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Im writing a story about a band of Chaos space marines that is about five hundred to seven hundred strong that all are all housed within one mighty ship that has enough room for them and several thousand cultists. I also want to have large chunks of the ship to have fallen to disrepair and become unmapped and dangerous and basically give the image that the ship is barely holding together. I prefer the ship to be pre-heresy but i don't know of any classes of ships that can hold that amount of Astartes and cultists and still have enough room for more than half the ship to fall to disrepair without impacting on there living quarters,vast meeting areas,arenas and what ever else i want to throw into the mix.

So ye anybody know of any massive pre-heresy ships that fits the bill?

Standard ships in the Rogue Trader 40k Roleplaying Game carry 20,000-30,000 or more crew, and most of these ships are old. See the basic Rogue Trader rulebook for details.

burnaboy wrote:
Im writing a story about a band of Chaos space marines that is about five hundred to seven hundred strong that all are all housed within one mighty ship that has enough room for them and several thousand cultists. I also want to have large chunks of the ship to have fallen to disrepair and become unmapped and dangerous and basically give the image that the ship is barely holding together. I prefer the ship to be pre-heresy but i don't know of any classes of ships that can hold that amount of Astartes and cultists and still have enough room for more than half the ship to fall to disrepair without impacting on there living quarters,vast meeting areas,arenas and what ever else i want to throw into the mix.

So ye anybody know of any massive pre-heresy ships that fits the bill?

It felt like there was more than enough room for that many passengers in Sanguinius' flagship in Fear To Tread. No hard numbers, and I doubt you want to use a primarch's old flagship as your base, but there's another reference for something massive.

A battleship would have sufficient space for that many marines, especially given that the full crew complement would be in the tens of thousands. During the Great Crusade there was much less standardization of fleets, so the legions used all kinds of ships, including the same battleships and cruisers as the Imperial Navy. I think an old Despoiler-class battleship would be fitting, as it has the capacity to launch a lot of attack craft. That would be perfect for boarding actions or planetary assaults.

How critical are those numbers to the actual story? Will the core of the story change if the numbers drop from thousands, to hundreds? Or dozens? Having a massive ship is one thing, but having a crew live on it for so long that it falls into disrepair of that extent seems... unlikely. If the ship had decayed to that extent, it would likely become unlivable. And it would also take a really long time, during which the crew would need to be repopulated.

You could set the story on a cruiser that has become part of a space hulk?

Is ship combat essential? You could say that the ship in question is a captured mass conveyor. Plenty of room in there, battle damage, but not really a warship.

This has been stated to be "one of" the largest ships the Imperium produces

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Universe_Class_Mass_Conveyor#.UHcHQsXA_X4

Mm not sure atm Kaldor its still an idea forming. And thanks Harriticus that ship is exactly what i need

 Harriticus wrote:
This has been stated to be "one of" the largest ships the Imperium produces

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Universe_Class_Mass_Conveyor#.UHcHQsXA_X4

Holy crap. That's a big fething ship.

Star ship scales ay?

There's a great site you have to see

http://www.merzo.net/

Click on the -10x tab for some 40k ships. The Battlestar Galactica can fit on the front eagle of an Imperium battleship.

No Universe Mass Conveyer yet but I bet they'd include it if someone made a to scale drawing.

Eh, 40K ships are absurdly large. You can easily fit that amount of people to the smallest destroyers, especially if you go by ship sizes from the RPG (personally I'd roughly halve the length figures given there. Seems to better match the original design scale of Battlefeet Gothic ships.)

Oh, and Merzo originally just made up the sizes of Gothic ships, the scale was never given in that game. And then the RPG makers just seemed to go with the figures from that site.

 Crimson wrote:
Eh, 40K ships are absurdly large. You can easily fit that amount of people to the smallest destroyers, especially if you go by ship sizes from the RPG (personally I'd roughly halve the length figures given there. Seems to better match the original design scale of Battlefeet Gothic ships.)

Oh, and Merzo originally just made up the sizes of Gothic ships, the scale was never given in that game. And then the RPG makers just seemed to go with the figures from that site.

Star Wars still beats out 40k with the Super Star Destroyers though. The Death Star was also far larger then any artificial craft in 40k, besides World Engines anyway.

 Harriticus wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Eh, 40K ships are absurdly large. You can easily fit that amount of people to the smallest destroyers, especially if you go by ship sizes from the RPG (personally I'd roughly halve the length figures given there. Seems to better match the original design scale of Battlefeet Gothic ships.)

Oh, and Merzo originally just made up the sizes of Gothic ships, the scale was never given in that game. And then the RPG makers just seemed to go with the figures from that site.

Star Wars still beats out 40k with the Super Star Destroyers though. The Death Star was also far larger then any artificial craft in 40k, besides World Engines anyway.

I have vague recollection that super star destroye'rs size got doubled at some point too.

In any case, it kinda bugs me how writers keep throving at these huge numbers without really stopping to think what they would actually mean. It is most apparent in the space marine ships. For example a strike cruiser carries a single company of marines. It is several kilometres long and it carries hundred dudes! Really? You could probably fit every space marine in existence into one of those ships.

Yeah, SM ship sizes don't make much sense. A single Frigate could hold the entire Chapter if they wanted.

The argument could be made though that these ships need to also be able to hold their own in combat and orbital bombardment, they need to be large enough to carry sufficient void shields and weaponry. In 40k void combat size matters, so if a Strike Cruiser is gonna take on a Chaos Cruiser it's gonna need to be of comparable size.

You could give them a Space Hulk if you wanted to; mashed-together conglomerations of asteroids and wrecked starships tend to be inhabited by Orks or Tyranids, but I could see a Chaos cult operating from one. It'd be a little strange in terms of the sheer scale we're talking, though, Space Hulks are absurdly large.

