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40k void combat is indeed drastically different from most Sci-Fi, it's a slow, monotonous, lumbering thing similar to 17th century naval warfare. The ships engage in broadsides over thousands of km and small/swift fighters are very ineffective (unlike Star Wars). Plus the weapons are gigantic, Battleship Torpedoes are the size of skyscrapers.

Fighters and Bombers arn't ineffective. They feature quite heavily actually.

Of course they are large compared to other Sci-fi fighters and bombers.

And like everything else in 40k, there are thousands of them in waves launched from hanger bays that could fit the Starship Enterprise with room to spare.

 Harriticus wrote:
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.

I always figured that any given strike cruiser carries all the gear that the Marines aboard could want. So, a few dozen Predators of each type, Landraiders of each type, Thunderhawks, Thunderhawk Transporters, Storm Ravens, Storm Talons, Dreadnoughts, Drop Pods, etc as well as the armouries necessary to keep them all in fighting order, chapels, training rooms, food and water recycling facilities, and crew quarters

Re: ranges: Don't forget, any projectile based weapon basically has unlimited range in space.

while projectiles might keep going forever, range is far from unlimited. You need to be able to predict where the thing you are shooting at will be when the shell arrives.

what this means is you can shoot at a planet and wait the six weeks it takes the sell to arrive an folks on the ground can do little about it, but unless you shoot at a moving target from close range, it has all the time it needs to simply move.

which is why projectile weapons have ranges, past the range there is no hope of the target still being where it was when you fired.

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
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.

There always seems to be this strange competition of whose strarships are bigger between the fans of different scifi franchises, and I think makers of the RPG got a bit carried away with that.
I prefer my 40K ships slightly smaller, so that at least the smallest ships can be a size you can actually somewhat conceive.

I think this chart is pretty good and reflects quite well the sizes assumed by the BFG community before the RPG was published.

 Crimson wrote:

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
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.

There always seems to be this strange competition of whose strarships are bigger between the fans of different scifi franchises, and I think makers of the RPG got a bit carried away with that.

I do not really care myself, I never played BFG and often find the lack of a scale one of GW many canon issues. However the Universe is out of RT, so it is not in the same scale as stuff like you just posted.

There is a crew scale given for BFG. From Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, to the BFG list:

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

My two pennyworth on crew sizes was around 1500-2000 per damage point for Imperial and Chaos capital ships (adjust down a bit for Eldar and up a bit for Orks), but only around 2-500 total for escorts. Space Marine ships, as had been mooted, I would imagine to benefit from a lot of automated systems and wired in servitors to reduce their crew requirements to a minimum and increase their state of readiness in comparison with Navy ships. I would imagine that most Imperial and Chaos capital ships could find transport capacity for troops equal to about 1/3 to 1/2 their crew compliment. Tanks, artillery, Titans etc would need specialist transports to carry in any significant numbers.

And those are sadly not official. They most likely should have been, but from what i dug up people have been fighting over ship scale for ages. GW should have put an official scale in.

I'd pay $50-$75 for a book detailing 40k stuff's specs from an unbiased viewpoint. Like there are for Star Wars and other sci-fi universes.

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
And those are sadly not official. They most likely should have been, but from what i dug up people have been fighting over ship scale for ages. GW should have put an official scale in.

It is backed up and consistent with a variety of other GW related publications.

For a Retribution class battleship:

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

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

In the more recent novel Soul Hunter for a grand cruiser:

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

The 40K RPGs, for all their atmospheric background, do not have a good record when it comes to numbers. One only need look at the Calixis Sector's populations for planets. Their supposedly teeming crowded sector capital planet doesn't even meet the minimum population definitions of a hive world according to the 3rd edition 40K rulebook, and is far below that of a "typical" hive world as given in the 5th edition rulebook. Essentially the RPG's when it comes to numbers, have a history of being unreliable.

Basically the crew and ship sizes were stupidly inflated for no real reason, which creates continuity issues when it comes to interactions with other racial ships (particularly low crew size ones such as the Eldar). It is equivalent to suddenly one day somebody writing that bolters weigh a literal ton and shoot shots that can blow up whole cities, and Titans squashing mountain ranges with their foot steps. It means people didn't do their research and are being hyperbolic.

