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No. Tyranid space farts do not smell.

But in battle I bet they could make even a Nurgle marine gag.

I remember another sci-fi book that had aliens that used gravity as an FTL. Using a fictional material called "cavorite", they could nullify gravity in certain directions. The theory was the entire universe has a gravitational force that pulls on you from every direction; cut gravity off behind you, then the gravity of the entire universe in front of you will pull you forward. They also used it to slingshot ships off the gravity wells of black holes to achieve faster than light travel.

Mr Nobody wrote:I remember another sci-fi book that had aliens that used gravity as an FTL. Using a fictional material called "cavorite", they could nullify gravity in certain directions. The theory was the entire universe has a gravitational force that pulls on you from every direction; cut gravity off behind you, then the gravity of the entire universe in front of you will pull you forward. They also used it to slingshot ships off the gravity wells of black holes to achieve faster than light travel.

Cavorite, of course, being the gravity-negating plot-device material invented by H.G. Wells for The First Men in the Moon.

xXSir MontyXx wrote:

No they definitely dont at present. I was was saying IF they could just screw with the gravity of ANYTHING they could send enemy vessels crashing into planets beore they assaulted it.... hel maybe even send planets out of orbit for whatever reason. After all, gravity is the universes most powerful force..... next to fluff that is

Gravity is actually a weak force ~ Nuclear Force is much more powerful, it holds atoms together.

Vice_Grip wrote:

Tyranids travel FTL through something known as a Narvhal (see Lexicanum). It doesn't make a lot of sense, and GW knows it. The GW explanation for why it doesn't make much sense is that the science behind it is so advanced humans can barely comprehend how it works. Basically you just gotta accept the explanation given.

Tyranids travel in-system and sub-light speeds through bio-plasma and air sacks in bioships that act as giant engines. I think I remember that explained in Battlefield Gothic somewhere.

Nids aren't in BFG as far as I can tell, PDF's are available on GW's website.

You're not looking very hard then. There's a pdf on the resources page called "BFG Necron and Tyranid fleets". I think that might include official rules for Tyranids. Maybe.

Must have been added after i checked last, sorry.

King Pariah wrote:If a nid farts in space and no one is around, does it smell?

How do you think Nurgle came to be

Vice_Grip wrote:Must have been added after i checked last, sorry.

Considering the pdf itself is dated 21/6/2005, I'd say you didn't look hard enough

It's been up ever since they put the BFG source pdfs up.

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I thought it sounded a little . . . .crazy. but if it is official than I guess I can't really say much about it.

They have a certain ship in each fleet that allows them to travel between galaxys but not as fast as warp travel. I think that it makes them jump distances like teleportation.

Brother Coa wrote:I am more interested to know how the hell they survive trip between the galaxies?

Closest one to us, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away from Terra. Others are much, much farther. They have to spend their biomass in some degree to keep themselves alive while travelling. It's little hard to me to understand that they can travel thousands of light-years, or even millions and still having enough biomass to overrun Imperial planets.

whilst nid travel they do not keep their slaves alive, they are pumped into biomass with their prey. that way they do not have to waste it for keeping the nids alive.

Brother Coa wrote:I am more interested to know how the hell they survive trip between the galaxies?

Closest one to us, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away from Terra. Others are much, much farther. They have to spend their biomass in some degree to keep themselves alive while travelling. It's little hard to me to understand that they can travel thousands of light-years, or even millions and still having enough biomass to overrun Imperial planets.

40k fluff is at times so utterly idiotic that the only possible explaination for much of it is "The warp did it".
Why do Tyranid bioships move trough space?
How can Narvahls manipulate gravity?
Where do the Tyranids store the entire biomass + water + natural ressources of a planet? ( because, a few hundred bioships are not even remotely sufficient )?
How can bioships, equiped with fangs and claws and spikey bits even threaten imperial warships which bombard them from many thousand kilometres away?
Well, the warp did it! There is no fluff too stupid, no idea too ilogical and no fluffwriter too incompetent that the warp couldn't explain it! \o/

I thought that the Bioships were in stasis during the travel between galaxies. And the fleets we see today are just the vanguard that "woke up" before the rest of the fleet...

Earlier novels and codexes had the Tyranids using the warp as their meands of travel. 5th edition introduced the Narvahl in place of the Warp. Depending on how you view canon (do the older codexes have any merit) they may still have warp travel - it's not like the Imperium has omniscient knowledge of how the Tyranids work, and the Tyranids have evolved different approaches/strategies/traits independently before (EG some could use warp travel, some narvahls, some may even be purely sublight.)

