Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

123ply wrote:
Hive fleey behemoth did not get destroyed. That was retconned. It was merley a scout tendril or whatever.

Most of Hive Fleet Behemoth was destroyed. A small amount survived and has been targeting less protected worlds (and so getting a bit stronger). It was very much crippled.

Ratius wrote:Now taking into account linguistics thats anywhere from 200,000 to 999,999 ships. Good luck blowing up nearly 1 million hive ships if the extreme end is taken.

Eh, the Tyranids have always massively outnumbered their enemies. Ship to ship they seem quite weak in space. While clearly their forces were dominating the Blood Angels and their successors they were facing only a small faction of Imperial might. That said they were also described as sending a trillion trillion bodies against the Blood Angels which is quite a lot.

BobtheInquisitor wrote:Battle fleet sizes vary dramatically. Depending on which source you use, fleets could either be in the hundreds or thousands on up to the millions or tens of millions. Most of the rule books tend toward the minimalist numbers while extracts from BL books tend to support higher numbers.

The small segment on the Cacodominus (alien-cyborg which Psychically dominated 1300 systems) has consistently said (in rulebooks) that upon it's death it temporarily blocked out the Astronomicon and caused millions upon millions of ships to be lost in the Warp. They wouldn't all be warships though.

Whenever GW in a Codex talks of hive fleets and enormous ship numbers, they don't usually differentiate between the BFG categories of actual hive ship (i.e. a Synapse creature equivalent) and the expendable non-Synapse ships. Many of the ships are the BFG equivalent of gaunts (i.e. numerous, weak, and expendable). Tyranids also use ablative screens of smaller bio-organisms flying around the bigger ships as their shield equivalents.

SomeRandomEvilGuy wrote:

123ply wrote:
Hive fleey behemoth did not get destroyed. That was retconned. It was merley a scout tendril or whatever.

Most of Hive Fleet Behemoth was destroyed. A small amount survived and has been targeting less protected worlds (and so getting a bit stronger). It was very much crippled.

Ratius wrote:Now taking into account linguistics thats anywhere from 200,000 to 999,999 ships. Good luck blowing up nearly 1 million hive ships if the extreme end is taken.

Eh, the Tyranids have always massively outnumbered their enemies. Ship to ship they seem quite weak in space. While clearly their forces were dominating the Blood Angels and their successors they were facing only a small faction of Imperial might. That said they were also described as sending a trillion trillion bodies against the Blood Angels which is quite a lot.

BobtheInquisitor wrote:Battle fleet sizes vary dramatically. Depending on which source you use, fleets could either be in the hundreds or thousands on up to the millions or tens of millions. Most of the rule books tend toward the minimalist numbers while extracts from BL books tend to support higher numbers.

The small segment on the Cacodominus (alien-cyborg which Psychically dominated 1300 systems) has consistently said (in rulebooks) that upon it's death it temporarily blocked out the Astronomicon and caused millions upon millions of ships to be lost in the Warp. They wouldn't all be warships though.

When was the Cacodominus introduced? Sounds cool. Also, did the Blood Angels fight the septillion Tyranids on one world?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

When was the Cacodominus introduced? Sounds cool. Also, did the Blood Angels fight the septillion Tyranids on one world?

6th Edition I think. It's just a part of the history section and isn't elaborated on but it does suggest Games Workshop is thinking bigger.

I think it might have been referring to the tendril sent towards Baal in it's entirety.

A Battlefleet will be made up of 50-75 ships. Those cover a single sector.

I think there is roughly 20-30 sectors in Segmentum Solar. So that's maybe a 1000-1500 warships that are scattered throughout the Segmentum.

The Sol System has its own Battlefleet. At the small end, that would be 50 ships, though I'd imagine with it being Sol, it would probably be in the couple hundred range.

Then you've got orbital defences, which are probably just bonkers, and again I'd imagine would be on the scale to repel a fleet numbering in the hundreds if not thousands.

