Has GW just teased/hinted at a revised Battlefleet Gothic?

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.

**Da Boss**

I mean nothing about the ships makes sense as written, especially if you take the ridiculous ship sizes from the RPGs seriously. Having the ships be kilometers long with millions of crew means boarding actions of squads as depicted in many novels would be meaningless and you'd nevet fight your way to the bridge in any meaningful amount of time. I headcanon the ships to a much more reasonable size and crew.

**Iracundus**

Da Boss wrote:
I mean nothing about the ships makes sense as written, especially if you take the ridiculous ship sizes from the RPGs seriously. Having the ships be kilometers long with millions of crew means boarding actions of squads as depicted in many novels would be meaningless and you'd nevet fight your way to the bridge in any meaningful amount of time. I headcanon the ships to a much more reasonable size and crew.

Yes, before the RPGs inflated things, Black Library fiction was actually remarkably consistent (within a certain give or take range) with the scale of ships and crew sizes.

It also makes no sense if transports have crew sizes greater than their cargo hold content. That has never been the case AFAIK for any kind of transport ship or vehicle in history.

**Hellebore**

Iirc there were some notes published for BFG somewhere that had notional numbers with 3.5km long cruisers and roughly 1000 crew per hit point, at least for the imperial and chaos ships.

**Iracundus**

Hellebore wrote:
Iirc there were some notes published for BFG somewhere that had notional numbers with 3.5km long cruisers and roughly 1000 crew per hit point, at least for the imperial and chaos ships.

That was Andy Chambers, designer of BFG, from the old mailing list:

My two pennyworth on crew sizes was around 1500-2000 per damage point for Imperial and Chaos capital ships (adjust down a bit for Eldar and up a bit for Orks), but only around 2-500 total for escorts. Space Marine ships, as had been mooted, I would imagine to benefit from a lot of automated systems and wired in servitors to reduce their crew requirements to a minimum and increase their state of readiness in comparison with Navy ships. I would imagine that most Imperial and Chaos capital ships could find transport capacity for troops equal to about 1/3 to 1/2 their crew compliment. Tanks, artillery, Titans etc would need specialist transports to carry in any significant numbers.A far more interesting way of looking at crew numbers is summed up in this excerpt from a short story I've been writing for my own amusement.

Nathan woke to the sound of screaming.
He lurched up with a half-strangled yelp, almost braining himself on the bottom of Kron's bunk. He stared wildly about him, gulping for breath. The oppressive redlight of the bunkroom still surrounded him, the cloying odour of sour sweat and grease still fought the sharp tang of coolant in the air down here. The room was quiet save for the drip of the condensers and the sussurance of night noises made by forty sleeping men.

Nathan wiped a shaky hand across across his eyes and peered over towards Hendriks. If anyone had screamed it would have been Hendriks, he had nightmares nearly every sleep-shift. They all did, but Hendriks just couldn't take it. Perhaps he had a guilty conscience, or perhaps he was just some dumb farmer who was completely terrified by being shut up in one of the Emperor's warships.The scream came again, but it was tinny and distant, carried along by the conduits from another bunkroom. Pity the poor devils in there, thought Nathan, every one of them wide awake and praying the screamer didn't go berserk and start clawing and biting at them. Didn't turn into a wild beast like Fetchin had.

Nathan lay back in the narrow bunk and tried to recapture sleep. He tried to imagine all the other shipmen doing the same. Start with this gundeck. Forty guns with forty(ish) crews each, thats sixteen hundred, another gundeck on the port side for three thousand two hundred. Then there were the lance turrets, port and starboard, nobody seemed to know just how big the crews for those beasts were, call it another sixteen hundred a piece. This was working well, his eyelids were drooping. That was six and a half thousand souls (give or take). The torps probably had a crew bigger than a single gun but less than a whole deck - maybe a thousand. That made seven and a half... engines must be at least two or three thousand more...

https://web.archive.org/web/20041225011114/http://www.wolfedengames.com/battlefleetgothic/crew.htm

**Cyel**

Da Boss wrote:
I mean nothing about the ships makes sense as written, especially if you take the ridiculous ship sizes from the RPGs seriously

What is it, some kind of a magic xylophone? I hope somebody got fired for that blunder

Spoiler:

As for the game itself, without knowing the rules I don't really know what to be excited about. Cool models are cool, but there's a lot of miniature wargames with cool models now. Those with really well written, engaging, smart rules are in short supply though. Knowing GW, I do not hold my breath, but I don't factor out any surprises (KT is a pretty smart game as far as GW standards are concerned).

