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.

I know that the imperium likes to use big cargo barges and big warships to move stuff around but i cant imagine an inquisitor stealthily moving through the imperium with a ship that big! i havent been able to find much fluff on the warp engines themselves either and i dont know if they need the power of those giant fusion reactors on those big ships to operate. Does anybody know anything about this?

Well the basic transport could be pretty small by comparison to the larger vessels.
Personally I see the inquisition maintaining and using the likes of a or a modified cobra Class destroyer, for general duties, fast and heavily armed compared to most vessels. Get the inquisitor where they need to be in in the best time.
Of course anything larger needed and they simply wave their 'this is mine now' warrant.

Inquisitor's have a lot of specialized craft they can get with a customized request. The Imperial Navy really only has warp drives on Corvette-class vessels or above, but in stuff like Eisenhorn you have a fairly small personalized craft with a warp drive.

I asked the same question a while back and there's no really good answer.

Normally the smallest you see is a Cobra destroyer a KILOMETER long!

But I can think of at least 3 Black Library books with smaller, 747 sized ships. The old Inquisition War books had Inquisitor Draco tooling around a small ship, Eye of Terror had a Rogue Trader flying around in a ship with just 2 people and the more recent Horus Heresy book Nemesis had an assassin team with a small warp ship.

So I think a safe answer is most Imperial ships are of the mile-long dreadnaught type but smaller ships are possible for those who can get them.

It is a tricky question. GW does not use any set scale, you get anything from a ship the size of a Guncutter to one over 30km long from BL books.

Unofficially they have some charts that got made from some chat on the old BFG forms, with input from one of the BFG creators that puts the smallest at a little under a Km, which matched up with the Newer FFG on the small side. Those same scales place a battleship at about 5 km or 12 km, all in whose scale you are using.

In other words you need to decide yourself what scale you like and which to use as GW sure as hell does not have one.

Most warp capable ships are very large. Your typical freighter will be several kilometers long, comperable in size to a Cruiser class warship.

Almost all ships that are Escort sized(~1kilometer) are warships of some kind. Either PDF gunboats that have no warp drive or they are actual Navy ships.


Civilian ships that are warp capable will almost always be big ships in the cruiser catagory.

There will be plenty of smaller civilian ships, but they will almost exclusivly be ships only capable of traveling within a star system.


The Inquisition and other organizations has ships that are very small that are Warp capable, so they do exist. But it will be a rare item to have.

In the first Grey Knights novel an inquisitor sends an operative in a small, one man ship that is noted as being the smallest possible warp capable ship. I don't remember the size given, and can't be bothered looking it up. I don't remember if the ship still had a navigator, or if it just used high speed processors and super charged warp engines to very quickly drop out of the warp, take bearings, and then drop back into the warp for a short jump.

Destroyers/frigates are close to the size of a Star Wars Star Destroyer; I don't recall mention of anything smaller being Warp-capable, but then I haven't read the Grey Knights novels, so Kaldor might be right on this one.

Stuff smaller then that certaintly isn't common, or readily avaliable to anyone that isn't inquisition.

The smallest warp-capable ship I can remember being definitively mentioned (in the sense it has an indicated size) was the Rogue Trader vessel from Eye of Terror. It could land on planets and was (IIRC) 90 feet tall. Assuming its dimensions corresponded to most other Imperial vessels, it could be at least 4-5x that length, which would make it no more than 200 metres long.

The smallest warp-capable warship I can remember hearing about is the Dark Angels Rapid Strike Vessel from Gav Thorpe's Angels of Darkness, which was 500 metres long IIRC. Other than that most warp capable ships aren't much smaller than 900-1000 metres long for the Imperium. I do remember one anthology short story where a warp-capable freighter was a kilometre long, and yet could also land on planets (benefits of starports...)

If you put any stock in the Forge World stuff, the Tau Manta has an ether drive capability and was as small as most other attack craft (even though the BFG era stuff hinted it was all but an escort, which would be considerably larger...) so take that as you might.

Is a frigate warp capable?

