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How do?

A thought that’s been rattling around my noggin. Now, it’s not fully formed, so this is your offices Wimbriling Warning. Code Red. Repeated. Code Red Wimbriling Warning.

Anyways.

In the world of Sci-Fi, 40k’s starships are notoriously ridiculous in proportion. Stupidly, near unfeasibly huge. But undeniably huge. And some of them, the Escort destroyers and frigates come in squadrons!

But beyond the rule of cool of course lies the ‘but why? The resources necessary....oooh blimey!’. And for that answer, we need to look to the background.

Now, all the races of 40k do things on a similarly grand scale. Not everyone goes quite full-on Imperial, but still. And it seems that’s out of some kind of necessity. After all, if you want to be a Space daring species, the scale is set. You go big or you stay home (see what I did there?).

Of course, the Eldar are the oldest ‘consistent’ race in 40k Lore. They’ve had mahoosive ships since forever by everyone else’s standards. So it seems fairly likely that Man had to upscale their own fleets to stand a chance against Eldar Aggressors.

But why do the Eldar have such big ships? Well, let’s put Craftworlds to one side. Whilst quite likely not the first or only time Eldar did it on that scale, they’re not exactly warships.

There must have been some impetus to the Eldar doing things that way. Which of course brings us, ultimately, to their original purpose. The War In Heaven, when they were (apparently) created to fight the Necrons/Necrontyr.

From there, it’s not a massive leap of logic to assume the ancient Necrontyr had similarly colossal ships at their disposal. No, not The Necrons, before that.

Seed Fleets. Those fleets dispatched to explore the galaxy at slower than light speed. The ones that might still be plodding along out there, somewhere. Those must’ve been vast. And I suspect, very, very well armed. Hostile races be damned, there’s asteroids and comets and that out there, so you’d want some way to fend those off, no?

And that’s pretty much it.

Now. Discuss!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
How do?

But beyond the rule of cool of course lies the ‘but why? The resources necessary....oooh blimey!’. And for that answer, we need to look to the background.

Resources mean little to an interplanetary civilization, let alone an interstellar one. How many starships could you build by, say, taking apart Mercury? How many star systems does the Imperium have access to that LACK habitable planets, and therefore can be completely strip-mined for everything it's got?

If anything, WH40K errs on the low end of the scale of things. It takes ONE navigator to move a warp ship (in theory, you'd probably want several, YMMV). Navigators are the limiting resource, so why not build your ships huge to maximize the value of each Navigator? This leads to the idea of fleet carriers rather than large fleets of independent warp vessels, but I guess there are enough Navigators to support the idea. Humanity should have staggering industrial capacity - entire worlds turned over to manufacture with entire solar systems feeding them raw materials - heck, mining stars for raw materials is well within their capacity, and stars are where most of the materials are (it's not all hydrogen and helium)..

The Eldar live on mobile planets. Even their warships are basically mobile space stations, because they live in interstellar space for the most part. Since they draw raw materials from (IIRC) the warp, their industry is only limited by their ability to produce bonesingers. They have huge ships because they don't need to live on cramped ones.

 John Prins wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
How do?

But beyond the rule of cool of course lies the ‘but why? The resources necessary....oooh blimey!’. And for that answer, we need to look to the background.

If anything, WH40K errs on the low end of the scale of things. It takes ONE navigator to move a warp ship (in theory, you'd probably want several, YMMV). Navigators are the limiting resource, so why not build your ships huge to maximize the value of each Navigator? This leads to the idea of fleet carriers rather than large fleets of independent warp vessels, but I guess there are enough Navigators to support the idea. Humanity should have staggering industrial capacity - entire worlds turned over to manufacture with entire solar systems feeding them raw materials - heck, mining stars for raw materials is well within their capacity, and stars are where most of the materials are (it's not all hydrogen and helium)..

Navigators aren't even a limiting resource. They are a limit to long distance warp travel, but calculated jumps are possible. That is how the so-called Chartist captains get around. All the various human pocket empires discovered would have similarly used calculated jumps. The actual amount of space traffic in 40K is actually much higher than is focused on in the stories and fluff.

