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.

We have a fight. Brave boarding party hit enemy's ship on their cestus ram and...
End what next? I mean in every novel we seen same gak. They rushing toward decks like it's running stadium. Yeah there not so brave defenders. In most cases just some hobos. But wait? What is it? iTS A BULKHEAD DOOR!!!

Sarcasm a said where all that ol' good hermetic doors? It's a space ship in an age of constant war and it'll shall be logical to shut them to prevent oxygen leak(and dead bodies leak from hole in hull, which we seen in every damn space battle . Imperial ships do not have emergency protocol which shut all doors locked? It's have and we see it in Cain novels. So how many meltas mines do boarding party can bring with them? And how many doors on mile long corridor? How long it took to cut them all with meltas torch? What's happening with brave boarders when they stuck before next door...

P.S. sorry just read another groks product in novels and get a bit frustrated

The fun of something like a Cestus is you can, with a lot of luck and some pilot skill, arrive somewhere the enemy crew really don’t want you to be. Engine Room, Warp Drive or Bridge.

From there, you’re likely deploying specialist units. For instance, Terminator Squads with Chainfists, which make a mockery of flesh and bulkheads whilst being all but immune to counter fire. Power Armour with Boarding Shields with Las-Cutters and Melta Charges distributed within the squad and Bolters for squishing enemy crew.

I do wonder if there’s an Eldar Aspect dedicated to such actions. But Warp Spiders would be an absolute nightmare to face in such close confines. Why go through a door, when you can short range teleport, and then soup anyone on the other side in the blink of an eye.

Orks? Don’t worry about doors, that’s wot Dragnatz’s head is for, and the Nobz’ power klaw.

There is genestealers cultist boarding RT ship. No fancy things. But instead of shutting doors they fight endless swarm...
I'll wouldn't whining if there is all that fancy guys. But most times there is tacticals who have single melta-bomb... I understand that if they close does novel ended at that page, but God-Emperor how it's stupid.

I vaguely remember the Night Lords omnibus having a half decent boarding action. Lots of dialogue about units being delayed or cut off. As well as the general confusion of trying to navigate the labyrinth of a locked down ship. It's definitely one of those things that vary between writers.

In Gav Thorpe's Caliban Trilogy it starts off with a Boarding Torpedo filled with Ravenwing Bikers.

Nothing like speeding down an enemy ship on bike!

 kabaakaba wrote:
There is genestealers cultist boarding RT ship. No fancy things. But instead of shutting doors they fight endless swarm...

In this specific example, shutting doors won't help. Vents, pipes, crawl spaces, anywhere that allows movement of anything, the Genestealers can and will get into, and by then it's already too late. For GSC specifically, mining equipment works on doors as well as it does on rock.

If we're talking other forces, the various human forces (Imperial and Chaos), Votaan, and T'au all have boarding equipment needed for such an action. Necrons tend to cheat with their whole "disintegrate the door" option. I would assume Aeldari Corsairs and Drukhari have the equipment needed, being pirates and all.

Boarding actions in 40k don't typically happen between 2 undamaged ships. By the time the ships close into range to initiate a boarding action, their target has already taken a beating of some variety. Hulls will be breached, power lost in sections, and compartments vented into vacuum. The defenders will certainly have an advantage of the fortified ground, but a boarding action in BFG terms is a massed assault between ships that can easily overwhelm an opponent. Locked doors will hamper the enemy, but they will also hamper the response to the assault, especially when the attackers are swarming into your ship from multiple entry points. Initiating a boarding action takes a certain amount of planning and intent, and it is a safe bet softening up the target will be part of this.

Hit and Run attacks, again in BFG terms, is usually what people think of when talking about boarding actions; the handful of boarding torpedoes, thunderhawks, other assault boats, disgorging small but elite strike teams onto a ship. Or even teleporting troops directly onto a ship; all Capitol Ships that aren't crippled can initiate one, even Imperial Navy ships with only armsmen and no Space Marines can do it. These are the attacks that would be hampered by layered defenses, but they aren't there for a prolonged fight. They want to do a quick smash and grab, and this is reflected by most of the attacks only temporary disabling/ degrading maneuverability or weapon systems. Only elite troops have a hope of any lasting damage, and that by lighting fires. Escorts are the exception to this, where they can be killed out right by the attacks because their small scale limits the number of defenders and the depth of defenses.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

I do wonder if there’s an Eldar Aspect dedicated to such actions. But Warp Spiders would be an absolute nightmare to face in such close confines. Why go through a door, when you can short range teleport, and then soup anyone on the other side in the blink of an eye.

