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Well unless the planet has an effective battery of anti-orbital cannon on a huge coastal installation that's also protected by huge void shields. Whilst the land-side of it is protected by a huge mountain range thus making a land ground assault insanely difficult.

Or (as oft happens) both sides have fleets in orbit so you can't waste time bombarding key installations on the ground because you're being shot at

Flesh and Iron by Henry Zou had a carrier in it IIRC.

 Overread wrote:
Well unless the planet has an effective battery of anti-orbital cannon on a huge coastal installation that's also protected by huge void shields. Whilst the land-side of it is protected by a huge mountain range thus making a land ground assault insanely difficult.

Or (as oft happens) both sides have fleets in orbit so you can't waste time bombarding key installations on the ground because you're being shot at

Which also raises the possibility of orbital defence batteries on naval assets of sufficient size.

Not necessarily common, but for any planet that’s roughly Earth equivalent in land/sea ratio? They’d make sense.

Consider the Pacific Ocean. A huge, wet expanse of Not Much Very Much. If your orbital defences are purely land based, such a feature is a weakness. Get an enemy ship in low geostationary orbit, and you’ve now strictly limited options for swatting it from the ground. Add in sea bases (ideally mobile ones) and you can cover it, any mobility making it damned difficult for the enemy to blast a gap. You’ve at least some chance of dodging direct hits, and have some capacity to shake up your grid, redistributing your assets.

Submersibles could easily carry surface to orbit missiles, remaining largely hidden, or at least much harder to detect.

Mass and boat physics is something fairly easily danced around. Suspensors and Anti-Grav may be relatively rare, but they do exist. In this theoretical application, you don’t need to lift the whole boat out the water. Just offset some of its mass to aid buoyancy and speed. Perhaps only temporary when deploying to a new location.

Also lets consider not every war is going to be world-wide in scale. Planets are BIG and in the 40K setting some are way bigger than Earth.

So in general you've got worlds where you could have lots of local warfare and contention which is big enough to warrant larger scale operations - like ships on sea - but in the grand scheme of things isn't big enough to warrant the Imperium sending a battlefleet in high orbit to bombard your world. Not to mention the radiation and other blowout from mass-firepower being used on that scale.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Consider the Pacific Ocean. A huge, wet expanse of Not Much Very Much. If your orbital defences are purely land based, such a feature is a weakness. Get an enemy ship in low geostationary orbit, and you’ve now strictly limited options for swatting it from the ground. Add in sea bases (ideally mobile ones) and you can cover it, any mobility making it damned difficult for the enemy to blast a gap. You’ve at least some chance of dodging direct hits, and have some capacity to shake up your grid, redistributing your assets.

This seems to assume land-based base defences can only shoot straight up - so need to get to the Pacific Ocean in order to shoot something in orbit above the Pacific Ocean. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have that issue today, never mind in the 40k universe.

Personally if you want Navies to be relevant, I wouldn't go for anything akin to OTL. Forget the "Aircraft Carrier, but larger." Embrace instead 40k's crazy scale creep.

Have giant floating Ad Mech cities - population whatever sounds cool - floating around predominantly ocean worlds, extracting minerals from the ocean floor. Or they don't even need to float, just have giant submerged Hiveworlds, because I'm sure Bioshock can't claim copyright. There's now something worth fighting over on the world - and ships are the mechanism for how you'd do it.

Not necessarily straight up. But the greater the angle (lesser? Guess it depend if straight up is your zero degrees) the more atmosphere the shot needs to deal with.

Not an issue for space bound rockets, as those fly in an arc. But lasers and other weapons (kinetic shells or energy) it may limit firing solutions.

And so having ocean based ones, which can redeploy can mitigate that.

On submerged Hive Worlds, I think they’re already a thing? Might be confusing sources though.

Certainly we’ve seen inverted Hive Cities on death worlds, plunging deep rather than high.

One of the Eisenhorn books had him in a submerged hive with some kind of aquatic view.

I'm willing to bet there's a 40k version of General Westmoreland..

"The first rule of ocean combat is to remove the water.".*


*modified from the original.

regarding brown water navys: I image those also being quite convenient for garrison duty on a lot of worlds. If one imagines some jungle world similar to Brazil or sout east asia with a lot of heavy terrain that can not really be crossed by tanks, few if any roads but lots and lots of rivers of various sizes, patroling the world with armed and armored rivercraft is quite practical. And they can move with a lot less fuel than their terrestrial or aerial counterparts.

