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Well, my question is how big are imperial void craft (fighter/bombers) and why do they all seem to have crews of 4 or more. The caveat to that question is why couldn't the Imperial Navy just used its atmospheric craft (other that engine trouble) as void craft? Are lascanons ineffective against void craft and frigates?
My reason for these odd question is that I'm working on the lore for my IG army and I wanted to be able to talk about their transport ship and I'm trying to figure out how big it would need to be and since I was making my own ship, I decided to give it some fighters. I was not aware that fighters couldn't double as void craft. While I will admit that this is more realistic, I am bothered by the lack of information on void fighters (both the Fury and the Starhawk) but both are implied to be massive, at least the same size and a Valkyrie but with no transport capabilities. Anyways, I know this is silly; but, my normal sources have failed me and I am still curious.

The first thing you need to know is that Imperial voidcraft are massive. Without the limitations of gravity or air resistance, they can be built to huge sizes. The Imperial Fury Interceptor is twice as long as an Emperor Titan is tall, with Starhawk Bombers being even larger. They must be large. The Starhawk in particular must carry a payload of starship-grade weapons so that it can inflict meaningful harm on the space leviathans that are Warp-capable craft.

Weapons like Lascannons are near irrelevant in warfare of such scale, beyond munitions interception.

Indeed.

The FFG RPG "Rogue Trader" is probably your best source for this, but the short version is that whilst most Navy Aeronautica are void-capable, that's just in a sense of "get to the carrier in orbit and back". The craft which actually fight in orbit are marauder sized or bigger - because not to put too fine a point on it, a lascannon will, as Ashiraya says, do jack all to a 'target' kilometres long. It'd be like trying to sink the USS Nimitz with a .50 cal.

A space-bourne transport ship for a guard regiment will likely be something akin to the Vagabond-class trader - that's the class which corresponds to the small "transport" model in Battlefleet Gothic. The thing is that if you want a ship built with a warp engine, then barring ridiculous archaeotech (the sort of stuff the Inquisition and Assassinorium have), that's about as small as warp-capable ships get.

According to the RPG:

Vagabond-class Merchant Trader

Dimensions: 2km long, 0.4km abeam approx.
Mass: 8 megatonnes approx.
Crew: 18,000 crew, approx
Accel: 2.1 gravities max acceleration

Just a point of disagreement locarno - there are smaller mass-production warp-capable ships. I present the Viper Class Scout Sloop.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Viper_Class_Scout_Sloop

950m long.

Below that though, you would need Inquisitorial/ Admech levels of tech.

About 1000 metre mark is.min for a warp capable craft.

Under that your looking high end admech/inquisition stuff.
One and the same in most terms.

Also speed. Depending on the design, freighter engines are going to be pretty underpowered vs a dedicated warship.

They don t put fancy designs on a meat sheikd hauler.

Thanks, this is all good stuff

So, another question along the same lines; would a deathstrike missile be effective against ship in the 40k verse?

KayTwo wrote:
So, another question along the same lines; would a deathstrike missile be effective against ship in the 40k verse?

Depends on the payload. Nuclear warheads aren't particularly effective in space unless you score a direct hit; but a vortex warhead might well do the trick - having a significant portion of your aft quarterdeck become a gateway to hell might be problematic.

Getting it to your target is hard though - it has to defeat point-defence batteries, anti-missile-missiles, fighters, and void shields.

All that said, ship-ship weapons are represented on the 40K table as orbital bombardments (Lance Strikes, Magna-melta torpedoes, etc), so perhaps a repurposed ICBM may well have a greater effect than would be suspected?

A Deathstrike Missile stands a reasonable chance of doing damage if it can reach the ship; the 'light' antiship torpedoes carried by Avenger Torpedo-Bombers will be more or less comparable in size to Deathstrikes.

Note that 'damage' is not the same as 'destroy' - even an escort-class warship would take several deathstrikes




Easiest way to think of it: A "human being" in 40k is just over 1" tall - call that 2m.

A voidship is 1km plus - meaning 1000m - meaning ~500" long by 300m wide - meaning 150" - so imagine about a huge apocalypse-esque board 7 realm of battle boards lengthways (on their long side) by 3 boards wide (on their narrow side).

