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'm not sure if this really goes in "fluff," but I'm not sure where else to ask it, so... apologies. What is the scale of 40K? More specifically, what distance does, for example, one inch in the miniatures game represent "in real life"?

It is not really accurate in that regard. techincally I believe the scale is 28mm. But it is 28mm Heroic, which mess stuff to start with, and the models are not all scaled against each other either.

There isn't one. 1st edition stated it was designed around 1 inch equaling 2 metres, but that was always somewhat ludicrous since it meant no professional soldier could hit anything beyond 60 metres. Since then GW's position has been that the games use a 'sliding scale' where things further away are further than the sum of the increments in between, all of undefined of course.

not so much with measurements, but model wise, looking at a Space Marine supposedly being ~8' tall, your average Landraider is as tall as a house and as long as two, a Necron Monolith would be more akin to a floating Skyscraper, a Titan would disappear through the clouds, and the Navy would land on entire Continents

 IHateNids wrote:
not so much with measurements, but model wise, looking at a Space Marine supposedly being ~8' tall, your average Landraider is as tall as a house and as long as two, a Necron Monolith would be more akin to a floating Skyscraper, a Titan would disappear through the clouds, and the Navy would land on entire Continents

Wait, what? That doesn't scale correctly. At all.

Let's take an Imperial Battleship at ~5km long. The English Channel, at its narrowest point, is ~35km wide. That's seven Battleships lined up. You wouldn't need anything remotely as large as a continent to land Imperial Navy starships.

 IHateNids wrote:
not so much with measurements, but model wise, looking at a Space Marine supposedly being ~8' tall, your average Landraider is as tall as a house and as long as two, a Necron Monolith would be more akin to a floating Skyscraper, a Titan would disappear through the clouds, and the Navy would land on entire Continents

Which, considering the listed scale of Battle Barges in BFG isn't too far out of the question.

 dbsamurai wrote:
Which, considering the listed scale of Battle Barges in BFG isn't too far out of the question.

Again, not really. Supposing we go by the incongruously inflated scale and say that the biggest capital starships are in excess of 15km long, Earth's smallest continent, Australia, is ~8.5 million square km in area. I don't think people realise just how tiny a few kms are in terms of general landmass.

Ground scale in 40k has never been a linear thing. It can't be.

I think it's always been a kind of geometric progression, where the range bands correlate to given metre ranges, but they aren't just a flat 1:1.

Weapons with a 12" range for example (pistols). That 12" could just as easily equal 50m - tends to be long range for a pistol shot. On the other hand, shuriken catapults operate much like a submachine gun, and have longer barrels, so it could just as easily be 150m.
24" would probably be 2-400m.
36" up to double that. 6-800m - not an unusual range for trained "snipers".
48" double that again (many missiles, even the primitive ones of the imperium should be able to do 1500m based purely on chemical explosive propellants.).
72" should be horizon for direct energy weapons.

I much prefer the weapon ranges from other games.
Infinity: The rifle has range of the table (extreme range is 48" and the game is played on a 4x4). Heavy weapons likewise.

 Anfauglir wrote:

Again, not really. Supposing we go by the incongruously inflated scale and say that the biggest capital starships are in excess of 15km long, Earth's smallest continent, Australia, is ~8.5 million square km in area. I don't think people realise just how tiny a few kms are in terms of general landmass.

I think you and I interpreted the statement differently...the listed size of the Battleship is 20km, which would mean you couldn't land it on...say...Honalulu. You would need a continent, and a pretty significantly empty/structurally sound section of land to land a ship of that size. As in, the wilderness of midwestern america. Which, considering that forgeworlds, hiveworlds, and industrial worlds tend to lack any such length of land, you would, in essence, need an entire continent devoted simply to landing craft of that size to have a dedicated spaceport.

In essence, I didn't take it to mean that you would need the entire span of america to land a battlecruiser, just that creating a landing zone for a craft that size is not something you could do just anywhere. I mean we're talking 400km^2 (or half of the area of los angeles) of flat, reinforced terrain capable of supporting a ship of that size. And I don't know anywhere on earth with that kind of geography.

 dbsamurai wrote:
You would need a continent

You really wouldn't.

I mean we're talking 400km^2 (or half of the area of los angeles) of flat, reinforced terrain capable of supporting a ship of that size.

Right. So let's look at Australia again. 8,500,000 divided by 400 is 21,250... an excessively high number of capital starships to be landing at once, in one place. It wouldn't happen. Ever.

And I don't know anywhere on earth with that kind of geography.