On resources....

That’s great. But look where we are now.

We don’t have the resources you mention.

From time to time, we strap a tin can to bloody huge rocket, and with science, kinda hope for the best.

To get from that, to the Great Crusade, there’s a helluva curve.

But Navigators are an interesting and so far as we know, uniquely human resource and requirement. Even then, they were genhanced for that specific purpose.

But how do we get from Challenger shuttles to the Great Crusade?

By getting out arses handed to us. At the bare minimum, it must’ve taken humanity getting battered to pull on our solar system’s resources to not be simply annihilated for the lulz by any race even marginally more advanced.

Remember, this is about that Picard/Borg moment, and thinking Jaws......we’re gonna need a bigger boat!

And precisely why everyone else is tanking about space in such colossal ships, necessitating colossal ships of our own.

I think the scale is appropriate really. Consider the current aircraft carriers of the US, a nation that is comprised of only 16% of the Earth's land mass. 10 active carriers with 2 more under construction that are all over 1,000 feet long and can support crews of up to 6,000 people. Compare those vessels to naval vessels of just a few hundred years ago. Now give many thousands of years more worth of technological advancement, and increase the available resources by many orders of magnitude.

The Necrontyr had already long been replaced by the Necrons by the time the Eldar were raised up to fight in the War in Heaven.


Even then, most elder capital ships still don't compete with the larger Necron ships in terms of scale or destructive potential - what is the Eldar answer to a 15km Cairn?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

But how do we get from Challenger shuttles to the Great Crusade?

Specifically? Some form of orbital mass driver or skyhook system(*). From there, lunar base to supply metals to build asteroid mining ships. There are some very large asteroids in the belt we're pretty sure are all metal. How big? Psyche is 186km wide, and they think it's mostly nickel-iron.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/01/05/nasa-visit-mysterious-metal-asteroid-could-core-lost-planet/

We have to get the basics up there first, of course, but once we do, resources aren't a problem. Space is full of resources compared to Earth, where most of the good stuff is stuck in a ball of molten rock. Any civilization which can manage to lift some industry out of their gravity well will never lack for resources to build stuff.

(*) There are multiple options, and some of them are feasible with today's tech, it just costs a lot - not so much we couldn't afford it, but nobody specifically wants to foot the bill just yet, or they require a lot of multi-national real estate to set up.

Me like

Love the insight that it's the Eldar who dictated the Imperium's starship size. Definitely plausible, especially seeing as relic-ships from the DAoT are massive too.

Before all the gakky Newcron fluff with their super-duper tech I always had the idea that Necron ships are slooow. Builds their whole 'inexorable army of the dead' vibe,and also the whole hopelessness of the Necrontyr position.

Before their slow FTL ships, they had STL seed-ships and it's definitely possible that these what started the massiveness trend oldcron Necrontyr were obsessed with death, but also with survival. Packing off whole pre-formed planetary coloniea into seed ships and scattering them to the winds would be a way to hedge your bets for survival. Love the idea that there still might be some out there. I've been meaning to have a go at some Necrontyr conversions based on just that principle. A lone surviving sleeper ship that wakes up way way way behind schedule. Necrontyr on board are hunted by eldar (who hate them for a reason they don't know), strange other alien races (same reason) and Necrons themselves (want to dissect them to try and work out how to resurrect themselves).

Another interesting possibility is that prior to the War in Heaven ships were relatively normal sized, but during it there was a massive arms-race building ever-bigger dreadnoughts until they dwarfed their pre-war equivalents.

A last possibility is that it's a response to the psychic fallout of the War in Heaven which fethed up the warp. Remember reading somewhere that one of the benefits of having massive ships with massive crews was that it provides a sort of psychic buffer to being lost or eaten in the warp. Ten thousand souls all praying for safe passage through the warp probably has a non-negligible effect on whether they actually make it or not.

