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I know that Terminators are generally used to board Space Hulks, which are giant blobs of ships and junk crushed together, because of all the danger, and that on board there can be Nids, Orks, and Demons, but I have a few other questions besides.

1. If there are no Space Marines near by, and yet valuable relics/tech/equipment has been detected on board -- would they deploy IG regiments or some other IOM group in an attempt to get the stuff, instead of simply bombarding the Hulk into scrap?

2. If the Space Hulks have been moving through the warp - why aren't the Genestealers/ Orks corrupted?

3. How are Space Hulks formed? I know they're made up of all the ships, but Space is Infinitely vast.. how can the ships congregate into a blob when they're so far apart etc.?

4. In all of the Space Hulk games / board game - gravity is facing downwards - but on a Space Hulk, wouldn't that be towards the center of all the ships, the center of mass? Is that simply a design oversight or are the ships orientated radially around the center of mass?

5. Why don't Chaos Marines, or simply Chaos Forces - gather up the Space Hulks and use them as vessels to carry troops etc. to Terra. That would bypass all of the defenses and they're huge, capable of holding thousands, if not tens of thousands of marines.

Thanks in advance for your answers

Ah, I see your mistake. You expected the fluff to make sense.

The Inquisition Daleks going HERESY!!! EXTERMINATE!!! doesn't make much sense either, if you consider that the IOM must have some commerce and communication besides the Navy and their logistics.

They are formed over thousands of years by vessels that are lost in the warp or are sucked in by warp storms. And as far as I know lots of different people board them from the IOM.

1. Possibly. I don't think there is any official fluff mention of non Space Marine forces boarding a space hulk, but it's possible, as all I can find is that they send 'elite' forces. So it's not so much of a restriction as it is a lack of evidence.

2. Orks have a pretty strong resistance to Chaos, I believe, and Genestealers like most Tyranids are also not particularly susceptible either. Citation needed here, tho.

3. Gravity and lots of time. LOTS of time.

4. I'd say that this is a fluff wiggle for the sake of gameplay.

5. Chaos forces have used Space Hulks in the past, if I am not mistaken and they are very effective, if blunt weapons. The problem with them just 'gathering them up' is the same problem that the Imperium doesn't just gather them up. They're not all that common, they're in various states of disrepair (and remember that Chaos forces do not the raw resources that the Imperium has) and Chaos will still have to clean out whatever is on them.

Thank you for all the replies! Fast and informative!

Adding a few interpretations.

Otto Weston wrote:If there are no Space Marines near by, and yet valuable relics/tech/equipment has been detected on board -- would they deploy IG regiments or some other IOM group in an attempt to get the stuff, instead of simply bombarding the Hulk into scrap?

I'd say it depends. There's about a dozen organisations in the Imperium who might be interested in a Hulk if they have cause to believe there's something valuable on it. The Navy would probably try it with its own armsmen first, but if they encounter resistance they may well try to request backup from the Imperial Guard. After all, a Hulk's interior is so vast it is almost a warzone all by itself. Similarly, the Adeptus Mechanicus is always on the hunt for technology from earlier ages. The Cult Mechanicus sends out Explorator fleets just for the purpose of discovering lostech, so I'd say they would use their Skitarii Tech Guard to board a Hulk as well. Then, the Sisters of Battle might be interested, if a vessel inside the Hulk is said to contain a relic or the remains of some lost saint, or because the Ecclesiarchy likes to acquire technology as well, even though they use it mainly as a bargaining chip with the AdMech. And then we have the Inquisitors, whose motifs may take the entire range from tech or relic recovery to investigating strange readings to taking genetic samples or trying out new weapons.

Otto Weston wrote:If the Space Hulks have been moving through the warp - why aren't the Genestealers/ Orks corrupted?

Perhaps they possess a natural immunity, perhaps they congregate in areas of the ship that are still powered and relatively safe, or perhaps they are corrupted. Lots of options here.