During the Heresy, the Alpha Legion attacked just Pluto with a fleet of 200 warships, and well... didn't win. Horus had to come into system with thousands of ships to bring the fight to earth, and that was with Mar's kind of being out of the picture due to the shenanigans going on there.

If a Tyranid fleet with 500,000 warships hit the Sol system at once, I doubt the defences would end up standing, short of the Emperor standing up from the Throne, and psychically hulking out, and killing the hive mind.

Granted, I doubt Leviathan could bring it's full weight to bear on a single star system like that though.

I think Leviathan certainly could focus its full attention on a single system ;indeed if the Emperor is the key goal for the Tyranids I could easily see them surging toward the target with a massed body of ships.

The real trick isn't the Hive striking; its the Hive striking alone. A concentration of armies like that would draw the Ork Horde; it would draw out Chaos; Eldar, Dark Eldar. Heck about the only two factions that might not arise are Necrons and Tau.

Tau are too far off to even attempt a strike whilst Necrons could go either way.


That said a vast battle of that nature could cripple multiple "big" factions; leaving room for groups like Tau to really rise up and take advantage of everyone else being weakened.

 djones520 wrote:
A Battlefleet will be made up of 50-75 ships. Those cover a single sector.

I think there is roughly 20-30 sectors in Segmentum Solar. So that's maybe a 1000-1500 warships that are scattered throughout the Segmentum.

The Sol System has its own Battlefleet. At the small end, that would be 50 ships, though I'd imagine with it being Sol, it would probably be in the couple hundred range.

Then you've got orbital defences, which are probably just bonkers, and again I'd imagine would be on the scale to repel a fleet numbering in the hundreds if not thousands.

During the Heresy, the Alpha Legion attacked just Pluto with a fleet of 200 warships, and well... didn't win. Horus had to come into system with thousands of ships to bring the fight to earth, and that was with Mar's kind of being out of the picture due to the shenanigans going on there.

If a Tyranid fleet with 500,000 warships hit the Sol system at once, I doubt the defences would end up standing, short of the Emperor standing up from the Throne, and psychically hulking out, and killing the hive mind.

Granted, I doubt Leviathan could bring it's full weight to bear on a single star system like that though.

Only 500,000 Hive Ships when attacking Sol System? I think you underestimated the Nids numbers. When attacking on Cryptus System and Baal, the fluff said Nids threw over a million of Hive Ships at the defender, and that is just "one" of a major tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan. I bet when converging on Sol System, the Nids ship number would be 50 million in minimum. Tyrainds are very overpowered.

The number of sectors in a Segmentum is never said anywhere in any GW source. However 20-30 is likely an underestimate.

The BFG rulebook says the average sector comprises a cube of space 200 light years a side. While that may sound vast, compare that to how much space is taken up by one Segmentum, relative to the total size of the galaxy (diameter is about 100,000 light years across). While there are swathes of wilderness space between Imperial sectors, Segmentum Solar is supposedly one of, if not the most densely populated area of the Imperium.

If Earth couldn't be defended from Horus, I very much doubt it could stop a Hive Fleet.

On Tyranid intergalactic travel time: I think it is implied in a Horus Heresy book (don't know which one), that the incidence which first drew the Hive Mind's attention to the Milky Way was a character activating an ancient alien beacon/super weapon during a battle between loyalists and rebels. This would mean that the Hive fleets have been travelling to get here since the Horus Heresy, app. 10,000 years.

 Esmer wrote:
On Tyranid intergalactic travel time: I think it is implied in a Horus Heresy book (don't know which one), that the incidence which first drew the Hive Mind's attention to the Milky Way was a character activating an ancient alien beacon/super weapon during a battle between loyalists and rebels. This would mean that the Hive fleets have been travelling to get here since the Horus Heresy, app. 10,000 years.

Yep it was the Pharos beacon if I remember its name properly.

I thought what happened is that they blew it up and made a much bigger psychic signal with that. So if they hadn't Tyranids wouldn't be around.