Also, a note on scale: starships in 40k are big. The most detailed figures I've seen quoted place a random throwaway frigate at about the size of a Star Destroyer, cruisers are larger than most anything you'll regularly encounter in sci-fi settings, battlecruisers are about the size of a Super Star Destroyer, and battleships are even larger. Plain, ordinary, regular Emperor-class battleships from the present day are perfectly capable of holding a thousand Chaos Marines and a few thousand Cultists and leaving space for a dozen times that number.

 AnomanderRake wrote:


Also, a note on scale: starships in 40k are big. The most detailed figures I've seen quoted place a random throwaway frigate at about the size of a Star Destroyer, cruisers are larger than most anything you'll regularly encounter in sci-fi settings, battlecruisers are about the size of a Super Star Destroyer, and battleships are even larger. Plain, ordinary, regular Emperor-class battleships from the present day are perfectly capable of holding a thousand Chaos Marines and a few thousand Cultists and leaving space for a dozen times that number.

No. You can easily fit all that in a Cobra-class destroyer, the smallest ship in BFG.

Just an Escort would be enough room for a couple hundred Marines and a few thousand cultists.

If you want more room then a Cruiser will fit the bill.


Ships in 40k are frakkin HUGE.

 Harriticus wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Eh, 40K ships are absurdly large. You can easily fit that amount of people to the smallest destroyers, especially if you go by ship sizes from the RPG (personally I'd roughly halve the length figures given there. Seems to better match the original design scale of Battlefeet Gothic ships.)

Oh, and Merzo originally just made up the sizes of Gothic ships, the scale was never given in that game. And then the RPG makers just seemed to go with the figures from that site.

Star Wars still beats out 40k with the Super Star Destroyers though. The Death Star was also far larger then any artificial craft in 40k, besides World Engines anyway.

The Super Star Destroyer isn't in that picture. It is bigger then the Retribution.

But given the rarity of SSDs compared to ships the size of Retribution's I'd say 40k easily wins.

In canon the SDF-1's main gun destroys EVERYTHING in its path for 12,000 miles.

Size matters not.

Whats an SDF-1?

 Grey Templar wrote:
Whats an SDF-1?

The white and blue ship just above the Star Wars Star Destroyer, it's the main ship in the Macross/Robotech franchise.

Or more precisely



(clears throat) It's a mile-long star ship with a gun that destroys everything in its path for 12,000 miles and has thousands of rail guns, missile launchers and lasers as back up weapons and also turns into a mile-high robot that has aircraft carriers for arms and launches F-14s which also turn into robots, IN SPACE, and armies of massive war robots that Battletech totally stole and a force field which if its ever breached overloads and explodes like a nuke and did I mention it has a whole city in its belly, cause it does and it fights a fleet of several MILLION enemy ships which are crewed by 60' tall cloned warriors and it beats them all though it did have help from a Chinese pop singer.



If it had a transporter and a holodeck it would be the most awesome ship EVAH.

A Space Hulk would. In the Soul Drinkers novels they commandeer a Space Hulk with working Warp Engines and Geller fields from multiple ships that are part of the Hulk.

A Space Hulk could easily carry almost any size warband you could imagine.

well as others have said, any Imperium ship could easily carry that many. The smallest escorts could hold that number with ease.

I think I inadvertently touched off a who's-biggest-athon. I just meant that that Universe Class Transport was fething huge in comparison to other 40K ships.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
I think I inadvertently touched off a who's-biggest-athon. I just meant that that Universe Class Transport was fething huge in comparison to other 40K ships.

I think it was said some battleships reached that size. The Ork battleship "the world breka" is 11 km long, currently the only Battleship given in Roguetrader if i recall, which is where the Universe comes from.. The Universe is a large ship, but not something you really want to take into battle without massive, massive refits.

I thought a normal battleship was like 5km long or something like that?

Not in Rogue Trader, A Luna cruiser is 5 Km long, a Grand cruiser 7.3 to 7.5 km. THe one Battleship we have size on is the Ork battleship at 11 km. Using RT scale, which the Universe does use as it comes from the same book as the Grad cruisers and you will be having battleships of roughly that size.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Whats an SDF-1?

The white and blue ship just above the Star Wars Star Destroyer, it's the main ship in the Macross/Robotech franchise.

Or more precisely



(clears throat) It's a mile-long star ship with a gun that destroys everything in its path for 12,000 miles and has thousands of rail guns, missile launchers and lasers as back up weapons and also turns into a mile-high robot that has aircraft carriers for arms and launches F-14s which also turn into robots, IN SPACE, and armies of massive war robots that Battletech totally stole and a force field which if its ever breached overloads and explodes like a nuke and did I mention it has a whole city in its belly, cause it does and it fights a fleet of several MILLION enemy ships which are crewed by 60' tall cloned warriors and it beats them all though it did have help from a Chinese pop singer.



If it had a transporter and a holodeck it would be the most awesome ship EVAH.

Given that 40k ships engage each other at ranges of thousands of kilometers I would say that ship is no threat at all.

40k ship weapon batteries are an assortment of energy weapons and railguns(railguns which fire slugs the size of small houses)

Well going off Rogue Trader, something say Like a Mars macro cannon has a firm range of 200'000 Km, it could shoot up to 400'000km. and that is a short ranged light end weapon.

Some weapons can more then double that and something like say a Nova cannon, can have a range from 1'800'000 km to 3'000'000 km

So yeah 12'000 mile range is zero threat to a 40k ship, even the smallest or slowest As they would have to be within Boarding range for you to even try and hit them.something you do not want.