Otto Weston wrote:How are Space Hulks formed? I know they're made up of all the ships, but Space is Infinitely vast.. how can the ships congregate into a blob when they're so far apart etc.?

As far as I recall, Hulks are not formed in normal space but the Warp, which has its own physical laws (or not). The Immaterium seems to react to the presence of such foreign bodies and may well succeed in manipulating the course of ships that lack the means to counter such phenomena. Perhaps the Warp Storms just "naturally" create a sort of center to which all ships within a certain range are pulled, until they collide and merge, kind of like a maelstrom that ultimately spits out the chunk of ships someplace else. Since time runs differently throughout the Warp, it may well be that ships coming from a region with faster time are slammed into other ships that are stuck in a region with slower time. Kind of like a "traffic jam".

Otto Weston wrote:In all of the Space Hulk games / board game - gravity is facing downwards - but on a Space Hulk, wouldn't that be towards the center of all the ships, the center of mass? Is that simply a design oversight or are the ships orientated radially around the center of mass?

I think that's just an abstraction. The ships that make up a Hulk are not connected in an orderly way, they're just merged however one vessel rammed another aeons ago. In the ships that still have power, gravity would always pull things "down", even if this "down" is locally limited and depends on perspective. Since the crossover from one wreck into another would likely involve overcoming lots of debris and horribly deformed hull, you'd probably not even notice the slow change in gravity as you try to worm your way from one section of the Hulk into another.

Otto Weston wrote:Why don't Chaos Marines, or simply Chaos Forces - gather up the Space Hulks and use them as vessels to carry troops etc. to Terra. That would bypass all of the defenses and they're huge, capable of holding thousands, if not tens of thousands of marines.

As far as I know, Space Hulks cannot actually be controlled specifically because of their monumental size, and because most of the engines of the ships that make up the Hulk probably don't work anymore (let alone the likelihood of them being pointed to the right direction). Orks and other aliens who board them just hope that some day it'll pop out of Warp nearby a populated world.

It's still a plan that might be theoretically feasible, but it would waste a huge amount of time and resources (including the manpower necessary to secure the Hulk in the first place!), and that still has no guarantee of succeeding (if a Hulk pops out near Terra, it'd likely soon find itself being ripped apart by the firepower of multiple Navy battleships). I would imagine that the other methods of transportation are just thought to be generally more efficient. Also, they'd have to get the Hulk past the Cadian Corridor first, where it would be detected and intercepted already (in terms of troop movements, the Cadian Gate functions a little like the NATO's SOSUS warning system in the GIUK gap during the Cold War).
That's not to say that I could not imagine that some day, somebody would attempt it.

Otto Weston wrote:
I know that Terminators are generally used to board Space Hulks, which are giant blobs of ships and junk crushed together, because of all the danger, and that on board there can be Nids, Orks, and Demons, but I have a few other questions besides.

1. If there are no Space Marines near by, and yet valuable relics/tech/equipment has been detected on board -- would they deploy IG regiments or some other IOM group in an attempt to get the stuff, instead of simply bombarding the Hulk into scrap?

Possibly, but the troops deployed would have to be void sealed which is expensive and rare outside of the marines or inquisition

2. If the Space Hulks have been moving through the warp - why aren't the Genestealers/ Orks corrupted?

Orks are blunt creatures as is, khorne is the top candidate to try and corrupt them but Gork & Mork are fairly powerful gods, combined with Ork self belief is probably what guards them
Nids I think are warp resistant (Shadow of the warp etc)

3. How are Space Hulks formed? I know they're made up of all the ships, but Space is Infinitely vast.. how can the ships congregate into a blob when they're so far apart etc.?

They are ships combining in the warp, remember despite the vastness of space time flows differently in the warp

4. In all of the Space Hulk games / board game - gravity is facing downwards - but on a Space Hulk, wouldn't that be towards the center of all the ships, the center of mass? Is that simply a design oversight or are the ships orientated radially around the center of mass?

