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 Lord Tarkin wrote:

 Random Dude wrote:
It depends on what you mean by spaceship. If you're talking battleships and frigates, probably hundreds. If you're talking fighters and support craft too, probably thousands.

Spaceship as in, the total arraignment of spacecraft and all its variants.

Freespace tried to mimic this (but could only go so big due to pc limitations at the time). It attempted to have multiple capital ships and their support ships with scads of fighters/bombers duking it out. The final cut scene for Freespace 2 implies potentially thousands of craft shooting it out as the Shivans then detonate a sun and kill everyone.

I'd imagine several dozen capitol ships would be a fairly large fleet. However, hive fleets could have hundreds if not thousands.

The Imperium couldn't field thousands of capital ships in a given battle... they don't have that many capital ships in the Imperial Navy.

A huge space-battle would be a few score ships, at the most, including all the escort vessels around the battleships, the carriers, the interdictors, the cruisers and everything else.

Warp capable ships are old, big and expensive.

All ships are big and expensive and to constantly withstand the void and the warp? The upkeep would be insane especially because they aren't completely knowledgeable of their tech.

Maybe a dozen or so large ships in a large battle but other than that just a handful with hundreds or support vessels and fighters.

War is a lot of waiting not a lot of broadsides and ramming.

War is many, many hours of tedium and boredom interspersed with brief moments of pants-gakkingly intense terror and adrenaline.

I am willing to vote on ddozens of warships. Anything larger for that would be unplayable on a tabletop. If anyone has ever played games like SFB or BFG will know what I mean.

A major battle? Half a dozen capitol ships, plus their escorts (so about thirty warp capable ships at most). If there's a carrier or two, throw in fighters and bombers as well, so maybe a hundred or so 'space ships' by Tark's definition.

A war? That's when you start looking at larger numbers.

The majority of space battles will be between fighters, that's where you get your impressive wall-of-ships-diving-and-blasting. It's best to think of capitol ships in this situation as snipers, fighting at stand-off ranges with their biggest guns, only using the smaller stuff for point defence and to take out sneaky escorts trying to get a look in.

Dozens.

Remember, in BFG you would have a dozen ships, and during a game you could go 'Wow, that's the Dark Angels gone. All of them.'

 Daba wrote:
Dozens.

Remember, in BFG you would have a dozen ships, and during a game you could go 'Wow, that's the Dark Angels gone. All of them.'

A single Chapter is given in the official BFG background to have only about 2-3 Battle Barges and only a few more Strike Cruisers. The rest of their fleet is all escorts. The loss of any of capital ship assets (i.e. Cruiser and above) would be a major blow.

Which is really why in the background, we see a lot more examples of ships opting to disengage so as to preserve their strength (and that of any troops they carry) rather than fighting it out to the bitter end, which is often the case on the tabletop.

 Lord Tarkin wrote:

 Swastakowey wrote:
Navies are expensive. Navies are valuable.

So dozens. A lot of naval battles that I am aware of are between a few ships. Even more of them are just shows (as in, ships face off but never sufficiently damage or hurt each other to be a win).

The loss of a couple of ships is a defeat in many battles. You could have hundreds of ships and loose 5. That would be a horrific loss.

Dozens to me makes the most sense.

I believe over the length of a million worlds, several hundred or so vessels can be supplied for a sector. Dozens would be fine but think about how IG would be transported. Millions of guard would need hundreds of troop carrying vessels and a battlefleet to protect them while they make their way to the designated warzone. In a galaxy as big as this one, the Imperium needs more than just "dozens" per sector imo.

The imperial navy will have hundreds or thousands of battleships. But not in one engagement. It's the same reason the Tau still exist - if you could spontaneously mass the Imperial Navy into one formation and park it in the orbit of T'Au, the empire would be charcoal in a matter of months, but logistics and the myriad threats the imperium faces won't let you do that.

twenty-to-forty capital ships and maybe two to three times that number of destroyers is the value generally given for a sector battlefleet. Bear in mind that that works out roughly to a capital ship per major world or so, which seems right to me - at kilometetres in length, with a crew in tens of thousands, each capital warship is the equivalent of trying to maintain a sizeable industrial city.

Granted, the effort isn't all being drawn from a single world, but the food, water, air, and replacement manpower all has to come from somewhere IN ADDITION to raising guard regiments, the planetary tithe, and maintaining the planet's own Planetary Defence Force and System Defence Fleet.

Convoys are one of the biggest things the Imperium deals with, but even then, ten to twenty regiments of guardsmen are a dozen or so transport ships. Going by the old gothic rules, that rates a cruiser and a small destroyer squadron as escorts.

You can't mass fleets in naval combat except under the direst circumstances because it takes weeks or even months to redeploy them.

 Daba wrote:
Dozens.

Remember, in BFG you would have a dozen ships, and during a game you could go 'Wow, that's the Dark Angels gone. All of them.'