Wet navies likely are a huge defense bonus while it is unlikely to be worthy for the attacker to bring a significant wet navy force.

The advantages of a wet navy: considerably cheaper hulls, artillery platforms and mobile airfields than void ships, are only true as long as you don't need to move them from planet to planet. So if you are attacking an enemy planet, they are highly inefficient unless you can built them there, but if you are defending they are very damn useful.

 Tyran wrote:
Wet navies likely are a huge defense bonus while it is unlikely to be worthy for the attacker to bring a significant wet navy force.

The advantages of a wet navy: considerably cheaper hulls, artillery platforms and mobile airfields than void ships, are only true as long as you don't need to move them from planet to planet. So if you are attacking an enemy planet, they are highly inefficient unless you can built them there, but if you are defending they are very damn useful.

It depends on the industrial capacity of the invader, I can see orks throwing together warships and being enthusiastic in doing so, and I can see the nids certainly having aquatic forms to harvest the seas. Smaller ships(more so patrol boats etc) could be stored and deployed, and something like a destroyer or frigate could be prefabricated, some transport ships in universe can be quite massive. It depends on whether you're expecting to need a navy I guess.

 OldMate wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Wet navies likely are a huge defense bonus while it is unlikely to be worthy for the attacker to bring a significant wet navy force.

The advantages of a wet navy: considerably cheaper hulls, artillery platforms and mobile airfields than void ships, are only true as long as you don't need to move them from planet to planet. So if you are attacking an enemy planet, they are highly inefficient unless you can built them there, but if you are defending they are very damn useful.

It depends on the industrial capacity of the invader, I can see orks throwing together warships and being enthusiastic in doing so, and I can see the nids certainly having aquatic forms to harvest the seas. Smaller ships(more so patrol boats etc) could be stored and deployed, and something like a destroyer or frigate could be prefabricated, some transport ships in universe can be quite massive. It depends on whether you're expecting to need a navy I guess.

I agree with Orks and Tyranids, and everyone will have at least some amphibious capability (e.g. Landraiders can drive in the bottom of an ocean).

The issue with bringing actual dedicated boats though is that you are wasting transport space (and mass) on something you cannot even be sure would be useful unless you know for sure you are either attacking an ocean planet or the planet has important targets near the coast.

But when it comes to 40k "standard" planets, hive worlds are kinda infamous for being desolated desert wastelands outside the hive cities, which unlike modern cities aren't dependent on access to natural water (which would be highly polluted anyways). Industrial worlds have similar issues in that their oceans are often described as polluted to the point a wet navy would dissolve in them. And even with worlds that still have an usable ocean, you cannot be sure there will be valuable targets near the ocean and you are risking the enemy just not needing to fight you on or near the ocean and now you have a lot of useless heavy wargear.

If you are a crusading force that is conquering world after world, it doesn't make much sense to bring a wet navy (unless you can build one on the fly like Orks and Tyranids).

But on the other hand you are building a PDF on a world with usable oceans? sure make a wet navy, it is relatively cheap and you know it will be useful.

Iirc there is ships mentioned in Gaunt's ghosts, at least some guy from ghosts was a marine at tanith, and there is a lot of ships in anarch novel mentioned. They mostly used to harvest fruita of the sea, but who forbid urdesh clans use them in local wars?

Also militarum have "medium" dropships like devourer which can deploy whole regiment with armoured support and transport. What can stop them deliver actual sea carrier?

kabaakaba wrote:

Also militarum have "medium" dropships like devourer which can deploy whole regiment with armoured support and transport. What can stop them deliver actual sea carrier?

Eyeballing the size, they are too small to carry a sea carrier.

Could maybe deliver a corvette though.

I mean there should be a larger dropships to put carrier inside. Cause devourer not the biggest one.

Do the dropships need stable ground to land on? Does the Imperium have anti-grav sufficient on these enormous Dropships? If stable ground is needed water landings wouldn't be feasible.

Personally I think water ships would be a PDF thing, that the IG/IN take control of as needed.

Crusades and invasions don’t happen by accident. If an invading force could make use of a wet navy, I’m sure the Departmento Munitorum can provide with a little help from the Admech. If titans can be landed, so can large vessels. Prefab units are Definately an option given the Imperiums STC tech base.

Ford class carriers are “only” 350m or so long. Plenty of room in cruiser class IN ships for a few to be brought along. Alternatively, I’m sure there is an STC option for a floating dry dock to build some new ones on planet.