I would assume the ship that is the centre of attention still has enough power to have internal gravity

5. Why don't Chaos Marines, or simply Chaos Forces - gather up the Space Hulks and use them as vessels to carry troops etc. to Terra. That would bypass all of the defenses and they're huge, capable of holding thousands, if not tens of thousands of marines.

Thanks in advance for your answers

They have tried. But they need to get enough engines operable for it be pilot-able. And that's after they've cleansed the insides from any enemies

I thing 1 and 2 have adequate answers above.

Regarding 3, a lot of the fluff describes there being flows and currents in the warp drawing ships astray, hence the need for the astronomican to go where you want. Such flows will 'naturally' bring loose ships into certain areas to amalgamate.

Regarding 4, marines have magnetic clamps in their boots. Gravity is irrelevant and given that its easier to use corridors when walking on the "floor" why not use a normal frame of reference in the hulk. It would only get weird if the artificial gravity was wildly off-normal overcoming the maglocks.

Regarding 5, orks do use them as invasion transports but they are not really steerable. You can get them in BFG and they can be controlled a bit in realspace but I think major hulks in warp space would be a bit different.

TBH, Lynata pretty much covered all I was going to say, so I'll only expand on a one point:

3. As Lynata says, with quite a good analogy, the hulk's collide in the warp, not realspace (At least not often in realspace, although bit's and bobs will occur). My analogy would be that the warp is more like an ocean. A hulk entering the warp will find itself drawn to the strongest local current and dragged along. However, these currents will also be utilised by the shipping of most 40K races, hence, when two currents join, or vessels are traveling along the same current, they may collide. Also, the laws of physics (or lack of) in the Warp will ensure that they collide in some strange manner that is especially hard to navigate or fathom out. Hence, when they pop out of the warp, they may have vessels built in M41 in the centre of the hulk (where you would think the older vessels would be), with vessels built in M30 on the outside. This would happen as the older vessels could have been lost in the warp, colliding into more recent vessels, and then re-emerging(Like a snowball effect).

TL;DR version...

1. No.
2. They can't be.
3. Because grimdark physics.
4. No.
5.Can't steer them.

2. Probably oversight from makers/writers part. It's one thing to have natural resistance to warp/chaos effects while in real space and then actually float inside the warp in spaceship wreck who knows how long.

Warpig1815 wrote:My analogy would be that the warp is more like an ocean. A hulk entering the warp will find itself drawn to the strongest local current and dragged along.

This, too, is an excellent point. Now that you say it, I recall it being described that Imperial ships almost universally travel along pre-established paths, similar to the Hyperspace routes in Star Wars, as there is a huge risk of "getting lost" or "dragged away" or simply not ending up where you wanted to if you stray from that route. The Battlefleet Gothic game even represents this by having you roll a number of Warp corridors connecting each system in a sector, and your ships can only travel between those navigational points. This means that the short route will often not be an option simply because there's no established pathway through the Warp, forcing you to take the long route along other worlds that may, at time, even be located to the opposite of where you actually want to go!

Anyways, the existence of these paths could well result in a higher chance of collisions on certain routes, either purely by chance - or because the Warp is shifting, moving a previously lost ship into the pathway of another vessel.

The decks of Imperial vessels (possibly of all vessels in the setting, though this is unclear) are plated with square "flagstones" that are referred to as "gravity plates" or "grav-plates". These are the devices responsible for forming the artificial gravity found aboard starships, and can be controlled by the various Tech-Priests (for example, turning the pull up or down to acclimate IG regiments aboard the vessel to the gravity of a planet they will soon disembark upon... or to trap an invading enemy in a hallway, because the floor just suddenly became 10Gs strong).

1. Yes. Rules for using Imperial Guard in Space Hulk itself were published in Citadel Journal, on a related note rules for Imperial Guard boarding Tyranid Hive Ships in Advanced Space Crusade were in White Dwarf.

It certainly happens, it just doesn't get mentioned much because doing so would miss a perfect opportunity to show how Spehs Mareenz are the awesum.

 Traejun wrote:

3. Because grimdark physics..

New favorite line to use when something does not make scenes