Void ships armament

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**kabaakaba**

BL novels confuse me again and again. Different authors describe void craft weapon different way.
How in name of God-Emperor it's actually work?
Lance:
Some authors said it's short pulse of energy which can make hole and bake ground if hit into it
An other say it's continuous beam/ray.

Nova:
It's shoot projectile which make big plasma boom
Or it's shoot various shells including one opening warp rift.

I'm ok with very different torpedoes in novels. But nova and lance baffling me.

**Gert**

There are different types of Lance weapons, so the descriptions can be applied to both.
And Nova Cannons have multiple ammunition types, so again, different descriptions can be applied.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Yup. Broad categories describing purpose, rather than specific design. Like Exterminatus. That’s a sentence imposed upon a world, rather than a specific method of destruction.

**Iracundus**

Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, on lances:

The attacks that ships make are divided into two sorts, direct firing and ordnance attacks. Direct fire attacks are weapons like lasers, fusion beams and plasma launchers which are fired and hit almost immediately even across tens of thousands of kilometres. Lances are incredibly high powered direct fire energy weapons capable of burning straight through an armoured hull or cutting an escort ship in two. On Imperial and Chaos ships lances are usually mounted in huge turrets with quad or triple energy projectors which focus into a concentrated beam of destruction.

Visually this would be along the lines of the advanced races’ weapons in B5, like the Minbari and Shadow ships - a coruscating beam of pure energy which is swept across a minute arc.

A lance turret would need to work something like this;

Immense power conduits enter at the bottom of the turret, feeding into house-sized capacitors and storage cells which form most of its base (ie magazine/ammo hoist area). The power conduits tap into the ship’s main power core, which in turn is energised by huge, throbbing plasma reactors.

The lance weapons themselves would be enormous energy projectors - each one the size of a factory chimney. They work by combining focussed coherent light (ie lasers) and electromagnetic pulses as a propellant for highly energised particles (ie plasma). The closest naturally occurring equivalent would be a solar flare but foccussed into a narrow beam. This means that lances would consist of a central particle/plasma chamber surounded by a series of enormous electromagnetic coils forming the barrel and muzzle, behind this would be a cluster of laser rods in the place of the breech/shell.

That said, sufficiently powerful lasers can also count as lances (see Firestorm frigate escort entry in BFG rulebook).

Eldar pulsars are treated like lances but they are rapid firing high energy lasers. Dark Eldar lances use dark matter.

Tau ion cannons are treated like lances.

Tyranid bio-plasma are treated like short range lances that ignore void shields due to their low velocity (something nearly all Black Library authors seem to get wrong).

Necron particle whips are treated as lances.

Essentially any sufficiently high energy laser or particle beam or plasma/ion projectile with sufficient armor penetration gets treated like a lance. Where they differ from normal weapon batteries (which can include plasma and energy weapons) seems to be basically the size of the weapon and the RoF. Individual lance weapons make a mockery of armor, but weapon batteries can potentially deliver more damage over time.

**Lord Zarkov**

Iracundus wrote:

Essentially any sufficiently high energy laser or particle beam or plasma/ion projectile with sufficient armor penetration gets treated like a lance. Where they differ from normal weapon batteries (which can include plasma and energy weapons) seems to be basically the size of the weapon and the RoF. Individual lance weapons make a mockery of armor, but weapon batteries can potentially deliver more damage over time.

Bio plasma aside, essentially ‘Lance’ is a catch all term for direct fire, armour penetrating weapons, whereas ‘weapons batteries’ are essentially area of effect weapons, through some combination of very high rate of fire and actual explosive warheads.

Best seen in comparison on the effect Eldar holofields have on them in BFG (which project fake images of the ships).

Lances have a high chance of straight missing (as they target a fake image) whereas weapons batteries get a ‘column shift’ as if they were fired in a less beneficial aspect - you’re targeting is somewhat off but there is such saturation it’s hard to miss entirely.

Either category can be a range of different weapon types (especially weapons batteries), though for Imperial/Chaos/Orks/Eldar lances tend to be lasers.

**Iracundus**

Eldar seem to like lasers as weapon batteries too as Aconite escorts for example are explicitly described as having lasers.

Although the imagery and fiction seems to like chain gangs hauling macro cannon shells, a good portion of the main firepower component of Imperial weapon batteries seem to be plasma cannons, as the Murder class cruisers are described as having some of the best plasma gun decks ever built by the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Tyrant class cruiser was described as using super-fired plasma weaponry to achieve greater range.

Taking bio-plasma into account, the key thing for lances is they are all armor penetrating weapons that require precision targeting. Tyranid bio plasma weapons have extremely short effective range it seems more because of the limitations of being able to accurately hit something than anything else, as the bio plasma is described as slow moving, though as mentioned the upside is they pass through void shields.

Weapon batteries are all other area effect weapons or have high rates of fire so they can saturate a target area in fire, making precision targeting less vital.