As far as realspace propulsion -they use a biologicla reaction drive. If you look up the BFG Armada stuff for Tyranids (alongside the Necron stuff) in the crtiical hits charts and the upgrades lists they mention dischrage vents (which seem to be for propulsion and manouvering) and primpary propulsion valves (linear thrust, I guess.)

KingDeath wrote:40k fluff is at times so utterly idiotic that the only possible explaination for much of it is "The warp did it".
Why do Tyranid bioships move trough space?

How else are they going to get their food?

I think your question should be how, not why, which was explained above.

KingDeath wrote:How can Narvahls manipulate gravity?

A wizard did it. This is new fluff half assed by Cruddace, like he half assed the book.

KingDeath wrote:Where do the Tyranids store the entire biomass + water + natural ressources of a planet? ( because, a few hundred bioships are not even remotely sufficient )?

There was actually a really great article on GW's website a couple of years ago. I'll see if I can find it. It talked about the quantities of biomass removed from a planet, including soil, water, natural gases, the atmosphere, etc, and that even one planets worth would not be able to be stored by the hive fleet, and hypothesised that it is being transported back through the fleet to some massive main fleet sitting outside the galaxy, storing it.

KingDeath wrote:How can bioships, equiped with fangs and claws and spikey bits even threaten imperial warships which bombard them from many thousand kilometres away?

Read the BFG fluff, it goes into great detail about Tyranid hive ships. They're surrounded by a screen of spore mines so thick, it appears solid, which causes and munitions with explosive force to detonate before reaching the ship. Basically a 'living energy shield'. Also, sheer numbers. Where above you said 'a few hundred bioships' isn't even close to what you'd encounter in a hive fleet. A few hundred thousand, that's more accurate. They also show the same level of adaptability as their ground forces. In the BFG fluff, there's a short story where an Imperial fleet officer talks about how at first, they hit them with torpedoes, then the next day they came back with defensive adaptations for that and they drove them off with lances. On the third day, they'd adapted to lances and the Imperial fleet couldn't do much against them.

A lot of stuff is explained as well as anything in 40k is explained. The only 'a wizard did it' parts of the fluff are the new bits Cruddace sloppily wrote for 5th edition.

KingDeath wrote:
Where do the Tyranids store the entire biomass + water + natural ressources of a planet? ( because, a few hundred bioships are not even remotely sufficient )?

In the 3rd. ed. Tyranid Codex was a reprinted article on Tyranid planetary consumption (reprinted from BFG). It describes how the hive ships calve once the consumption is underway.

In other words, the Tyranids are not carting off water, dirt, and biomass in that form as inert cargo. They are moving it off in the form of Tyranid flesh. Some Tyranid ships are packing it on as fat or other forms of biological storage. Immature ships are using the nutrition to grow and mature. Mature ones are producing young, which can then take on resources to grow. Finally, things like water and atmosphere are frozen and coat the ships in layers. These could presumably be used as reaction mass for propulsion, and also parts could be metabolized as part of respiration along the way.

King Pariah wrote:If a nid farts in space and no one is around, does it smell?

Since they do 1d3 wounds to every figure under the template if they take the "Acid Fart" biomorph, anyone who would complain has already melted.

I'm pretty sure I red they leave themselves to the Warp currents, like jellyfish. Perhaps they use a variety of techniques, such as gravity pull -as said on the OP-, etc.

IronChaos wrote:I'm pretty sure I red they leave themselves to the Warp currents, like jellyfish. Perhaps they use a variety of techniques, such as gravity pull -as said on the OP-, etc.

If it was written, it's old fluff. They haven't used the warp in a long time.

kshaw2000 wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:I am more interested to know how the hell they survive trip between the galaxies?

Closest one to us, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away from Terra. Others are much, much farther. They have to spend their biomass in some degree to keep themselves alive while travelling. It's little hard to me to understand that they can travel thousands of light-years, or even millions and still having enough biomass to overrun Imperial planets.

whilst nid travel they do not keep their slaves alive, they are pumped into biomass with their prey. that way they do not have to waste it for keeping the nids alive.

Stephen Hawking theorized that when you are traveling near or at the speed of light, time slows down dramatically. 3 weeks in light speed being equivalent to 50 years real time. 50 years in light speed would be over 43 thousand years real time. So traveling to the nearest star to the sun at light speed is four light years, however to the people traveling at that speed it would be less than a week of aging.