It being a Heresy game would immediately kill any interest of mine, though, just like LI did. I remember for most of the editions I've played (3-8) the prevalence of Space Marines made any battles involving marines a rather generic, unexciting affair and the marine on marine matchup the epitome of flat and boring. It kind of blew my mind that GW decided to base a game exactly on that

**kodos**

the numbers have always been ridiculous and all over the place in general

the designers also thought about "less" automatism on 40k ships compared to like WW1 or WW2 ships, given some stories and artwork, without knowing how many people those ships needed for their guns

like the WW2 Iowa class had ~100 crew for the 16" turrets, makes ~30 per gun, ~2000 crew total with a ratio of ~1:2 for tooth to tail

so use the 7k gun crew mentioned in the story and you are ~21.000 people on a single ship
now you would add that the ratio to logistics and supply is ~1:5 and you need a 100.000 people per ship to keep that going

and now add that supply needs to be stored for decades given how they operate and this is way beyond anything

40k is meant ti be ridiculously big and unrealistic, the same as Star Wars, so even if you just use what is written in the original rulebook it is beyond what would make sense

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

On Boarding Actions? Boarding Torpedoes and in Heresy era Dreadclaws are fairly adept at hitting the enemy ship right where they don’t want to be hit. Don’t have to fight your way to the Bridge if you can be delivered right to it,

Also short range teleportation. Orks and all flavours of Astartes could do that, tech wise.

Torpedoes could indeed be countered by launching Fighters. But that still forcing your opponent to react. All the time they’re launching Fighters, they’re reducing their Bomber and Assault Boat options. Meanwhile, with enemy Fighters trying to negate Torpedo volleys, your own launch decks can be farting out said Bombers and Assault Boats.

They’re kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t threat.

**Iracundus**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On Boarding Actions? Boarding Torpedoes and in Heresy era Dreadclaws are fairly adept at hitting the enemy ship right where they don’t want to be hit. Don’t have to fight your way to the Bridge if you can be delivered right to it,

Also short range teleportation. Orks and all flavours of Astartes could do that, tech wise.

Torpedoes could indeed be countered by launching Fighters. But that still forcing your opponent to react. All the time they’re launching Fighters, they’re reducing their Bomber and Assault Boat options. Meanwhile, with enemy Fighters trying to negate Torpedo volleys, your own launch decks can be farting out said Bombers and Assault Boats.

They’re kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t threat.

If the person was loading up on small escorts firing torpedoes then they would not have as many points for ships with launch bays. They would also have a fleet with far less durability since by BFG rules, escorts only had 1 Hit with their hull whereas a cruiser would have 8 (for Imperials and Chaos), while cruisers were not 8x as costly as escorts. Admittedly I think Andy Chambers said the fragility of escorts was one mistake he would have liked to do over as there was such a huge gap between escorts and capital ships in terms of durability.

**Tannhauser42**

On the issue of changing model scale, I'm not too worried about it. As long as they stick to the original concept where measurements are from the base stem and not the model, you can use any size models you like. Just be prepared to pull them off their bases if several ships get bunched up.

**Da Boss**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On Boarding Actions? Boarding Torpedoes and in Heresy era Dreadclaws are fairly adept at hitting the enemy ship right where they don’t want to be hit. Don’t have to fight your way to the Bridge if you can be delivered right to it,

Also short range teleportation. Orks and all flavours of Astartes could do that, tech wise.

I'm thinking of sequences in novels where the Astartes are at the bridge and have to get somewhere else to be picked up before the ship falls apart. When the ship is so incredibly enormous it just doesn't make sense that they could traverse it in the timeframes given.

I just think the ship sizes are too big, and the idea of essentially "lost tribes" down in the crew decks is from another genre of sci fi entirely. A cool concept, but it doesn't fit with the sort of warships 40k is about, it's more for massive generation ships where there is no FTL.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Iracundus wrote:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On Boarding Actions? Boarding Torpedoes and in Heresy era Dreadclaws are fairly adept at hitting the enemy ship right where they don’t want to be hit. Don’t have to fight your way to the Bridge if you can be delivered right to it,

Also short range teleportation. Orks and all flavours of Astartes could do that, tech wise.