True, but then you can easily lose a third of the deathwing in a normal game of 40k....

Ehm... a standard Sector Battlefleet typically numbers between 50 and 75 vessels of all sizes. This includes all the really big ships down to the tiny missile-boats and other escort frigates.

 Psienesis wrote:
Ehm... a standard Sector Battlefleet typically numbers between 50 and 75 vessels of all sizes. This includes all the really big ships down to the tiny missile-boats and other escort frigates.

Does that include non-warp capable ships, such as system defense monitors?

I would think that the 50 - 75 would be all warp capable ships: Battleships down to Escorts.

There would be a second tier for transports / supply craft.

One other point to note is escorts may be weaker in the large table-top battles then they would be when deployed on a standard patrol

System Defense monitors are not part of a Sector Battlegroup, since they can't patrol the Sector, just the system. Those are local assets, in the possession of whoever runs the system, likely a merchant cartel or the Planetary Governor of the most-important planet in the system.

Note that such ships are pretty rare, actually. Most systems have to rely on planet-based, long-range auspex to detect ships entering the system. If they're lucky, they'll have some kill-sats or an orbital installation to deal with invaders, should they arrive.

Otherwise? Better hope the astropaths (if any) get a distress call out to the Imperial Navy, so at least someone will arrive to learn how you died.

 Psienesis wrote:
If they're lucky, they'll have some kill-sats or an orbital installation to deal with invaders, should they arrive.

What about planetary defense cannons? Ground-based anti-spacecraft weaponry seems somewhat common in the setting.

Somewhat common, sure... but I wasn't going to list every possible defense that a planet might have. Still, if the invading fleet is large enough, at best, those are going to be a speed bump, until their ground-attack forces neutralize them in some way.

Unlikely that a less-advanced world, like Old Tanith, or the Agri-Worlds, have such things in sufficient numbers to stop a determined invasion. Tanith certainly didn't.

I think what has the biggest impact on how impressive the space battle is the mix of craft.
40k ships tend to be mind boggling huge.

So two opposing ships "Strike Cruiser" grade duking it out with a bunch of "Hunter Destroyers" buzzing around would be fun.

For a single battle? At most between 1 and 5 capitals per side with 3 times that number in smaller ships (excluding fighters).

The amount of resources and time it takes to build those ships is immense. An Admiral (or equivalent) isn't going to be dumb enough to engage with a huge fleet when there are better strategies for dicing up your opponents or there is simply no other choice and the line has to be held. In which case we're talking about last ditch efforts.



Regarding the size of the ships in 40k: I find those numbers to be absurd. There is no justification for having a ship that's 8.2km long hold only ~300 marines. Even including all of the support staff and supplies, 8.2km is an incredibly large amount of real estate. Enough that you could easily transport 100x that number along with their gear, support vehicles and supplies for a multi-year campaign. I'd rather GW retconn those sizes to be more in line with what it would actually take to hold a fleet based chapter. Just taking length into account, a battle barge is 24 times larger than the Enterprise air craft carrier (holds ~ 6000 people). By volume it's going to be much more than that; based on the pictures I'd estimate between 300 and 500 times more space. Which, on the low end, means space for 1.8m people. If we set aside quite a bit of space for the drives and storage, then we should be able to still hold between 500k and 1m people.

Remember that automation is almost unheard of in the Imperium. Each of those guns is dragged into place, or dragged back into stowage when the gun-ports are closed, by hundreds-to-thousands of sweating men pulling ropes and chains.

The gun is aimed by those same men (or men very much like them) pushing the weapon to the left or right, or pulling this chain or that chain, which elevates or depresses the weapon within its firing arc.

That 8.2km ship is crewed by over 100,000 people.

Funny enough, the cubic volume of the Sword-class frigate is actually insufficient for the 24,000 people that supposedly crew it, and that's one of the smaller Warp-capable ships.

 Psienesis wrote:
Remember that automation is almost unheard of in the Imperium. Each of those guns is dragged into place, or dragged back into stowage when the gun-ports are closed, by hundreds-to-thousands of sweating men pulling ropes and chains.

The gun is aimed by those same men (or men very much like them) pushing the weapon to the left or right, or pulling this chain or that chain, which elevates or depresses the weapon within its firing arc.

That 8.2km ship is crewed by over 100,000 people.

Yeah I remember reading in one of the HH books (Think it was Galaxy in Flames) when Saul Tarvitz is at the gun decks and there are thousands of people putting the guns into position and prepping them to fire. The people who talked to him didn't even know what planet they were flying over, much less who they were shooting at. So yeah it makes sense for there to be hundreds of thousands of indentured servants/slaves/workers making sure these ships run. After all taking care of a ship is a lot of work, especially once you realize that for ever person you add you have to account for food/water/space/medical supplies/free time etc. These ships are essentially cities where people live all the time, they have bars/cafes or their 40k equivalent. GW fails at scale a lot of the time but these massive ships do makes sense