropping them off reqired the transport ship to drop down to just above the planets surface. just because it's practical doesn't mace it tactical, and nobody has ever accused the Adeptus Mechanicus of being practical (unless when refering to human life).

For me? thanks.

The funny part of those IW books is, they lose their pricey titans all the time. So if youre a chaos follower, you may not need to think about launching back to space...


Anti-grav is a good point. Seems only right to use it, titans are heavy and maybe have an easier move with some counter on their own weight even on the planets surface. Power could be redirected, maybe imperial tech just eats up too much of it to use it always
when moving normally. What else than shields and less weight would be needed in travel from transport to surface and back?

Yes. read Galaxy In Flames (one of the Horus Heresy books) and it describes the Titans being dropped in huge containers which are essentially Titan sized drop pods.

read the short story about titans (sorry i 4get the title but its in the book "let the galaxy burn") and the new book "Titanicus"

Maybe the trasnport ship lands on the planet itself and the titan just walks into it. Sounds like the most logical answer, unless transport ship for some reason can't land.