Torpedoes could indeed be countered by launching Fighters. But that still forcing your opponent to react. All the time they’re launching Fighters, they’re reducing their Bomber and Assault Boat options. Meanwhile, with enemy Fighters trying to negate Torpedo volleys, your own launch decks can be farting out said Bombers and Assault Boats.

They’re kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t threat.

If the person was loading up on small escorts firing torpedoes then they would not have as many points for ships with launch bays. They would also have a fleet with far less durability since by BFG rules, escorts only had 1 Hit with their hull whereas a cruiser would have 8 (for Imperials and Chaos), while cruisers were not 8x as costly as escorts. Admittedly I think Andy Chambers said the fragility of escorts was one mistake he would have liked to do over as there was such a huge gap between escorts and capital ships in terms of durability.

True, but Imperial Fleets could pack in a fair number of Light Cruisers and Cruisers with reasonable amount of Torpedoes. If you really specced in, you would be sacrificing Lances (Dauntless Light Cruisers) and Nova Cannon.

But even a couple of squadrons of Cobras could spit out a decent number of Torpedoes early game in an attempt to force your opponent into action.

God I miss that game.

**Tyran**

40k ships has always been insanely big, 40k writers never had a sense of scale.

No one is every changing that because absurdly big ships is part of the power fantasy.

**Lathe Biosas**

Just remember, some of those boarding torpedoes are filled with Space Marine Bike Squads.

They can cover a lot of distance, very quickly.

**Tyran**

Boarding is also less about taking control of the ship but rather crippling it.

If you end in the ass if the ship, you don't go for the bridge, you go for the engines.

**Fayric**

I thought the ships would be able to transport huge armies complete with loads of warmachines and tanks + crew to run the ship, and supplies to support them for months in transit.
Ad to that the over the top 40k style that would include a cathedral, huge halls to display banners and statues, and other important stuff.

How would these ships not be huge space cities?

Disclaimer, I have avoided this thread because i dont acknowledge it as news and rumours, and dont have any interest in the game. But now Im here for the general discussion that is apparently not a problem.

**Platuan4th**

Fayric wrote:
I thought the ships would be able to transport huge armies complete with loads of warmachines and tanks + crew to run the ship, and supplies to support them for months in transit.

While that's true for some ships(Marines, Orks, Eldar, Tyranids, probably Tau), the Guard, Mechanicum, and Titan Legions use purpose built mass conveyance ships(with the Titan ones specifically designed for both drop pod and lander launches).

**Lathe Biosas**

Platuan4th wrote:
Fayric wrote:
I thought the ships would be able to transport huge armies complete with loads of warmachines and tanks + crew to run the ship, and supplies to support them for months in transit.

While that's true for some ships(Marines, Orks, Eldar, Tyranids, probably Tau), the Guard, Mechanicum, and Titan Legions use purpose built mass conveyance ships(with the Titan ones specifically designed for both drop pod and lander launches).

Then you have House Faustus that likes to use its Teleportariums to beam Knights onto other ships and directly into battlefields.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

The Imperial Guard will hitch a ride on whichever ship they can between Warzones.

Whist the Imperial Fleet of course has dedicated carriers, all ships by necessity have some orbit to ground lander capability. Not necessarily in the numbers to be useful to a Guard Regiment, but they still have to take whatever they can get.

Examples I’m most familiar with are of course from the Ciaphas Cain novels. On occasion, they’re travelling aboard a Navy vessel. Other times, it’s a dedicated troop ship. On others it’s a hastily requisitioned/hired Private Ships.

Provided a given ship can physically house the Regiment and its necessities? It’s fair game, regardless of how efficient the offloading might be.

**Tabletop_Magpie**

So I'm well in to the Siege of Terra arc in the HH novels but I was utterly absorbed by the Solar Wars arc - the fleet battles really fired up my imagination and were not nearly as boring as I thought they'd be. I would be very happy to see BFG return but saying that, there's a new 2.0(?) set for Drop Fleet Commander that is just void war based, and Wayland just announced a new Firestorm Armada, so we may soon end up with a raft of games supported with cool plastic ships.