That last option doesn't quite gel with the 'eldar were earlier' idea, but it's also possible that the eldar built their ships bigger in response to other warp-traversing species. Or, perhaps, that the eldar still used the warp significantly in those days. Their smaller (non-craftworld) ships are still warp-capable.

It's a combination of being a sort-of-generational ship and the needs of the warp engine.

Based on the rogue trader RPG, a cross-system STL voyage (getting to the mandeville point where you can jump into the warp) take a couple of weeks, as does the STL bit at the other end of the voyage.

A 'normal' warp journey is a week to a month based on 'common' warp speeds.

About the smallest the imperium can build a non-archeotech warp engine is the Cobra destroyer - it's not that big because they like showing off their enormous compensation battleship to the galaxy; that is about as small as Mechanicus technology can build a ship which contains:

~ A Warp Engine
~ A Plasma Drive capable of powering said engine
~ A Gellar Field capable of projecting a bubble covering both of the above

by the time you've allowed for these three components, you've used up nearly half the volume of an escort class imperial warship.

Add in enough crew to maintain them, and enough supplies/life sustainers/etc to keep them alive for months at a time, and you literally cannot make a ship much smaller than that....

Eldar don't have such limitations (webway & part-sentient psychic tech) - which is why the shadowhunter is essentially a small-calibre lance with solar sails and handles more like a heavy attack craft than a small warship

It would help if we had more examples of ships on the smaller scale. We hear about 'sub warp' ships and other non military vessels, but not in great detail.

The Necrons had the World Engine, which was 'planetoid size'.

There's also the Outsider's dyson sphere, not a ship, but huuuuuge.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On resources....

That’s great. But look where we are now.

We don’t have the resources you mention.

From time to time, we strap a tin can to bloody huge rocket, and with science, kinda hope for the best.

To get from that, to the Great Crusade, there’s a helluva curve.

But Navigators are an interesting and so far as we know, uniquely human resource and requirement. Even then, they were genhanced for that specific purpose.

But how do we get from Challenger shuttles to the Great Crusade?

The leap wasnt from shuttles to great crusade. Humans had already hell of a bigger and more impressive Imperium than in 40k before great crusade happened. Crusade was just trying to recover it.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On resources....

Remember, this is about that Picard/Borg moment, and thinking Jaws......we’re gonna need a bigger boat!

And precisely why everyone else is tanking about space in such colossal ships, necessitating colossal ships of our own.

Well, but then Starfleet went and decided to actually build the Defiant

I think, concerning ressources, you should factor in time. I'll give you the Great crusade as I'm not that familiar with the ships there, but my impression with 40K Chaos and Imperial fleets was that many of them are ancient relics build thousands of years ago, some even in the Dark Age of Technology. And if every planet of the imprium built only one frigate every hundred years - that's already a pretty impressive armada.
Also keep in mind that the imperium is a fascist slave state. So their economy is totally focused on military while nothing is left for the population. So you have shiny Space marine armies and giant warships, but beside that it's a large craphole were you starve to death. Nothing is "wasted" for all the luxury and welfare even the capitalist states today spend money on.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On resources....

Remember, this is about that Picard/Borg moment, and thinking Jaws......we’re gonna need a bigger boat!

And precisely why everyone else is tanking about space in such colossal ships, necessitating colossal ships of our own.

Well, but then Starfleet went and decided to actually build the Defiant

I think, concerning ressources, you should factor in time. I'll give you the Great crusade as I'm not that familiar with the ships there, but my impression with 40K Chaos and Imperial fleets was that many of them are ancient relics build thousands of years ago, some even in the Dark Age of Technology. And if every planet of the imprium built only one frigate every hundred years - that's already a pretty impressive armada.
Also keep in mind that the imperium is a fascist slave state. So their economy is totally focused on military while nothing is left for the population. So you have shiny Space marine armies and giant warships, but beside that it's a large craphole were you starve to death. Nothing is "wasted" for all the luxury and welfare even the capitalist states today spend money on.