Anti-grav tech may be easier on larger vessels due to the ability to fit larger power plants. Every IN ship seems to have artificial gravity, but fitting grav plates to anything larger than land speeders and jetbikes was basically lost until Cawl came along.

Also there's value in a ship that can float on its own without grav. If you lose grav whilst on land you crash but you can survive; if your ship on sea requires grav to stay afloat and you lose it - you're sunk.

But of course you could make use of it to smooth the ride; deal with storms and help provide stability for firing larger weapons.

I always wondered about the Ork submersible, wethere they were engineered to be submarines, or they were just boats that kept sinking.

Weapons wise I can easily imagine an Imperial Warship, if powered by plasma generators, to field Titan Class weapons.

The engine may not be as efficient designs as for Titans, I’ll happily accept that. So it might “only” be Scout Class weapons. But even those would prove potent against any real world equivalents.

Energy based weapons would also, arguably, free you up from the risk of a magazine hit.

2000 AD's Rogue Trooper had lots of naval activity on Nu-Earth.
That were alongside drop pods, all sorts of aircraft and spaceships. When a portion of the war takes place to control parts of the 'Scum Sea', there are boats.

As for the point about "there are flyers, no need for boats", someone has to recover the crews when they crash. Crashing on land might hurt a lot, but there's a chance for the pilot and crew to get to safety. Not on water.

The problem with energy weapon that its shoot in straight line. even for ww2 it's common to have naval battle without seen each other and firing bayond horizon. So I think it's should be missiles for naval as is it now

I think we agree that wet navies could have a roll for PDF/defensive armies.

What happens when a water world needs to tithe regiments to the guard?

Sure the need to drop some boats onto a planet are going to be few and far between, but with millions of worlds and a universe always at war, it will come up. Probably not infrequently.

The guard might be slow and ponderous, but it does grind things down. There might be a planet that needs a naval invasion, and it might take a decade to raise and/or redeploy assets to get a water world under control again, but that’s OK. It’s not going anywhere.

Logistics might be fun, but if you can drop titans, you can drop battleships. Which would fill a similar role.

Well, orbital drop ships for ocean going warships seem possible. Relatively rare, sure. But how many would you need?

We know technology is largely standardised across The Imperium. Local variants, yes. But seemingly if you’ve been trained to drive a Leman Russ, you can drive any Leman Russ variant - though I’ll accept the more exotically armed may require specifically trained gunners. But how long might that training actually take?

So, it could be that once planetside, trained naval crews would take over the PDF assets?

But as has been said before, with craft capable of safely and swiftly delivering Titans from orbit, specialised carriers for, well…carriers are well within the bounds of possibility.

They may even be as basic as space going cradles. The ship needn’t be crewed for the journey, so you wouldn’t necessarily have to worry about breathable atmosphere. Unless it’s a submersible, which would be air tight and thus deliverable fully armed, crewed and ready to go asap.

The other upside there is something like the Pacific Ocean? You’ve a wealth of possible Landing Zones. No pesky mountains, forests and other terrain getting in your way and limiting your options. Just…pick a patch of open sea, hopefully free from enemy forces and close-ish to friendly ones, and await splashdown.

Actually. Thinking about the drop? Would it be terribly hard to have the innards of a wet naval ship airtight? So you could bundle the crew up in there, safe and sound, so once it’s on the wet stuff, throw open the doors and man hour positions. I mean, there are already safety doors and bulkheads and that in warship designs, and have been for decades. Add a bit of future tech wizardry into that, and whilst far from capable of operating in space, you can at least survive the drop?

[Stuff]

 Skinnereal wrote:
[Stuff]

Yes. Exactly.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I always wondered about the Ork submersible, wethere they were engineered to be submarines, or they were just boats that kept sinking.

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B


Automatically Appended Next Post:
@MDG - a quick Google suggests that modern naval vessels can be secured for NBC operations, which would suggest they can be sealed against atmosphere now. Exhaust ports might need special seals that open potentially be sacrificial on landing.

I don’t see why a titan grade plasma reactor would be less efficient when fitted on a different chassis.

 Flinty wrote:
..
modern naval vessels can be secured for NBC operations, which would suggest they can be sealed against atmosphere now...

...NBC operations? What, like filming episodes of America's Got Talent?

Also I think energy weapon batteries/capacitors would let go with a bang if damaged in certain ways. Just Google EV or electric bike/scooter fires.

Oh it’s far worse than that if the powering reactor goes.

Capacitor? A bang for sure, but not “how is the road also on fire now” bang?