This huge board area is entirely covered in fortifications and massive fortifications.

To meaningfully hurt the ship, you've gotta destroy a meaningful chunk of that hull area - so we're talking sufficient deathstrike missiles to destroy an entire realm of battle board, filled edge-to-edge with bastions, void shield generators, and aquilla redoubts, for the ship to really notice.

locarno24 wrote:
A Deathstrike Missile stands a reasonable chance of doing damage if it can reach the ship; the 'light' antiship torpedoes carried by Avenger Torpedo-Bombers will be more or less comparable in size to Deathstrikes.

Note that 'damage' is not the same as 'destroy' - even an escort-class warship would take several deathstrikes




Easiest way to think of it: A "human being" in 40k is just over 1" tall - call that 2m.

A voidship is 1km plus - meaning 1000m - meaning ~500" long by 300m wide - meaning 150" - so imagine about a huge apocalypse-esque board 7 realm of battle boards lengthways (on their long side) by 3 boards wide (on their narrow side).

This huge board area is entirely covered in fortifications and massive fortifications.

To meaningfully hurt the ship, you've gotta destroy a meaningful chunk of that hull area - so we're talking sufficient deathstrike missiles to destroy an entire realm of battle board, filled edge-to-edge with bastions, void shield generators, and aquilla redoubts, for the ship to really notice.

One of the best scale descriptions of a 40k ship^

If you had a teleporter, which is exceedingly rare and treasured in the first place, you could potentially teleport ordnance directly into the enemy ship - bypassing anti-missile and point-defence systems. All you've gotta do is knock down the Void Shields for a moment and teleport across, that's easy enough to do even with large void ships in the 40k universe.

The Void Shield acts like flowing water protecting rocks underneath. You blast the water out of the way and then before the water flows back to cover the rock, you hit it (or in this case, teleport something inside it).

Starship weaponry is so massive as ships are so huge you need the enormous guns and warheads to damage such things in a meaningful way.

Macro cannons that in a ground instlation are super heavy artillery are light weapons in void warfare.

 Otto Weston wrote:
Just a point of disagreement locarno - there are smaller mass-production warp-capable ships. I present the Viper Class Scout Sloop.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Viper_Class_Scout_Sloop

950m long.

Below that though, you would need Inquisitorial/ Admech levels of tech.

Which is smallest and only for scouting use. Not much use in combat. So again weapons need to be good for kilometers long vessel destruction to be really of a concern in space war.

 Ashiraya wrote:
The first thing you need to know is that Imperial voidcraft are massive. Without the limitations of gravity or air resistance, they can be built to huge sizes. The Imperial Fury Interceptor is twice as long as an Emperor Titan is tall, with Starhawk Bombers being even larger. They must be large. The Starhawk in particular must carry a payload of starship-grade weapons so that it can inflict meaningful harm on the space leviathans that are Warp-capable craft.

Weapons like Lascannons are near irrelevant in warfare of such scale, beyond munitions interception.

The problem with this theory is that it doesn't account for non-imperial fighters. The Tau Manta is titan sized and explicitly described as being larger than average for a bomber (even getting a special durability rule in BFG to reflect this), while the same Barracuda that fights just fine in 40k-scale ground combat is also the Tau interceptor in space. The obvious conclusion is that the very vague descriptions of the Fury and Starhawk are inaccurate and the real ships are much smaller, more like the Marauder as suggested by the few pictures we have of them. And, given the fact that they fight at least rough parity with the Manta and Barracuda, it seems equally obvious that Imperial fighters can not possibly be carrying titan-scale weapons and the humble lascannon is a very relevant weapon.

Even on a big fighter, a laser strike to the engine or a penetrated hull can still do damage. Take out a control line, maybe even detonate the ordinance or strike a fuel tank.

Laser cannon still viable weapon.

Also void.. No air.. Nothing to stop a laser beam or interfere. The range could be far longer and still effective.