Not entirely true for the civilian classes. Hive cities have noble classes that live idle lives of luxury, enough for the children of some of them to get bored and go on killing sprees among the lower classes as a means of blood sport or rite of passage. What 40K has is a large inequality of wealth. There are the noble classes, a tiny skilled artisan/middle class providing luxury items and services for the nobles, a vast heaving ocean of plebs who perform all the manufacturing or minor official work. Below even them are the slaves, abhumans, and mutants that form the underclass, tolerated at times as a form of cheap expendable workforce, and at other times the targets of pogroms.

What the Imperium lacks is a decent sized educated middle class. There is no focus on mass consumption, reducing poverty, or improving the well-being of the population as a whole.

tneva82 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On resources....

That’s great. But look where we are now.

We don’t have the resources you mention.

From time to time, we strap a tin can to bloody huge rocket, and with science, kinda hope for the best.

To get from that, to the Great Crusade, there’s a helluva curve.

But Navigators are an interesting and so far as we know, uniquely human resource and requirement. Even then, they were genhanced for that specific purpose.

But how do we get from Challenger shuttles to the Great Crusade?

The leap wasnt from shuttles to great crusade. Humans had already hell of a bigger and more impressive Imperium than in 40k before great crusade happened. Crusade was just trying to recover it.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't bigger considering the Eldar had their Empire already.

As far as I've been aware, some worlds are basically indistinguishable from our own - including the First World and all our Nice Things - except the need to send a tax to the Imperial representatives.

M.

pm713 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On resources....

That’s great. But look where we are now.

We don’t have the resources you mention.

From time to time, we strap a tin can to bloody huge rocket, and with science, kinda hope for the best.

To get from that, to the Great Crusade, there’s a helluva curve.

But Navigators are an interesting and so far as we know, uniquely human resource and requirement. Even then, they were genhanced for that specific purpose.

But how do we get from Challenger shuttles to the Great Crusade?

The leap wasnt from shuttles to great crusade. Humans had already hell of a bigger and more impressive Imperium than in 40k before great crusade happened. Crusade was just trying to recover it.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't bigger considering the Eldar had their Empire already.

There's a possibility it could have been (although for the record I'm in the 'smaller but more powerful/better place to live' camp).

The Eldar's Empire was clustered around their core-worlds (plus webway realms) in the area of space now occupied by the Eye of Terror. So, the size of the Eldar Empire as lost territory to humans is probably offset mostly by the size of the Eye of Terror as lost territory.

Reason I'm still in the 'it was smaller' camp is it's stated that DAoT mankind had a sort of federation-thing going with a number of alien species. So, while said federation may have been approaching the Imperium in size (which shares a lot of space with Ork empires that are likely far larger today than in the DAoT, not to mention areas lost to Chaos), actual humans likely made up a proportion of that federation's population. Even if it was a majority, it's not as complete of a majority as the Imperium has.

 Infantryman wrote:
As far as I've been aware, some worlds are basically indistinguishable from our own - including the First World and all our Nice Things - except the need to send a tax to the Imperial representatives.

M.

I think that quip is placed in the fluff to hint at the possibility that 40k might be real and Earth is actually one of those worlds. Doesn't make it not part of the fluff, but it does provide an explanation.

As far as realism goes, the Imperium is in a state of total war, and has been for 10,000 years. If you look at how the first and second world wars decimated the economies of those directly involved, it will give you a sense of what effect total war has on a nation's economy and the quality of life of its citizens. As such, any taxes or tithes placed upon relatively stable and wealthy worlds will be heavy in order to support the Imperium's gargantuan war machine. Sizeable enough to ensure that any worlds as comfortable as ours is currently will in every likelihood be pushed to become a far, far worse place to live in simply to meet the tithe that Imperial authorities have demanded of it.

That's the thing about people who claim that the Imperium is a god-awful place to live in in the vast, vast majority of places. It's not really due to the fact that people just like it to be grittier and nastier. It's the most realistic eventuality for a galactic society that's been taxing its military and civilian production capacity to the limits of what its administration can achieve for 10,000 years simply to ensure its survival to the next day.