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Imperial, and so presumably Chaos, ships are noted for high, vaulted ceilings in places. Not something noted in modern battleships.

I don’t think that’s going to be all of them, but it’s still a space wasting feature in certain areas.

Not sure if that’s throws off the calculations any.

The Ark Mechanicus Speranza had a large enough internal space for titan battles (but Speranza was noted as being size of a continent).

The Imperium is also a mix of high tech and low tech. So although they have chain gangs hauling on chains to reload guns and torpedo tubes, they also have black box machines that nobody touches except maybe the Tech-Priests and even then probably only when it is docked at a shipyard. These can include the warp engines, the realspace engines, the reactors, the various steampunk-like computer systems, recycling systems for air and water, and lots of power conduits (plus redundant backups). Then there are also the warehouses used to store consumables like food. The mistake people make is calculating a volume for a ship and then thinking to fill that volume with crew, whereas the actual number of crew is really dependent on how many are actually necessary to run the ship.

The Imperium is known for lavish quarters for the highest admirals (Lord Ravensburg was said to have had a set of luxurious quarters to house his concubines), grand vaulted open spaces (to awe individuals and to show them how insignificant they are) and rat warren crawlspaces and living quarters for the low level crewmen.

It’s also not a uniform thing.

So Lunar Class A might have the same pattern weapons as Lunar Class B. However, Lunar Class A has still operational autoloaders. Lunar Class B’s auto loaders have long since broken down to an irreparable state (damage or neglect), and so Lunar Class B depends on human power to reload its batteries.

Lunar Class C has energy based broadside weapons, and so gets its ammo straight from the ship’s Plasma Reactor.

So not everything is in the exact same state of decay and disrepair. And it won’t necessarily be forever. Lunar Class B may still be repaired at some point in the future, if it happens to dock over a suitably equipped Forgeworld or Naval Station. Until then, what is presumably a jury rigged manual reloading cycle will remain in place. Because it works well enough.

It might remain knackered for weeks, months, years, even decades. It might remain knackered forever.

This is something we see elsewhere within The Imperium. For instance, the Shadowsword Super Heavy Tank. Should the Volcano Cannon be damaged or breakdown and the local area doesn’t have the resources to repair or replace? It can be replaced with another gun, changing its classification.

Whether any such adjusted examples are ever converted back is something I don’t know.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


This is something we see elsewhere within The Imperium. For instance, the Shadowsword Super Heavy Tank. Should the Volcano Cannon be damaged or breakdown and the local area doesn’t have the resources to repair or replace? It can be replaced with another gun, changing its classification.

Whether any such adjusted examples are ever converted back is something I don’t know.

Likely no. We have the example of the Dictator class cruiser which arose from replacing the damaged lance turrets of Lunar class cruisers with launch decks. For the 40K Imperium, lances are rarer and trickier pieces of technology so repairing the lance turrets would presumably have taken longer as there were no parts in supply or would have taken longer simply for the repair process and they needed the ship back in action as quickly as possible. Once converted, we have no examples of Dictator cruisers being converted back, and then once the class was accepted, there were ships built as Dictator class from the very beginning.

Tygre wrote:


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.

Wow, everything you said is wrong.

Volume increases to the cube of length, that's basic mathematics.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
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.

Playing around with a model of a cruiser in meshmixer, I'm getting slightly less than half a billion cubic meters (4.8e+8). For a battleship, I'm getting 3.15 billion cubic meters.
And that's using the Andy Chamber scale (3.5 km for the cruiser, 5.5km for the battleship).

Don't forget the Ammuniton.

Macrocannons, Torpedoes, and Nova Cannon shot are all physical items that must be stored.

Volume matters a lot. Exponentials aren't intuitive for a lot of people, so they don't realise quite how much of a difference there is between n and n cubed. If a ship had the same proportions as the Iowa, but was 12.2 times as long, it would occupy 1,816 times as much volume. That's well over a hundred times as much space per meter of length.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Don't forget the Ammuniton.

Macrocannons, Torpedoes, and Nova Cannon shot are all physical items that must be stored.

If, and I’m not making this a specific claim, all extant Imperial and Chaos ship classes are developed from the same source technology as the original Colony Ships? They may well have space dedicated to manufacturing their ammo.

Granted, that also must involve at least some warehousing space for the raw materials. But provided those remain inert until manufactured, it would require less specialised storage.

We do know there are dedicated Factory Ships out there, most notably within the independent fleets of Forgeworlds. But given the staggering size of all Imperial Ships? Having some ammo manufacturing capacity may relieve some logistical stresses. Don’t need to get the finished shells/rounds/charges or whatever, just some/all of the raw materials.

 Tyran wrote:

Tygre wrote:


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.

Wow, everything you said is wrong.

Volume increases to the cube of length, that's basic mathematics.

I was in a hurry when I posted this but my maths is correct, as I did state per length. I did not have the volume and I stated such. Saying 'everything' is wrong is a bit rude. You should of said that volume changes things more than you think. To quote myself "Volume will change things but this will give better ballpark figures."

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
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.

Playing around with a model of a cruiser in meshmixer, I'm getting slightly less than half a billion cubic meters (4.8e+8). For a battleship, I'm getting 3.15 billion cubic meters.
And that's using the Andy Chamber scale (3.5 km for the cruiser, 5.5km for the battleship).

You have the volume, great. I was sceptical but ten's of thousands of cubic metres per crew seems correct. (4.8e+8)/(8 hit points * 2000) = 1 crew per 300,000 cubic metres.