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 Eetion wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
What the different people eat Eetion is another subject entirely.

Again the size-differences can be differences in eras, just like today. The Spruance-destroyers are larger than even heavy cruisers of WWII. Buddha had a great point there.

Not so. Its quite an apt point. No point having a pen for Grox when the only people who will eat them can manage prefectly well with a well stocked freezer. They don't have to feed everyone steaks, just a select few.

I'm willing to give up at my belief in Grox-pens, but not food-growing on ships. Ask any scientist. Just ask any and watch the Universe-series. I don't mean to be rude but it's suicidal to venture into it without any food-produce. of course it must be changed from time to time due to the warp. Same with the people there, too much time exposed to the warp means warped people.

 Beaviz81 wrote:

 Eetion wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
What the different people eat Eetion is another subject entirely.

Again the size-differences can be differences in eras, just like today. The Spruance-destroyers are larger than even heavy cruisers of WWII. Buddha had a great point there.

Not so. Its quite an apt point. No point having a pen for Grox when the only people who will eat them can manage prefectly well with a well stocked freezer. They don't have to feed everyone steaks, just a select few.

I'm willing to give up at my belief in Grox-pens, but not food-growing on ships. Ask any scientist. Just ask any and watch the Universe-series. I don't mean to be rude but it's suicidal to venture into it without any food-produce. of course it must be changed from time to time due to the warp. Same with the people there, too much time exposed to the warp means warped people.

No large scale, onboard food production has ever been mentioned in the fluff. Ships seem to stock sufficient food for several months and have to restock when that food runs out.
When the supplies run out the crews will suffer from starvation. That might be suicidial ( it realy isn't, relatively few ships get stuck in the warp for months and even a ship which disapears for centuries might have only traveled for days in warpspace ) but there are quite a few things in the imperial navy which don't make any sense.

 KingDeath wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:

 Eetion wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
What the different people eat Eetion is another subject entirely.

Again the size-differences can be differences in eras, just like today. The Spruance-destroyers are larger than even heavy cruisers of WWII. Buddha had a great point there.

Not so. Its quite an apt point. No point having a pen for Grox when the only people who will eat them can manage prefectly well with a well stocked freezer. They don't have to feed everyone steaks, just a select few.

I'm willing to give up at my belief in Grox-pens, but not food-growing on ships. Ask any scientist. Just ask any and watch the Universe-series. I don't mean to be rude but it's suicidal to venture into it without any food-produce. of course it must be changed from time to time due to the warp. Same with the people there, too much time exposed to the warp means warped people.

No large scale, onboard food production has ever been mentioned in the fluff. Ships seem to stock sufficient food for several months and have to restock when that food runs out.
When the supplies run out the crews will suffer from starvation. That might be suicidial ( it realy isn't, relatively few ships get stuck in the warp for months and even a ship which disapears for centuries might have only traveled for days in warpspace ) but there are quite a few things in the imperial navy which don't make any sense.

Nor has large starvation except when ships has been lone survivors. Telling tale for me. And Food-production onboard is booooooooooooooooring so who in their right mind would mention it? We are talking Wh40k here and not cruise40k? It's a boring logistical piece of fluff not everyone considers. And I will like to mention Nimitz is the only thing we can do to compare, and they are 90% logistics. As before I will refer to known wordly sources, use it at your leasure.

Keep in mind the Imperium has Stasis technology. They can literally freeze things in time, and in the Ravenor trilogy it is shown that it is used to store quality food and keep it from spoiling.

Plus you have the recyclers that churn out tasteless food paste from waste.

If I was a galaxy spanning dictatorship that had the bulk of its ship crews being quite literally slave labor, I wouldn't feed them anything better.

Non-slave labor wouldn't be much better off. Think MREs, but without even nominal attempts at making it taste good.


There is no need for the Imperium's Warships to grow their own food onboard. If any is grown, it will likely be the exclusive domain of officers and VIPs.

Civilian ships might grow their own, but again as a luxury, not as a viable way of feeding the crew.

 Beaviz81 wrote:
Sooner or later food onboard ships will become depleted, of course a smaller vessel is unlikely to have that, but if no food is grown, then the vessel eventually will starve to death, especially with the shaky supply-line of WH40k. And even if you have lab-grown food, recycling onboard ships is likely hugely important. Nothing can ever be wasted. Help can be many years away and the supply-ship can be sabotaged or blown up or anything else. And the IOM is advanced enough to grow much food on little space. it seems a bit odd going into interstellar travel without any way to produce food onboard.