Ah, but those spiders have to be extra careful not to accidentally splork themselves by accidentally teleporting themselves into a wall or piece of equipment they can't see! (So they're either absolutely devastating or borderline unusable. I think there's a story out there somewhere where an autarch with a warp jump generator pack solos a bunch of people as part of a boarding action?)

Dragons, avengers, and banshees probably love boarding actions. Melt through doors. Fill the hallways with ninja stars, and let your screams echo through the halls so you can guarantee they're stunned after you approach from a blind corner.

FWIW, we also see D-cannons being used as part of corsair boarding actions in Path of the Outcast. Don't have to melt through the bulkhead if you can just teleport chunks of it into the warp instead.

I’d imagine there may be Warp Spider Temples with an emphasis on training for such attacks.

If, and yes it is an If, their Warp Jump Generators can be used so precisely? You’ve a near ideal boarding party. Not only pretty heavily armoured, but able to go pretty much where they want, with weapons that sport zero risk of breaching the hull, whilst being devastating against crew members.

And all could be done really speedily.

Only downside is they’re not exactly packing the tools to reliably damage infrastructure.

Sure, you could jump into an internally sealed area, goo whoever happens to be in there at the time, throw any interesting looking switches and dials to “Uh Oh” and then jump out again. Which could depending on the door design, prevent anyone getting back inside to turn the safeties back on.

But even so, just zipping around the ship doing terror raids could easily mess up the overall defence. I can’t imagine many crews would be happy assuming it’s merely a relative handful, not a massive boarding action.

So, as part of a wider boarding force? You can keep the defenders off balance and spread out, possibly preventing them mounting any kind of suitably organised defence.

Guns don't work if there are no gunners.

Do we know how spiders find their destination?

Even if it’s completely blind/dead reckoning, when you have seers on your side that can be mitigated. But I could easily see a farseer (or even a warlock) Telling a WS “On your 7th jump of the assault, go an extra 10 meters to get behind the ambush at the door”

If it’s more “visualize your destination” which is easy if you have LOS, I could also see a seer scrying the bridge and planting that image in the WS’s mind. “go here, kill everyone”

--

While the aspects have all the tools between them to be devastating in boarding actions, I think it’s worth mentioning storm guardians. Even the basic craftworlds militia is more then a match for basic humans. Flamers and fusions for cutting through bulkheads and clearing barricades. Embedded warlocks for psychic support. Some power swords for tougher foes.

From a pure craftworld POV. Harlis and Corsairs are better, but also not a classic part of the warhost. But then, you are probably much more likely to see a Corsair in a boarding action...

You'd have thought boarding actions would be fairly easy to defend against by sealing sections and venting the atmosphere and messing about with the artificial gravity

mrFickle wrote:
You'd have thought boarding actions would be fairly easy to defend against by sealing sections and venting the atmosphere and messing about with the artificial gravity

Doing that would also hinder damage control teams, and the general function of the ship. Which if you are at the point where you are being boarded, are probably already working overtime with enough stresses.

Sections of the ship are probably already vented to space due to damage. And the incoming boarders are more likely to be void suited then the ratings manning the ship.

And nothing is getting fixed if everything is vented and locked. No systems repaired. That might be a call the captain is willing to make, but it’s not a no brainer.

It also depends on how much damage has been done to the ship pre-boarding.

If systems are down, cut or locked due to the ship being damaged by weapons fire it's not going to be an option to vent atmosphere.

Also, venting a section of the ship means precious air is lost. All well and good for Astartes with sealed armour but less so for squishy mortals.

I figure Imperial ships don't have a lot of automated systems due to lack of knowledge of how to maintain and repair them and also distrust of machine minds. So it's probably ridiculously slow trying to do stuff like seal ship sections or vent gas because you have to get actual people into position to pull big heavy levers and so on.

But yeah, the main problem (I said this somewhere here recently) is the ridiculous scale of the ships as given by later accounts. Something so large would be largely unconcerned with a boarding action as they'd not really be able to make much headway in the timescales involved.

Boarding actions are tremendous from a drama point of view though. And they really show Space Marines at their best, heavily armoured brutes that don't care if the hull is breached slaughtering crew with abandon.

A good reminder that 40k is science-fantasy and runs more on the rule of cool then physics.

Is it cool to ram boarding torpedoes into the hull of a kilometer long warship and fight your way to the bridge? Heck yah! Make any sense? mumble mumble...