Luckily we're not talking about modern day real life Earth. We're talking about 40K, a setting where the IoM wouldn't think twice about finding a planet populated by primitive lifeforms and steamrolling all available landmass to make way for a Munitorum paper mill, let alone a dedicated shipyard for the Navy.

40k has no scale, and 40k's writers have no sense of scale.

 Anfauglir wrote:

 dbsamurai wrote:
You would need a continent

You really wouldn't.

I mean we're talking 400km^2 (or half of the area of los angeles) of flat, reinforced terrain capable of supporting a ship of that size.

Right. So let's look at Australia again. 8,500,000 divided by 400 is 21,250... an excessively high number of capital starships to be landing at once, in one place. It wouldn't happen. Ever.

And I don't know anywhere on earth with that kind of geography.

Luckily we're not talking about modern day real life Earth. We're talking about 40K, a setting where the IoM wouldn't think twice about finding a planet populated by primitive lifeforms and steamrolling all available landmass to make way for a Munitorum paper mill, let alone a dedicated shipyard for the Navy.

Aaaaaand you continue to miss the point. The IoM is running out of land pretty rapidly. You run into the catch-22 that the only places with enough space to have a dedicated starport (let's say 3 capitol ships landing? that's 192 km^2 just to land 3 cruisers) don't produce or necessitate landing such vehicles. Forge Worlds for example tend to look like this and hive worlds are similarly limited. Add in the fact that if you land it on just any piece of land you're then gonna have to transport it to its destination, meaning that only an idiot would just "stick it anywhere".

Remember, this is a universe where the earth's seas have been deliberately boiled away because the imperium needed the space. When you're that desperate for space, you're not gonna have room for spaceports. Even a dedicated spaceport (which would most logically be placed near the heart of major hives to limit the necessity of shipping) would take up massive amounts of space that would necessitate a very focused and concentrated effort that would mean also that you can't use the land or the space above it for anything else meaning you may as well be sacrificing a continent to the sort of logistics necessary not only for landing pads but also supply trains, offloading equipment, anti grav fields (yay physics) so your ships don't crush themselves, living spaces for all your workers...when you add it all up a spaceport could easily cover most of australia just in logistics.

If you're still not getting the point: the supply train alone would take up most of the space. Aircraft carriers have tiny landing strips compared to the insane mass of their ships so that it can operate properly, a spaceport would necessitate a similar ratio of "landing space" to "spaceport supply space", in a universe where a patch of dirt is more valuable than a human life.

I'm pretty sure that most of the spaceports are in space...the larger battle cruisers and the like don't land on planets.

There is no scale as far as distance goes in game.


I've always said its something like this.

Shooting at a target within 6" is shooting around 50 yards. 24" would be 50 yards or so.

up to 48" would be around a half mile.

A railgun shooting a target 72" away could be taking a shot at a target that's 10+ kilometers away.

 greyknight12 wrote:
I'm pretty sure that most of the spaceports are in space...the larger battle cruisers and the like don't land on planets.

QFT.
Most spaceports for the larger vessels are out in space, and smaller loader craft take the goods to the surface, unless its a ship small enough to land

 dbsamurai wrote:

 Anfauglir wrote:

Again, not really. Supposing we go by the incongruously inflated scale and say that the biggest capital starships are in excess of 15km long, Earth's smallest continent, Australia, is ~8.5 million square km in area. I don't think people realise just how tiny a few kms are in terms of general landmass.

I think you and I interpreted the statement differently...the listed size of the Battleship is 20km, which would mean you couldn't land it on...say...Honalulu.

Oahu is 44 miles by 30 miles, so a battleship of this size would just about fit... just saying

On the one hand it would be massively innefficient to drop a capital ship down that far into a gravity well. On the other hand for certain planets gravity is much weaker and older capital ships of the Imperial fleet are stuffed to the gills with technosorcery that could potentially nullify the mass of the ship and let it go wherever it wants to without crushing the ground into paste and sinking. Just because the thing has "landed" doesn't mean that any weight needs to go into the ground. Airships for example. They get tethered more than landed.

Theres a website where it takes the template size of any warship and scales it to london but i cannot find the link but i think that it will help with the issue of size of these ships


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Theres a website where it takes the template size of any warship and scales it to london but i cannot find the link but i think that it will help with the issue of size of these ships

 Octopoid wrote:
I'm not sure if this really goes in "fluff," but I'm not sure where else to ask it, so... apologies. What is the scale of 40K? More specifically, what distance does, for example, one inch in the miniatures game represent "in real life"?

There is no real scale. SM's in fluff are 7/8 feet tall. Their models are the same size as a normal human. Dreadnoughts are supposed to be 3x the height of a person. Not shown in the models.
A Rhino is meant to carry ten SM's. Also not shown in the models.