Given how Marines Operate, might also explain the differential between its size and its carrying capacity. They would, at least some of the time, spend extended periods of time away from their Chapter base, and would, by neccesity, have to carry equipment and facilities to repair and rearm their marines, space for company vehicles and vehicle maintainence bays, medical bays, plus all the cargo holds neccesary to carry spare parts, raw materials, ammunition and so on, not to mention be a void capable ship, with all the gubbins that requires, macro cannons, torpedo launchers, ammunition bays for said cannons and launchers, boarding craft, thunderhawks and shuttles and drop pods.

So I think it's based ona mix of neccesity and chapter preference, and while strike cruisers could carry more, its also a matter of tactical flexibility.

The primarch's battlebarges would have been the largest void ships. The Vengefull Spirit, was said to have cannons the size of the cruiser that Garro was on. In Flight of the Eisenstein. We also have the Red Tear in Fear to Thread, which makes the battleships around it look tiny.

Iracundus wrote:

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
And those are sadly not official. They most likely should have been, but from what i dug up people have been fighting over ship scale for ages. GW should have put an official scale in.

It is backed up and consistent with a variety of other GW related publications.

The issues with those are they are BL, which means if you use those to "back up" unofficial stuff then you will have to admit 30km battleships and warp ships the size of guncutters are also normal as well. GW has no canon, they do not police it, they do not care, they do not make use anything published fis or makes sense. You can not use BL to back up something when Bl does not always use the same scale, hell Bl are almost whole other settings, all in who wrote what..


You can hate FFG if you want, but they do one thing that GW and BL does not. They Are consistent. Each and every book uses the same rule and same numbers as they others, they unlike GW know what the Hell canon means. Are the ships over large, maybe but are the ships always consistent in size, yes. This whole mess is not FFG's fault, they had zero to go on, they choose a scale where GW did not give a damn to.

So yes I use FFG scale as I know I can back it up and it will always be consistent with itself.



That being said..any scale puts even the smallest ship well large enough to do as the Op asks.

They on the other hand don't know what 'bolter' means...

But this is not abut right or wrong, merely about different preferences. I personally don't like some parts of FFG fluff (but I don't like some GW and BL fluff either), but I'm not claiming it is objectively bad.

However, to me FFG's 40K setting is a different thing from GW's 40K setting; it's like comic book Batman and movie Batman are two different interpretations of the same character. That's why I don't like when people quote things from RPG and assume it would directly apply to GW's version of 40K setting.

I remember a BL book where a torpedo went from 100 feet long to 100 yards long in 2 pages.

So yeah, BL ain't the place to look for tight editing.

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
And those are sadly not official. They most likely should have been, but from what i dug up people have been fighting over ship scale for ages. GW should have put an official scale in.

I agree, GW should release a background book that covers the official stats/info for ships of the 40k universe. Star Wars has released a series of these for their universe (which has many more ships in it), and they're all interesting reads for sci-fi nerds.

 Crimson wrote:

But this is not abut right or wrong, merely about different preferences. I personally don't like some parts of FFG fluff (but I don't like some GW and BL fluff either), but I'm not claiming it is objectively bad.

However, to me FFG's 40K setting is a different thing from GW's 40K setting; it's like comic book Batman and movie Batman are two different interpretations of the same character. That's why I don't like when people quote things from RPG and assume it would directly apply to GW's version of 40K setting.

I mostly agree with you, I have a huge dislike for GW handling or mis handling of what is a very cool setting. GW's 40k changes from book to book. People use the RPG line as they have solid numbers they can really back up. when asked how big is a Luna, you can pull out the RPg and give hard numbers..that stay the same across the line. Or you can dig though a few hundred books, loads of fan made and unofficial posts and come up with maybe 5 diffident sets of numbers.

when talking about ships you can A: go with the one official version we have that never changes or B: go with some official version that changes from book to book or C: Go with a version some one posted online.Of the three A is easy , B takes alot of knowledge of BL books and time to search. C takes time and you more or less have to know where to look and still it ends up kinda vague. And this is why folks use the FFG stuff when topics like this comes up.

Its easy to find, in print hard data that is always consistent.

Having FFG's inflated ship and crew sizes creates more of an issue than merely personal preference for gigantic numbers. It creates problems when it comes to interactions with other races that are not as numerous, such as Eldar or Dark Eldar ships. Those races are never described as having enormous numbers of crew, yet in terms of performance from BFG for example, we see that an undamaged Eldar cruiser fights equally well as an Imperial light cruiser in boarding actions.