Depends on the faction doing the boarding. At one end of the spectrum we have the basic humans that kinda sucks at offensive boarding, on the other Tyranid carnifexes literally ripping through bulkheads with ease.

Different factions will have different tools for the job.

 Nevelon wrote:
A good reminder that 40k is science-fantasy and runs more on the rule of cool then physics.

Is it cool to ram boarding torpedoes into the hull of a kilometer long warship and fight your way to the bridge? Heck yah! Make any sense? mumble mumble...

A kilometer? Only if it's a Cobra Class Destroyer. A Marine Battle Barge is what? 8.2 Kilometers long?

See, by adding ridiculous sizes to our equation, it makes more sense.

I know the book is commonly slated by many as been dross, but in The Damnation of Pythos, there is a fairly excellent account of a boarding action by IH's against EC, with also a step by step lead up and detailed plan that included a fairly justified reason for the boarding action to take place, as well as a detailed account of the exfil of the IH's.

Also, the NL book above I'm fairly certain is Prince of Crows which includes arguably the most bonkers but entertaining boarding of an enemy ship by Sevatar, and the absolute whirlwind of chaos during a boarding action - however, since it is the NL's and Sev was following Curze being a lonatic, it's no surprise it was chaotic.

The thing with boarding actions for me mostly though is, the only species that should really be able to do it by a boarding torpedo and the like is space marines and other superhuman warriors and equivilants. Most other species would go splat, or be so wiped by the G forces they would be all but useless. They have to access via a ship landing into a dock.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
A good reminder that 40k is science-fantasy and runs more on the rule of cool then physics.

Is it cool to ram boarding torpedoes into the hull of a kilometer long warship and fight your way to the bridge? Heck yah! Make any sense? mumble mumble...

A kilometer? Only if it's a Cobra Class Destroyer. A Marine Battle Barge is what? 8.2 Kilometers long?

See, by adding ridiculous sizes to our equation, it makes more sense.

Did get me thinking about the crew population density.

Imperial Ships vast, closer to space faring towns and cities than warships. Certainly crews can be generational. But by no means are the majority combat trained. With the likes of Battleships being many kilometers long? How many decks are there? How spread out are the crew, especially in a combat situation.

Of course, Ork ships are something really quite different. Everyone there is just spoiling for a fight, indeed they possibly think quite highly of you for bringing the scrap to them.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
A good reminder that 40k is science-fantasy and runs more on the rule of cool then physics.

Is it cool to ram boarding torpedoes into the hull of a kilometer long warship and fight your way to the bridge? Heck yah! Make any sense? mumble mumble...

A kilometer? Only if it's a Cobra Class Destroyer. A Marine Battle Barge is what? 8.2 Kilometers long?

See, by adding ridiculous sizes to our equation, it makes more sense.

Did get me thinking about the crew population density.

Imperial Ships vast, closer to space faring towns and cities than warships. Certainly crews can be generational. But by no means are the majority combat trained. With the likes of Battleships being many kilometers long? How many decks are there? How spread out are the crew, especially in a combat situation.

Of course, Ork ships are something really quite different. Everyone there is just spoiling for a fight, indeed they possibly think quite highly of you for bringing the scrap to them.

Jumping off the floating cities and generational crew, are the crew numbers (such as we get) the active crew to man/fly/fight the ship? Or the total population? Children to young to serve, teachers to school them, old folks to infirm to work the guns, but full of wisdom? Artisans scrimshawing scrap to sell at the next port? Transient stowaways who act as middlemen between rival gundecks?

You can talk about logistics. How many support staff per fighting man. How deep does the non-combatant “civilian” life of a imperial warship go?

That’s pretty much a setting, and a discussion unto itself.

But there’ll be all the above I’d imagine. I mean, how is that society structured? Are crew specialisations hereditary, and so the society is a kind of caste system? Are the young’uns taught a Comprehensive Curriculum, with the tutors themselves trained to spot relevant aptitudes and so eventually pass the kid on for an apprenticeship in whichever role they’ve demonstrated a knack for?

Because those are two quite different societal structures.

Maybe it varies ship to ship or fleet to fleet.

As per Andy Chambers, the BFG scale was 0.5 km for escorts like Cobras up to 6 km length for battleships. For a long time Black Library stories were consistent with this scale, until FFG and then a newer crowd of authors started crew size and ship size inflation to a point where it makes little sense.

His crew scale was 1500-2000 crew per damage point (more for Orks, less for Eldar) yields a crew size of 18,000-24,000 for an Imperial battleship.

