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What would you consider to be a(n Imperial) Capital Ship? Exclusively Battle Ships? Grand Cruisers, as well? Battle Cruisers?

 dusara217 wrote:
What would you consider to be a(n Imperial) Capital Ship? Exclusively Battle Ships? Grand Cruisers, as well? Battle Cruisers?

Cruiser or larger.

Anything less is an escort of various sizes.

The only ships I'm not sure about are light cruisers or strike cruisers as they really straddle the line between the two types. That said, the complexity and expense of a strike cruiser would likely make it closer to a full capital ship.

For batlefleet gothic, everything that has more than 1 hitpoint is considered a capital ship.

And the general rule of thumb is one hit point per mile of hull length

 master of ordinance wrote:
And the general rule of thumb is one hit point per mile of hull length

Actually it is 2 hit points per km. A Retribution class battleship, one of the more common battleship types within the Imperium, has 12 hit points, and is listed in the main BFG rulebook is explicitly given to be 6 km long as shown below:

Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness...Six kilometres from stern to prow...

p. 31, Dark Disciple

Iracundus wrote:

 master of ordinance wrote:
And the general rule of thumb is one hit point per mile of hull length

Actually it is 2 hit points per km. A Retribution class battleship, one of the more common battleship types within the Imperium, has 12 hit points, and is listed in the main BFG rulebook is explicitly given to be 6 km long as shown below:

Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness...Six kilometres from stern to prow...

p. 31, Dark Disciple

Ship sizes in 40k seem to vary a lot depending on the source. I believe the HH book about the battle for Calth listed many ships in the 15-20km range.

Personally, I go with escorts being < 2km , battle ships > 6km and cruisers in between.

 minigun762 wrote:

Iracundus wrote:

 master of ordinance wrote:
And the general rule of thumb is one hit point per mile of hull length

Actually it is 2 hit points per km. A Retribution class battleship, one of the more common battleship types within the Imperium, has 12 hit points, and is listed in the main BFG rulebook is explicitly given to be 6 km long as shown below:

Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness...Six kilometres from stern to prow...

p. 31, Dark Disciple

Ship sizes in 40k seem to vary a lot depending on the source. I believe the HH book about the battle for Calth listed many ships in the 15-20km range.

Personally, I go with escorts being < 2km , battle ships > 6km and cruisers in between.

From when Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, was posting to the BFG mailing list:

http://www.wolfedengames.com/battlefleetgothic/crew.htm

The issue with the wildly inflated ship sizes is that it is inconsistent with crew sizes given elsewhere such as that for a Dictator class cruiser:

Now, six years later, he was one of the most senior non-commissioned officers amongst a crew of almost thirteen thousand...
p. 62, Shadow Point, by Gordon Rennie

or that of an Avenger class grand cruiser, which again is more in keeping with Andy Chambers' scale:

Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches...
p. 95-96, Soul Hunter

Having inflated ship sizes also plays havoc with the logic of troop transport ships, which are given in Imperial Armour 3 for example as transporting approximately a regiment each. Having inflated crew sizes means transports have much larger crews than their actual cargo of IG troops, which violates the whole principle of a troop transport ship in the first place if the crew outnumber the cargo.

Really this is all the result of those people that demand that just because it is 40K that it must therefore be stupidly big, even though this actually breaks from the previous consistency established in BFG, and multiple BL novels. It is analogous and little different from that segment of people that demand that Titans have their heads in the clouds and be the size of mountain ranges.