Here are some numbers:

Using the upper end of Andy Chambers' scale of 2,000 per damage point gives about 16,000 per cruiser, and 12,000 per light cruiser. This is in contrast to FFG's 95,000 per cruiser and 65,000 for a light cruiser.
Using say 1,000 per Eldar damage point, would yield 6,000 Eldar per Eldar cruiser.

We also know from both Forge World and FFG (which based off FW's models) that average Corsairs are equivalent to Guardians. This means it is unreasonable to expect a low number of Eldar to outfight that many times their own numbers, if we only inflate the human crew sizes. Seriously, 6,000 against 65,000? Eldar outfighting 2x their number in humans (which includes ratings and other unskilled manual laborers) is somewhat believable, but expecting them to outfight nearly 11x their own numbers? However if we inflate Eldar numbers as well to keep pace, which would yield like 32,500 Eldar per cruiser, that is not really consistent with how the Eldar are portrayed.

As per some of the previous BL quotes have shown, the scale of BFG has actually been one of the remarkably consistent bits of information that has been maintained over many years by different novels and authors, with some outliers of other authors not doing their research. That is not different from some authors doing ridiculous things with actual 40K scale information (Goto).

 Harriticus wrote:

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
And those are sadly not official. They most likely should have been, but from what i dug up people have been fighting over ship scale for ages. GW should have put an official scale in.

I agree, GW should release a background book that covers the official stats/info for ships of the 40k universe. Star Wars has released a series of these for their universe (which has many more ships in it), and they're all interesting reads for sci-fi nerds.

I Myself would pay for such a book. This will never happen as GW would have to then accept Canon as a fact,not a word they seemingly do not understand. They refuse to use canon, so they will refuse to put out hard data. FFG put out hard data because of GW's failure to do so, for better or worse. I really do wish that BFG guy and been able to put real numbers into print.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Iracundus wrote:
Having FFG's inflated ship and crew sizes creates more of an issue than merely personal preference for gigantic numbers. It creates problems when it comes to interactions with other races that are not as numerous, such as Eldar or Dark Eldar ships. Those races are never described as having enormous numbers of crew, yet in terms of performance from BFG for example, we see that an undamaged Eldar cruiser fights equally well as an Imperial light cruiser in boarding actions.

Here are some numbers:

Using the upper end of Andy Chambers' scale of 2,000 per damage point gives about 16,000 per cruiser, and 12,000 per light cruiser. This is in contrast to FFG's 95,000 per cruiser and 65,000 for a light cruiser.
Using say 1,000 per Eldar damage point, would yield 6,000 Eldar per Eldar cruiser.

We also know from both Forge World and FFG (which based off FW's models) that average Corsairs are equivalent to Guardians. This means it is unreasonable to expect a low number of Eldar to outfight that many times their own numbers, if we only inflate the human crew sizes. Seriously, 6,000 against 65,000? Eldar outfighting 2x their number in humans (which includes ratings and other unskilled manual laborers) is somewhat believable, but expecting them to outfight nearly 11x their own numbers? However if we inflate Eldar numbers as well to keep pace, which would yield like 32,500 Eldar per cruiser, that is not really consistent with how the Eldar are portrayed.

Honestly to me it seems FFG gets what an Eldar is more then Gw does. Rt Eldar ships have tiny crews, fitting for a race that is both small in number and massively more tech advanced then the other. even if you cut the Human crew in half, the eldar crew should not go out. I myself can not understand how GW can use flesh and blood eldar as shock troops. That is more troublesome to me then any huge FFG ship crews. So that hellbore has a crew of 100 vs say a swords crew of 26k.

both numbers fit the races that use them< Eldar are dying off, small in number and use very, very advanced tech they fully understand. They also tend to use soul stones to power many stations within the ship if needed, Some ships have zero flesh and blood crew at all. Now look at the Imperium, they have almost unlimited people, most tech that do not understand and a mindset of "Don't use the holy tech...get more people to do it! We can always just replace them"

So yes the idea of Eldar crewing ships of any size with more then a hundred at most is silly and not fitting within the race, if you ask me.

However as I have written in my previous post, Eldar Corsairs are not super warriors. Those are the Aspect Warriors, not the Corsairs. Corsairs are shown to be Guardians armed with lasblasters, with some scattering of heavy weapons mixed in. Yes individually their weapons and armor are superior to IG and likely human naval crew, but it still strains suspension of disbelief to expect them to defeat 11x their number. Even halving that to 5.5x their number is a bit much to ask. The Eldar tech shown is better than human tech but not enough to explain and justify such disproportionate numbers and performance.