 ENOZONE wrote:
Is a frigate warp capable?

Yes, under and scale a Frigate is far from the smallest ship. Destoyers/raiders are smaller then a frigate.


Like all things 40k man, you have to choose which to you is canon. Some books have ultra small void ships, others say anything smaller then half a km is impossible.

I would assume that between the need for the regular propulsion, bridge/ command the warp engines, and a gellar field generator, excluding any other equipment or personel requirements sutch as galleys, weapons, crew quarters etc, those 4 essentials are still quite large.
I dislike the idea of a 1 man void vessel. 1 man couldn't hope to keep all those 4 items running on his own. I'd expect at least a tech Seer, and I can't see an inquisitor going anywhere without an astropath seeing that warp travel can still take months.

I will personally disregard the idea of a 1 man warp 'pod'. Just doesn't seem feasable.

 Eetion wrote:
I would assume that between the need for the regular propulsion, bridge/ command the warp engines, and a gellar field generator, excluding any other equipment or personel requirements sutch as galleys, weapons, crew quarters etc, those 4 essentials are still quite large.
I dislike the idea of a 1 man void vessel. 1 man couldn't hope to keep all those 4 items running on his own. I'd expect at least a tech Seer, and I can't see an inquisitor going anywhere without an astropath seeing that warp travel can still take months.

I will personally disregard the idea of a 1 man warp 'pod'. Just doesn't seem feasable.

I shall invoke the hated Rogue Trader here. Now leveling aside the sizes, which many people dislike, FFG did more or less what you are talking about. Ships have "spaces" or a base size of how much crap one can shove into a set hull. The smallest a viper has 29 spaces, while something like a grand cruiser has like 90. What all this does is give a rough idea of how much space something can hold. So the scale does not matter, if your max size is 12km..its 90 space..if you max size in your scale is 2 km..its 90 spaces. Now under this system the smallest warp drive is 10 spaces, which is a lot of room on something on the small end, Plasma drives can get as low as four ( for transports) with archotech.

Under this system bare bones, smallest you can get, with relic archotech is 19 spaces..no weapons. That is roughly 34% smaller then a viper as the smallest you can go. To me that sounds right on the money.

Just how big is a viper?
34% of that is what?
And just what crew complement is that?

Sounds reasonable enough.

The size is...debated. Rogue Trader uses a scale some folks hate. Its large, so the viper is the smallest ship so far published . RT scale brings it in at 950 meters with a crew of 7'500

On the other end of the scale is a fan made chart based off some threads from some BFG boards and that scale would place it closer to 500 meters, but I am unsure on the number of crew on that scale. I think its 2-500 but I could be wrong)

As for the 34%, I was talking of ship spaces. The smallest you can go is 34% smaller then the "space" of a viper and then with zero weapons and relic tech.

 Eetion wrote:
I would assume that between the need for the regular propulsion, bridge/ command the warp engines, and a gellar field generator, excluding any other equipment or personel requirements sutch as galleys, weapons, crew quarters etc, those 4 essentials are still quite large.
I dislike the idea of a 1 man void vessel. 1 man couldn't hope to keep all those 4 items running on his own. I'd expect at least a tech Seer, and I can't see an inquisitor going anywhere without an astropath seeing that warp travel can still take months.

I will personally disregard the idea of a 1 man warp 'pod'. Just doesn't seem feasable.

No pods . But in ss "Kraken" the crew of SW ship were servitors. So as far as WH40K parties concerned, it was 1-man vessel.

Besides the difficulty in building and powering a small ship, the shortage of astropaths and navigators will always limit the number of small ships. Why would anyone waste an irreplacable navigator and astropath on a small ship with only a few passengers and bit of cargo when they could be running a mile long freighter or warship?

They would also be very vulnerable without the crew, sheilds or weapons to hold off any attacker. The 40k universe is full of pirates, raiders, monsters, daemons and other things looking to pick up an underarmed ship alone in the void.

So they might also be rare for the same reason ferarris are rare on the streets of Mogadeshu. Building and keeping a small ship is too valuable and vulnerable.