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I've been trying to find what are the size of Imperial Flagships are Battleships,Cruisers etc.

I'm also wondering if they were to ever collide with a planet would they do some serious damage due to thier size.

in general terms HUGE!!!!

battleships can have 80+ decks to them, and can be up to 8km long or so, as for wrecking a planet? prob not, causing tidal waves and mass destruction certainly.

That would be an awesome landmark, just a giant flagship sticking out of the ground.

"whats that big tower over there"
"oh thats just a Battlecrusier that decided it wanted to play chicken with the planet"
"oh"

That would be such an awesome scenery pice for armageddon or something just a smaller ship sticking out of the ground or something similar.
Also wouldn't the plasma driver cause even more damage due to radiation and well generally big explosions?

Are Imperial Flagships still able to be produced? Or have they lost the knowlodge to make such ships?

They still get made, but not to the standards they used to during the great crusade and earlier.

purplefood wrote:That would be such an awesome scenery pice for armageddon or something just a smaller ship sticking out of the ground or something similar.
Also wouldn't the plasma driver cause even more damage due to radiation and well generally big explosions?

Yeah but remember we as a race have set off some fairly big fusion / fission explosions and we haven't destroyed the Earth.

Yet

I remember someone discussing this elsewhere. The smallest ship in the smallest class in the Imperial Navy, not strikecraft like Thunderhawks or Lightnings, is about 3 metres long when made to 40k Scale. Like the larger Titans it goes up too big to be usable.

irongustavius wrote:

purplefood wrote:That would be such an awesome scenery pice for armageddon or something just a smaller ship sticking out of the ground or something similar.
Also wouldn't the plasma driver cause even more damage due to radiation and well generally big explosions?

Yeah but remember we as a race have set off some fairly big fusion / fission explosions and we haven't destroyed the Earth.

Yet

Fair point but according to what i've read plasma reactors have a mini star inside which is how they generate enrgy so if that went of... also a battleships is gonna have a load of them and an 8km chunk of metal going at a very high speed and loaded with munitions is always gonna break something i want a battleship now...

Imperial Navy escorts are 750m to 2km in length. As 40k is a pretty huge abstraction, it's hard to say how big they would be if you modeled them. The best way to do the scale would be to assume that weapons ranges are totally off compared to model size (they are) and model it with respect to the actual model size. This would mean that a 3 cm tall guardsman that is say 1.75 meters, would roughly translate the small escort size to 12 meters long, in real life.

The largest Battleship is 10x this large, at 7.5km long (120 meters in real life model scale). It seems likely that something this large would significantly damage a planet, especially considering 40k ships can supposedly accelerate to a sizable percentage of light speed.

Try -10x

http://www.merzo.net/

purplefood - in 40k terms a plasma reactor is just a fusion reactor, so nothing crazy special. Thats why its "likea star", as it generates energy in the same way as a star does.

The hilaruious thing about BL is that the figures are way off - when you actually calculate the weapon yield they supposedly have, along with voidshield power, it turns out something ~0.12% the size of the planet earth can generate more energy than our sun, despite using exactly the same process....not even M-AM conversion, plain old fusion!

Wow someone should make a game board of a ship.

It sounds like they have enough room to have battles on them

They do, what do you think terminator armour was made for!

Have a read of the soulhunter novel, good example of a ship board battle there. In addition when Guard are moving between planets you have decks hosting full scale battle prep with tanks, artillery etc.

Yak9UT wrote:Wow someone should make a game board of a ship.

It sounds like they have enough room to have battles on them

There's afew example of seriously massive ship boarding actions one is in the Space Wolf codex where a Space Wolf fllet is attaked by an Ork Space Hulk and some other ships the space battle ends when the wolf lord rams his strike cruiser into the Space Hulk and begins a 6 month boarding action.

Also someone did make a board of an Ork space cannon where the people fight on the outside of it, can't remember where i saw it though

Yak9UT wrote:Wow someone should make a game board of a ship.

It sounds like they have enough room to have battles on them

They had one at my local GW it was insane. I had to help bring it in and assemble it, it was so big. It was the dreadclaw launch bay of a chaos criuser that they used at gamesday UK.

I know White Dwarf had rules for spacehulk combats, but they sucked; Airless vacuum put all the saves up by one including invulnerable saves, so a Marine had a 4+ save, and Ork had no save etc... Also the Low Gravity rules meant that fething up a terrain test, except for Jumppacks, resulted in models being removed because they drifted off... not hard to see why it was ignored.

nosferatu1001 wrote:purplefood - in 40k terms a plasma reactor is just a fusion reactor, so nothing crazy special. Thats why its "likea star", as it generates energy in the same way as a star does. The hilaruious thing about BL is that the figures are way off -

40k Plasma reactors are not 'plain old fusion', the background never says that they're purely fusion reactors, and (as you wrote) they put out way more power than even perfectly efficient fusion reactors could. It's a little silly to declare 'plasma reactors are fusion' on your own then complain that the background has bad numbers because plasma reactors don't match fusion numbers; the better conclusion is that since the numbers don't match simple fusion, plasma reactors aren't simple fusion.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Yak9UT wrote:I'm also wondering if they were to ever collide with a planet would they do some serious damage due to thier size.

The whole ship wouldn't do much to the planet just crashing from orbit, they're not that big - you'd have a local disaster, but nothing planetwide. If the ship was moving at a high fraction of C, then it would do a lot of damage. And of course, larger 40k ships are designed for exterminatus, where they seek to wipe out all life (or in some cases all of the surface) of a planet deemed to dangerous to leave alone.