It is no different from being asked to believe a squad of Marines killing literally thousands of Dark Eldar (from a BL book). Based on what we know of the universe and the 40K game (which at least gives a rough scale for what troops can or cannot do), such lopsided performance is unlikely enough as to be near negligible to expect, and hence the difficulty of suspension of disbelief.

Yet the whole idea of Eldar Corsairs is that they raid and pirate, and yes, they board. They crave the sensation of conflict, victory, and the thrill of danger. They are not portrayed as satisfied merely with blowing up things with their starships, but actually engage in person to person combat. So any setup or paradigm that creates issues with Eldar or Dark Eldar boarding actions is significant.

Any of those crew sizes are way too low for the ships of the size we are talking about. They are off by several orders of magnitude.This is because these ships are so big, that the writers utterly fail to comprehend it.

The largest military ship in existence today is Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. It is huge, 333 metres long and has a crew of about six thousand. Now, let's imagine a ship that is ten times as long and roughly of the same shape. This is about the size of a cruiser in the assumed BFG scale and probably about the size of a light cruiser in FFG scale. This ship would have the volume thousand times of that of Nimitz. Such ship would have crew of millions.

And no, there is no amount of stuff hundred marines would need that it would even remotely justify carrying only that amount in a ship of that size.

Eh writers, sci-fi, gamer or otherwise often miss scaling and numbers. If you think 40k numbers are off ( and sweet gods they are) take a look at battletech sometime (although they did put more work into more or less correct crew sizes) I am ok with those super low number' if you use the idea that the ship is more or less pure automation, something the Imperuim does little of on any scale. That and the idea is the eldar are dying, they can't place thousands on a warship or any ship really that they can afford to lose. so most of the ship is ran by A.I or soul stones, which is more or less how RT seems to approach the issue.

I do agree however that someone needs to really rework number, not that it will ever happen mind you. I am way more offended by the misuse of mega tonne and weights that would make them more or less weightless then the crew size issue.

I am not sure your nimitz comparison works however, the ships do very diffident thing. A space craft with the same size of crew, would likely be many, many times larger then a sea going craft. You have many things that must go into a ship that a sea going craft will not have, life support, radiators, Larger supply vaults and crew space, extra bulk heads, and 360 type, not 2d sea vessals have.

Now look at a 40k ship at any scale. Good amounts of that mass is bulkheads, reinforcement and over all the skeleton of the ship. I for one don't buy the idea that 40k ship passive senors is a deck of guys with IR imagers, but Ymmv there.

Ships are then taken up by the war engines, which working off say FFG stuff for now that are a good chunk of a ship, then the power and plasma drives take up yet more massive amounts of space. Throw in tubing and piping, power links and such and the space you have to really use is not as much as one would think, unlike a ship made to work upon water.

While the numbers may still be low, you simply can't use all that space you think you have.

 Harriticus wrote:

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
And those are sadly not official. They most likely should have been, but from what i dug up people have been fighting over ship scale for ages. GW should have put an official scale in.

I agree, GW should release a background book that covers the official stats/info for ships of the 40k universe. Star Wars has released a series of these for their universe (which has many more ships in it), and they're all interesting reads for sci-fi nerds.

I thought the FW books had real world stats for their vehicles. Obviously they don't have the BFG ships but they do cover the tanks and titan and such.

Yes, starships might need to dedate larger percentage of their volume on structures and engines as ocean going vessels, but even if the spaceship would have crew per volume ratio only 10% of that of Nimitz, it would still have a crew of about 600 000.

I doubt it, remember that in space wieght is not an issue and there is no resistance to the ship moving forwards besides inertia.

 Crimson wrote:
Yes, starships might need to dedate larger percentage of their volume on structures and engines as ocean going vessels, but even if the spaceship would have crew per volume ratio only 10% of that of Nimitz, it would still have a crew of about 600 000.

well if you go roughly by the FFG stuff, 50% of the available space on something like a sword is warp and plama engines. Larger ships have more free space, which is mostly then taken by weapon systems. It never came up in GW stuff as far as I know, but FFG seems to have pegged whose down as massive, which makes sense if you look at the ship images, they more or less look built around large drive systems.

so working on that you have roughly say 25-30% of "space" taken up by the likes of builheads and such, then items like armor and then roughly 30-50% of whats left over as drives, before you get into thinks like power systems, life support and decks. I really yhink you are underestamiting the amount of space taken up by a space craft compared to that of a surface craft.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:


I thought the FW books had real world stats for their vehicles. Obviously they don't have the BFG ships but they do cover the tanks and titan and such.