Stupidly inflated crew and ship sizes create downstream illogical situations, like transports where the crew is larger than the number of troops transported (something which I don't think has ever been true in all of human history for any kind of vessel transporting troops), and how less numerous races like Eldar corsairs can still fight effectively in boarding actions against ludicrous crew sizes.

At its most simple, an inflated size for ship length means somebody boards the enemy ship in the wrong spot might not make it to the battle for any vital spot of the ship in time simply because it takes so long to walk there.

 kabaakaba wrote:
We have a fight. Brave boarding party hit enemy's ship on their cestus ram and...
End what next? I mean in every novel we seen same gak. They rushing toward decks like it's running stadium. Yeah there not so brave defenders. In most cases just some hobos. But wait? What is it? iTS A BULKHEAD DOOR!!!

Sarcasm a said where all that ol' good hermetic doors? It's a space ship in an age of constant war and it'll shall be logical to shut them to prevent oxygen leak(and dead bodies leak from hole in hull, which we seen in every damn space battle . Imperial ships do not have emergency protocol which shut all doors locked? It's have and we see it in Cain novels. So how many meltas mines do boarding party can bring with them? And how many doors on mile long corridor? How long it took to cut them all with meltas torch? What's happening with brave boarders when they stuck before next door...

P.S. sorry just read another groks product in novels and get a bit frustrated

Terminator Chainfists are specifically designed to cut through armored bulkheads. Powerfists can get through them too, though just not quite as reliably.

The 40k universe is notoriously wonky when it comes to numbers, but it's especially true for spaceship sizes and crew.

Iracundus wrote:
As per Andy Chambers, the BFG scale was 0.5 km for escorts like Cobras up to 6 km length for battleships. For a long time Black Library stories were consistent with this scale, until FFG and then a newer crowd of authors started crew size and ship size inflation to a point where it makes little sense.

What does a 500-meter "escort" ship even do in a space battle that warrants being so large, I wonder? Even assuming that the engines, warp drive and other essentials take up most of the space, a ship that large would assuredly carry enough armament to lay waste to dozens of cities. That 6 km battleship wouldn't stand an inkling of a chance if the escort ship shot first. This isn't exactly the realm of escort duty.

It's as if 40k ship size ratios are based on technology from the Age of Sail... except that in a vacuum, it would be easy to give even a mere cannonball a kinetic energy comparable to the yield of a small nuke.

Stupidly inflated crew and ship sizes create downstream illogical situations, like transports where the crew is larger than the number of troops transported (something which I don't think has ever been true in all of human history for any kind of vessel transporting troops),

Especially when you consider fleet-based chapters. An entire codex-compliant chapter (or hell, most non-compliant ones) would make up only a small fraction of the complement of one moderately-sized ship. Presumably they have thousands of auxiliary troops too, but at this point they're not so much a chapter with a fleet, as a fleet that carries a chapter.

Such a fleet would have more nuclear warheads than it has individual Marines.

.

It’s been explicit that Marines are a tiny minority on their own ships.

They’re not Naval Officers. They’re Marines.

And so the crew of the ship are Chapter Serfs and Servants.

-Guardsman- wrote:


What does a 500-meter "escort" ship even do in a space battle that warrants being so large, I wonder? Even assuming that the engines, warp drive and other essentials take up most of the space, a ship that large would assuredly carry enough armament to lay waste to dozens of cities.

Except by the currently accepted numbers (that the licenced RPG maker just made up) the smallest escorts are not 500m long, they're 1500m long!

Especially when you consider fleet-based chapters. An entire codex-compliant chapter (or hell, most non-compliant ones) would make up only a small fraction of the complement of one moderately-sized ship. Presumably they have thousands of auxiliary troops too, but at this point they're not so much a chapter with a fleet, as a fleet that carries a chapter.

Such a fleet would have more nuclear warheads than it has individual Marines.

Yes.Realistically in a marine chapter the marines are pretty much irrelevant. They have a fleet of giant ships with crews of tens or hundreds of thousands, that utterly trivialise the military might of the handful of actual marines. And of course the numbers of marines these ships can canonically carry make no sense whatsoever. Like their small escort ships can carry a single squad and their gear, except that escort is mile long! It would trivially carry a whole chapter.

Ultimately it depends on the ship, the attacker and the defender.

Sending Human marines (not space marines but the Naval Breachers and their various iterations) to board a Tyranid Hive Ship is an exercise in Doordashing food. The ship is likely literally crawling with Tyranid Organisms and potentially so inimical to life as we know it to be to hostile to board. Nothing like breaching what you think is a membrane to step into some gigantic stomach or warrior form vesical.