Q: "What does one inch represent?"

A: "Nothing."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

dbsamurai wrote:

 Anfauglir wrote:

 dbsamurai wrote:
You would need a continent

You really wouldn't.

I mean we're talking 400km^2 (or half of the area of los angeles) of flat, reinforced terrain capable of supporting a ship of that size.

Right. So let's look at Australia again. 8,500,000 divided by 400 is 21,250... an excessively high number of capital starships to be landing at once, in one place. It wouldn't happen. Ever.

And I don't know anywhere on earth with that kind of geography.

Luckily we're not talking about modern day real life Earth. We're talking about 40K, a setting where the IoM wouldn't think twice about finding a planet populated by primitive lifeforms and steamrolling all available landmass to make way for a Munitorum paper mill, let alone a dedicated shipyard for the Navy.

Aaaaaand you continue to miss the point. The IoM is running out of land pretty rapidly.

I'm fairly certain one of the reasons for this is that they keep building huge militarian structures instead of proper habs for the civilian populace.

greyknight12 wrote:I'm pretty sure that most of the spaceports are in space...the larger battle cruisers and the like don't land on planets.

And that solves this argument nicely.

I never said the ships were landed frequently, but the space required (in space or not) would still cover most of a continent

Why? A 5km ship, while huge for a space-going vessel, is nearly microscopic compared to the mass of even Earth's smallest continent.

While there's been BL novels that present the ecological effects of introducing huge bodies of mass into an atmosphere, we don't know if this is actually true or not, as we've never thrown 2800 megatons of adamantine and steel into our atmosphere.

While, yes, their lift-engines are huge, and probably create a massive blast-area behind and below them to generate lift-off (unless they build massive anti-grav engines, such as those found in Landspeeders) to achieve lift, you don't need an entire continent for that.

 IHateNids wrote:
I never said the ships were landed frequently, but the space required (in space or not) would still cover most of a continent

I think you do not understand the maximum size of a ship of the IoM, a few kilometers and the size of a continent. Even when large ships do land, they land in a science fiction manner of descending vertically with anti-gravity thrusters.

If they didnt and say they were landing like a space shuttle they would probably collapse under their own weight. If they had slowed down enough not to explode on impact it is not even remotely likely that they would skid farther than a few tens of miles.

It's also important to note that the vast majority of IoM space-ships, the ones that are kilometers in length, do not enter a planet's atmosphere for any reason. They're built in space, they work in space, they die in space.

This is relevant as to why:

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!

Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.

This guy is obviously trolling, let it go.

I agree withthe rhino point. Personally I cant bring my self to use a transport if it dosent look like it could hold the amount of models physically. But thats because im obsessive in details like that.

 IHateNids wrote:
I never said the ships were landed frequently, but the space required (in space or not) would still cover most of a continent

Right. And all I said was how out of whack that estimation is. The landmass of a continent is an inordinate amount of space to dedicate to a starship landing.

 Psienesis wrote:
Why? A 5km ship, while huge for a space-going vessel, is nearly microscopic compared to the mass of even Earth's smallest continent.

JWhex wrote:
I think you do not understand the maximum size of a ship of the IoM, a few kilometers and the size of a continent.

Exactly the point I was making. To no avail, it seems.

gork and possibly mork wrote:
This guy is obviously trolling, let it go.

I agree withthe rhino point. Personally I cant bring my self to use a transport if it dosent look like it could hold the amount of models physically. But thats because im obsessive in details like that.

LOL, well since 40k is not a scale model game, at all, it shouldnt bother you at all. You have to just ignore it or become paralyzed by it. 40K models have never been anything more than big fancy tokens, which has never bothered me. If I wanted to build scale models, there are plenty of those around and if I wanted to play with scale models there is always the hobby of model railroading.

Be happy GW models have slightly increased in size over the years. It was more silly back when the original vehicles came out and they were tiny.

 Anfauglir wrote:

 IHateNids wrote:
I never said the ships were landed frequently, but the space required (in space or not) would still cover most of a continent

Right. And all I said was how out of whack that estimation is. The landmass of a continent is an inordinate amount of space to dedicate to a starship landing.

I agree. I wouldn't mind the suggestion of an area the size of Wales being dedicated to landing Imperial Navy craft, but it shouldn't need much more than that.

Imperial landing craft range up to maybe the size of a container ship here on Earth, so no more than a few hundred meters. Most or all have VTOL capability, so a modern international airport would probably be large enough to service large numbers of Imperial ships. Heck, you could probably build it on the roof of a hive city. As mentioned above, the starships themselves never venture below orbit.