I could not tell you, I have never read them and no not play the wargame. However, from what i have seen, I would not expect them to match up with other GW books. I am unsure if FW keeps there own books consistent with each other, it it clear GW odd does not require it.

Of course 40k ships do squeeze people in quite tightly. The only ships I've seen described as having areas with no people are large cargo freighters or Space Marine vessels. Navy ships are buzzing with activity. Crewmen are often chained to their work station.

That like most 40k stuff changes from book to book . All in who wrote it.

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
That like most 40k stuff changes from book to book . All in who wrote it.

Indeed, there are 2 visions of the Imperial Navy. One is enslaved starving crew members hauling gigantic archaic weapons and devices to the orders of Tech Priests who barely understand the very technology they command. The other is a Battlestar Galactica-esque professionalism, a clean well-run ship with well-trained happy personnel. Personally I like the former as it's a bit more unique and fitting for the 40k universe.

Whenever people try to bring up real world ship crew densities, people forget that it is not a direct translation to equivalent density in 40K.

Yes, ships are packed in certain areas tightly with crew, akin to the Age of Sail. However other areas are described as vast cathedral like spaces and for senior officers to have lavish palatial quarters (see the Gordon Rennie novels). So it is equally possible to have both kinds of environment. In fact, given the low priority the Imperium places on the average crew member, it would not be surprising that the crew quarters are cramped, because all the space has been allocated to "essential" ship functions.

Likewise as others have said, large chunks of the ship are going to not need crew. Remember, that crew fulfill a purpose. Just having volume doesn't mean crew is needed. Fuel tanks, power conduits, bulkheads, ammunition stores, etc... are all areas that don't need constant babysitting with somebody sitting there all the time. Also, 40K is a universe where machinery has been engineered to be able to be mothballed for literally centuries and work fine (see Forge World Siege of Vraks books), and where ships can have thousands of years of operational lifespan. This far exceeds modern ships. So much of the function of crew, that of maintenance, is likely not needed to the same extent. This is especially so when it comes to the Adeptus Mechanicus and its jealous hoarding of knowledge. Much of the machinery on a ship is going to be "black boxes" that nobody is going to touch outside of dry dock.

This is shown in the novel Execution Hour where a daemon manifests in an out of the way part of the ship that is deserted during combat. This means that not all parts of the ship are going to be crammed to the brim flying ghettos of humanity.

There is also the bit from Andy Chambers that I posted earlier saying Imperial ships also have additional space to transport ground troops from 1/3 to 1/2 their total crew size. This adds further to the amount of space allocated and essentially not needing crew.

Finally, 40K ships have missions that can last far longer than comparable modern ships, and is more akin to the Age of Sail. See below:

Marquis Lex
Held the record until 657.M41 for ship on longest patrol (1,741 days)
(Warp Storm p. 75)

A lone ship on nearly 5 years patrol. That is a lot of stores to carry, and also atmosphere (or atmosphere processors). By comparison, modern ships like a carrier, are surrounded by various support ships and have short duration patrols.

Indeed, there are 2 visions of the Imperial Navy. One is enslaved starving crew members hauling gigantic archaic weapons and devices to the orders of Tech Priests who barely understand the very technology they command. The other is a Battlestar Galactica-esque professionalism, a clean well-run ship with well-trained happy personnel. Personally I like the former as it's a bit more unique and fitting for the 40k universe.

Actually it can be both, and is somewhat shown as such in the Gordon Rennie novels. The latter is on the command decks with the officers and senior personnel. Below that it is more like the former, as taskmasters beat, whip, or do whatever it takes to ensure that order is carried out. Meanwhile, there is also an active underworld life of crime and drug dealing, that is tolerated within certain limits so long as it does not adversely affect ship functioning. Again this is possible only because the paradigm is a mix of high tech and the Age of Sail. A vast number of the crew are not going to be doing anything technical and are just manual labor.

When the bridge crew carry out their tasks and the ship performs well, it is at the cost of a lot of human sweat, toil, and suffering to carry out their orders. However in 40K's status stratified depiction of life, the senior crew don't care because the lower deck crew are expendable.