BearersOfSalvation wrote:

nosferatu1001 wrote:purplefood - in 40k terms a plasma reactor is just a fusion reactor, so nothing crazy special. Thats why its "likea star", as it generates energy in the same way as a star does. The hilaruious thing about BL is that the figures are way off -

40k Plasma reactors are not 'plain old fusion', the background never says that they're purely fusion reactors, and (as you wrote) they put out way more power than even perfectly efficient fusion reactors could. It's a little silly to declare 'plasma reactors are fusion' on your own then complain that the background has bad numbers because plasma reactors don't match fusion numbers; the better conclusion is that since the numbers don't match simple fusion, plasma reactors aren't simple fusion.

Fusion reactors and plasma reactors are the same thing. In order to create a stable fusion reaction you need plasma. Thats how the sun works and thats how fusion reactors work today on Earth.

Actually, a meteor the size of a large house can make a crater 1/2mile wide and cause massive damage.

40k Plasma reactors are confirmed to be Fusion reactors and the 2 are used interchangable in the fluff. Plasma just sounds cooler.



Impierial ship sizes

Battleships(including Emperor, Armageddon, and Oberon classes): can be up to 8 kilometres from prow to stern and displace billions of tons. Crew of 25,000 to 3,000,000.

Cruisers: typically 1/2-2/3 the size of a Battleship with Grand cruisers being 3/4 the size of a battleship.

Escort ships: not more than 1.5 kilometres in length, with destroyers generally being only 750 metres to 2 kilometres from prow to stern.



so the largest Impierial ships are about 5 miles in length(4.98 to be more precise)

Eyclonus wrote:I know White Dwarf had rules for spacehulk combats, but they sucked; Airless vacuum put all the saves up by one including invulnerable saves, so a Marine had a 4+ save, and Ork had no save etc... Also the Low Gravity rules meant that fething up a terrain test, except for Jumppacks, resulted in models being removed because they drifted off... not hard to see why it was ignored.

But there was a nice battlereport Templars + Evesor vs. Orks.

And I still would like to see Space Hulk, after Apocalypse, City Fight and Planetfall. Imagine the cool boards you could build.

Read the Grey Knights novel by Ben Counter. It has a small passage where...

Valkyrie wrote:Read the Grey Knights novel by Ben Counter. It has a small passage where...

Spoiler:

It describes part of the Rubicon crashing into the a planet. It states that a relatively small strike cruiser would be the equivalent of a meteor strike. Even though only a fraction of the ship landed in a large enough piece to do damage, the impact wiped out a few regiments of Guardsmen and SoB, as well as destroying an entire Ordinatus construct

I love that bit so much it's just so awesome.

"whats that big tower over there"
"oh thats just a Battlecrusier that decided it wanted to play chicken with the planet"
"oh"

Which reminds me of a funny mistake some americans made once...

Radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10-10-95.

Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.

Canadians: Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.

Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES' ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED By THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH, I SAY AGAIN, THAT'S ONE FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTERMEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

--------

As to the destructability of a ship moving at speed, a 25 kg metal slug moving at 1.3% the speed of light impacts with a force greater than the bomb that landed on Hiroshima....

So a couple billion tons moving at a similiar rate should pretty much plow through the whole darn thing.

Ratbarf wrote:Which reminds me of a funny mistake some americans made once...
[story]

You do know that is not based on a true story, right?
http://www.snopes.com/military/lighthouse.asp

It was good for the lolz

Ratbarf wrote:As to the destructability of a ship moving at speed, a 25 kg metal slug moving at 1.3% the speed of light impacts with a force greater than the bomb that landed on Hiroshima....

So a couple billion tons moving at a similiar rate should pretty much plow through the whole darn thing.

Isn't that how the Tau railguns are supposed to work?

Even if the ship was moving at slower pace there are number of things that can affect the whole planet. The meteor behind the Meteor Killed The Dinosaurs theory was smaller then sizes of some of those ships, not to mention it lacked plasma/fusion (could it be using the fusion process with plasma instead?) reactors, so therefore almost any large Imperial ship that plays chicken with a planet is bound to cause planet-wide disaster. If the reactor is like a nuclear reactor then you get a wide area saturated with radiation which will probably sterlize a good chunk of the planet's surface and make the atmosphere fairly toxic with radioactive dust. Not to mention if its close to C in speed, the friction of the ship against the atmosphere may just cause the oxygen to burn up...

I think TV tropes wiki has a page which discusses this class of event in detail, they call it a Colony Drop...

Well it the asteroid was roughly 10KM so pretty close in size of a Imperial battleship. Thats why I thought a ship could do some serious damage to the planet and not to mention that reactor core could have a very serious outbreak of radiation.

Eyclonus wrote:

Ratbarf wrote:As to the destructability of a ship moving at speed, a 25 kg metal slug moving at 1.3% the speed of light impacts with a force greater than the bomb that landed on Hiroshima....

So a couple billion tons moving at a similiar rate should pretty much plow through the whole darn thing.

Isn't that how the Tau railguns are supposed to work?

Even if the ship was moving at slower pace there are number of things that can affect the whole planet. The meteor behind the Meteor Killed The Dinosaurs theory was smaller then sizes of some of those ships, not to mention it lacked plasma/fusion (could it be using the fusion process with plasma instead?) reactors, so therefore almost any large Imperial ship that plays chicken with a planet is bound to cause planet-wide disaster. If the reactor is like a nuclear reactor then you get a wide area saturated with radiation which will probably sterlize a good chunk of the planet's surface and make the atmosphere fairly toxic with radioactive dust. Not to mention if its close to C in speed, the friction of the ship against the atmosphere may just cause the oxygen to burn up...

I think TV tropes wiki has a page which discusses this class of event in detail, they call it a Colony Drop...

You mean apocalypse how?

Edit: Forgot they actually do have a page dedicated to colony drops