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How do Tyranid bio-ships transport the mass from the planet surface, back to the Bio ship? Giant feeder tendrils? Teleportation? Or do small creatures (Ripper swarms) consume and "store" the biomass, and those creatures are then carried onto the ship via flyers?

Also, on particularly large planets, how could the Tyranids possibly fly back up to the Bio-ships? Wouldn't they be unable to attain the escape velocity required to leave the atmosphere?

spore chimneys. The rippers eat everything and put it in a pool of acid slop with a chimney that dissolves everything and creates spore clouds of biomass that go up to the mothership. When the rippers are done, they throw themselves into the pools and dissolve into more biomass

In other cases, a primary hive ship organism will land on the planet, where the capillary tubes will suck all the biomass into the ship before taking off again.

Spore Chimmneys. Basically giant pumps that take the biomass up to the hive ships. Like a straw.

Everything is reduced to a liquid and pumped up to the ships.

Even the atmosphere is sucked away.

I can imagine the bioship landing and feeding, but spore clouds? Shot all the way up into space? Is that even possible? Besides, won't some of the bio-gunk fall back onto the planet or something? It'd take forever to do it that way. They can't do it in a 100 days surely...

Not clouds.

Giant tubes that pump the biomass into orbit to be collected. Basically a giant straw from the hive ship that goes down to the planet and suck up pools of biomass.


And yes, they could do that in a matter of a 100 days. The ships are upwards of a dozen kilometers long, and a hive fleet will have many of them. Depends on the specific fleet. If its just a couple ships it would probably take many months or even a year or two.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Capillary_Tower#.UT_-8Bymhq8

It makes for an interesting factoid that regardless of victory, defeat, death, or survival on a planet, any Tyranid who makes planetfall will die in the end via being broken down in a reclamation pool.