But sending Orks to board a human or Eldar ship is likely going to prove rather effective (if you have enough to achieve an effect on the Eldar since they're probably some of the best 1 for 1 combatants in the galaxy.

Also what is the size of a ship, how damaged is it?
If a Lunar Class is engaging a rebel (not chaos) Cobra and sends boarders it probably can deploy a significant portion of the Cobra's crew as combatants in this action and can easily disable the vessel and take its time. You could probably demand a surrender as well under threat of destruction. Space Marines meanwhile would rapidly engage and disable the vessel, frankly its probably their best usage environment. Heavily Armored infantry still reasonably close to the baseline's size with sealed suits and armament sufficient to overwhelm anything short of a tank or peer Heavy Infantry. Terminators are probably at their best in these environments, as are Assault Centurions. (Space Hulk with Centurions when?)

Necrons are likely the best at boarding actions simply due to their incredible control of real space, teleportation, resilience and ability to ignore certain restrictions. A Necron boarding action just teleporting inside your ship, gaussing your reactor's control rods or safety mechanisms and then annihilating your drive stacks is probably the best way to go about doing this. Would love to see some specialist Immortals doing a boarding action like this.

A Tyranid boarding action is a nightmare. It could be delivered by massive kilometer long proboscis from a living ship, biting into your armor and then spraying a thick liquid full of bioforms into your ship. Rapidly shuts down the breach's defenders and protects the organisms in transit. Then you have Carnifexes, Hormagaunts, Genestealers, Pyrovores and other creatures swarming into your ship. Go ahead, take on that Tyranid Warrior with a shotgun, let me know how it goes. Plus the omni present boarding pod.

Iracundus wrote:
As per Andy Chambers, the BFG scale was 0.5 km for escorts like Cobras up to 6 km length for battleships. For a long time Black Library stories were consistent with this scale, until FFG and then a newer crowd of authors started crew size and ship size inflation to a point where it makes little sense.

His crew scale was 1500-2000 crew per damage point (more for Orks, less for Eldar) yields a crew size of 18,000-24,000 for an Imperial battleship.

Unless my math is totally wrong, that's tens of thousands of cubic metres per crewman, equivalent to one person manning an entire early 20th century capital ship. To get the crew density of actual warships, you would need to have something like 99% of the volume filled with unmanned systems. While there's certainly a possibility that 40k void-ships have vast tanks of reaction mass, I doubt that would explain it (even realistic spacecraft would only dedicate around two thirds of their mass and maybe 90% of their volume to reaction mass). Art does make it seem like the interiors are very spacious and sparsely populated, but still not to the extent that a few tens of thousands of people in several cubic kilometres (billions of cubic metres) of ship would imply.

 Perfect Organism wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
As per Andy Chambers, the BFG scale was 0.5 km for escorts like Cobras up to 6 km length for battleships. For a long time Black Library stories were consistent with this scale, until FFG and then a newer crowd of authors started crew size and ship size inflation to a point where it makes little sense.

His crew scale was 1500-2000 crew per damage point (more for Orks, less for Eldar) yields a crew size of 18,000-24,000 for an Imperial battleship.

Unless my math is totally wrong, that's tens of thousands of cubic metres per crewman, equivalent to one person manning an entire early 20th century capital ship. To get the crew density of actual warships, you would need to have something like 99% of the volume filled with unmanned systems. While there's certainly a possibility that 40k void-ships have vast tanks of reaction mass, I doubt that would explain it (even realistic spacecraft would only dedicate around two thirds of their mass and maybe 90% of their volume to reaction mass). Art does make it seem like the interiors are very spacious and sparsely populated, but still not to the extent that a few tens of thousands of people in several cubic kilometres (billions of cubic metres) of ship would imply.

Your math is probably wrong. Ten of thousands of cubic metres per crewman is unlikely. I don't have the volume, but going by length. (I cant remember if it was 3.2km or 3.6km for a Lunar class)
8*1500 = 12000 crew or 8*2000 = 16000 crew. 12000 crew/3200 metres = 3.75 12000 crew / 3600 metres = 3.33 16000/3200 = 5 1600/3600 = 4.44 crew per metre. So 3.3 to 5 crew per metre.

1980ish USS Iowa had ~1800 crew and 262m long, so 6.87 crew per metre.
HMS Vanguard 1975 crew and 248 long, so 7.96 crew per metre.

Bit sparser than IRL battleships. But not that out there. Volume will change things but this will give better ballpark figures.