A lascannon is still a useful, and, as Peregrine says, relevant weapon, but not for 'killing' a starship it's a question of 'scale of damage' - again, imagine that 42' x 12' board full of fortifications.

What lascannons and ion cannons are good for are two things:

Blowing away relatively fragile fighters - like other barracudas and furies, as well as bigger-but-still-not-that-tough mantas, thunderhawks and starhawks (which as noted, I've always seen as marauder-esque - in fact in one story, Raptor Squadron, the Imperial Navy is using void-adapted marauders as fleet bombers). As noted, the Manta is definitely supposed to be bigger - a marker is a single manta, and this is supposed to be unusual.

Blowing away small surface detail on the ship is certainly possible with lascannon & hellstrike fire. Not 'take out the engines' - they're a plasma drive on most race's ships, and as such the bits targetable from outside the ship's hull will be shielded against an inferno which would make a titan's plasma cannon look like a firecracker - but 'punch a hole in the defence turrets'.

A starship's defensive turrets will be analogues of firestorm redoubts and aegis bastions (if you've got Imperial Armour aeronautica). Vulcan megabolters are also mentioned as close defence weapons, and the Phaeton-pattern turret (the twin autocannon thing that was part of the Anphelion Base kit) was mentioned in its description as being 'adapted from starship defence turrets'.

Taking out one or two of those is hard work for a fighter group but doable - and it makes an attack run by superheavy bombers who can't meaningfully jink much safer.

Which is the two main uses they get put to in BFG - intercepting other ordnance markers, or reducing the effective turret score of a target ship during an attack run.


By comparison, 'area destruction' that a capital ship will notice requires taking out large areas of fortifications - in the case of the manta; it's those heavy railguns that can take out large (well....not insignificant, anyway) chunks of a ship at once. Similarly, it's the antiship missiles in a marauder/starhawk's belly that are the real threat (again, I'd see deathstrike warheads as not a million miles away), not the handful of point defence lascannons.

That's not to say they'll do nothing, or that you wouldn't fire them....but it's not going to be the thing that really matters in a bombing run.

How about for interceptors? That is, fighters which specialize in destroying like sized vessels, wouldn't lascanons be good for them?

And, yet another question, about macrocannons; what type of propellant do they use? Are they chemical, like gunpowder? Railgun? Mass driver?

Laser cannons still effective against other fighters. Bombers etc.

And off top of my head. Macro cannon is powered by electromagnetic energy.

I'm pretty sure Macro Cannons are one of these crazed 40K things that are on the one hand super-high-tech mass-driver cannons capable of firing all sorts of different things from scatter-shot to warhead-carrying penentrator shot, with ultra-advanced targeting and so on... loaded by chain gangs of hereditary slave workers, driven by whips and drums.

Do you think that if macrocanos had a more efficient loading system that their rate of fire might be higher?

i belive Space marine, and some admech warships will have autio loaders. one ot make up for smaller crews, the other as they have a ability to mantain far more advanced designs.
however Navy... Navy may vary on ships age, and design.

however Navy, just uses often human power.

From Wiki. well one of em

Crew

Unlike the vessels of the Imperial Navy, a Space Marine ship has a relatively small crew. A Space Marine is far too valuable to waste in manning a gun or watching a surveyor screen, and so only the officers aboard a vessel are likely to be Space Marines, as well as the few Techmarines who oversee the engines and perform other mechanical duties. Almost all the ship’s systems are run and monitored by servitors; half-human cyborgs who are wired into the vessel’s weapons, engines and communications apparatus. There are also a few hundred Chapter Serfs to attend to other duties, such as routine cleaning and maintenance, serving the Space Marines during meal times and other such honoured tasks. These serfs come from the Chapter’s home planet or the enclave they protect, many of them Novitiates or applicants who have failed some part of the recruiting or training process. These serfs are fanatically loyal to their superhuman masters, and indoctrinated into many of the lesser orders of the Chapter’s Cult. Although human, they still benefit from remarkable training and access to superior weaponry than is usually found on a naval vessel, making them a fearsome prospect in a boarding action – even without the support of their genetically modified lords.[1]

Small crerw so servitor manned or auto laoder if they mount Macron armaments.