I don't quite understand your arguement 'even if they have lab-grown food...they still need to produce food'. the time and energy and space wasted raising and culling meat is massive compared to growing microorganisms that can be easily grown and processed.

No one i saying it is rediculous that IoM ships have food production procedures, they think you idea of devoting acreas of space to grox raising and further acres upon acres to growing food for said grox (you need more area of land to grow feed for livestock to produce the same quantity of food as just growing the food in the first place.) It makes far more sence to overtock a ship with supplies, have recycling facilities and lab production areas (if the ADMech can make full humans, it stand to reason that they can vat grow synthetic protein.)

 Beaviz81 wrote:
The Spruance-destroyers are larger than even heavy cruisers of WWII.

Sorry for the off-topic, but by my maths that's wrong, a Spruance class is kind of in the middle of WW2 light cruiser size, some light cruisers were notably larger and heavy cruisers definitely were.

Certain Fleet Based Chapters I'm sure have auxiliary ships to hold supplies, allowing Strike Cruisers to rapidly deploy to combat zones while maintaining the main fleet.

Fleet based chapters also have mobile factory ships.

SerQuintus wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
The Spruance-destroyers are larger than even heavy cruisers of WWII.

Sorry for the off-topic, but by my maths that's wrong, a Spruance class is kind of in the middle of WW2 light cruiser size, some light cruisers were notably larger and heavy cruisers definitely were.

Oh sorry, I meant Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. I read it a long time ago. The Arleigh Burke is heavier than most cruisers before it.

Except the IN size differences arn't the difference between what is called a Cruiser and what isn't.

Its size differences between ships of supposedly the same class.

Two Retribution class Battlecruisers should be identicle.


The issue here would be more comperable to two Nimitz class Supercarriers having 2 vastly different lengths and carrying capacities. Practically 2 different ships.

Add age to the factor Grey Templar and it makes sense. A destroyer today is larger than a cruiser of yesterday. The same warping can happen in the IOM.

Again, the Cruisers of WW2 are NOT the same class as the ones we have today.

The Imperium is making the same classes of Ships they were making 5 thousand years ago. The same schematics. They should be the same size.

So no, the age argument is not valid.


That would be like manufacturing a Nimitz Class Supercarrier in the year 2150 that displaces another 10,000 tons, can carry 12 more planes, has a Railgun battery, and a submarine bay. While claiming its the same as the USS Ronald Reagen, if for whatever reason the Reagen was still in service in 2150 and had undergone zero modifications.

Well the Nimitz-class carrier has slowly grown in size, and going by that logic and 10k. years then the ships as they evolve can indeed grow in since to the mentioned proportions. And it can be explained with technological decay. The IOM need more space to achieve the same effect. And Ronald Reagan is probably in service in 2050, upgrades is now the norm before new ship-types.

 Beaviz81 wrote:

SerQuintus wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
The Spruance-destroyers are larger than even heavy cruisers of WWII.

Sorry for the off-topic, but by my maths that's wrong, a Spruance class is kind of in the middle of WW2 light cruiser size, some light cruisers were notably larger and heavy cruisers definitely were.

Oh sorry, I meant Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. I read it a long time ago. The Arleigh Burke is heavier than most cruisers before it.

'Fraid not, the Arleigh Burke isn't much bigger than the Spruance, they are marginally or so bigger (tho shorter) than the state of the art modern Ticonderoga class cruiser, but the Ticonderoga was designed as a destroyer and labelled as a cruiser at the last minute for PR purposes.

Modern destroyers aren't the size of WW2 light cruisers because destroyers got bigger, rather the advent of airpower, torpedoes and ship-to-ship missiles resulted in light cruisers losing their traditional armament and becoming destroyers - whilst the larger heavy cruisers, battle cruisers and battleships became all but extinct.(Arleigh Burke, Spruance and Ticonderoga are all 500'-570' long, WW2 US Alaska class cruiser was 800')

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Imperium is making the same classes of Ships they were making 5 thousand years ago. The same schematics. They should be the same size.

So no, the age argument is not valid.

While this is true, older ships of the same class tend to be larger due to additions, older ships in imperial fleets tend to get massive cathedrals put on them and other extras.