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.

Hi all,

I need help figuring out the fleet for my custom SM Chapter. I don’t know where to begin or how to setup a fleet to accommodate a Chapter.

Any advice please?

Thanks

For starters - a Battle Barge can carry 3 Companies and a Strike Cruiser a single Company.

A fleet based Chapter will obviously have more ships than a planet based one, and some older Chapters will have a Star Fort or Battleships. The Minotaurs Chapter have the Daedelos Krata, a relic-ship classed as a Heavy Assault Carrier.

Of course realistically even the smallest escort could easily carry the full chapter. So none of it makes any sense.

The 3rd edition SM codex, when it lists the total assets of the chapter, has the fleet command for the Ultramarines as this:

48 pilots, gunnery officers, and command crews
18 navigators
8 strike cruisers
3 battle barges
12 rapid strike vessels
32 thunderhawks.

(BFG recommends using destroyer/frigate rules for the rapid strike vessels)

Ultramarines might not be the best example though, as there is a good chance that they have more assets than an average chapter.

 Crimson wrote:
Ultramarines might not be the best example though, as there is a good chance that they have more assets than an average chapter.

I thought about putting that as a caveat, but decided to just toss the raw data up there. While the Ultras are an old, well established, and well equipped chapter, they are also a benchmark for others. In this case, they are not particularly well known as a fleet-centered chapter. Someone like the Black Templars, who probably took a chunk of the Imp. Fist’s fleet in their founding, probably has a better fleet than the Ultras.

While the max size of a fleet could be quite large, I don’t think it would be too above (double?) what the Ultras have.
“average” would probably be enough space-lift for the full 10 companies, with barges holding 3 and strike cruisers 1, plus a roughly equal number of light ships
If you wanted to set a minimum size (barring post-disaster losses) I’d probably make sure you could lift 5 companies. Plus a handful of RSVs/Escorts. This would let you get the battle companies where they need to be.

But that’s just my gut feeling, without any backing from the lore. Which I know has some pretty big issues with scale and consistency.

Azkallean wrote:
Hi all,

I need help figuring out the fleet for my custom SM Chapter. I don’t know where to begin or how to setup a fleet to accommodate a Chapter.

Any advice please?

Thanks

Are they fleet based or world based or something else?

For your average Chapter I would go with:

A Flagship/Command Ship (usually a Battlebarge but could be a Strike Cruiser or an Ex Imperial Cruiser or Battlecruiser or even Battleship )

A second Battlebarge
2-3 Strike Cruisers
about 5-7 escorts and support ships.

Just don't go down the stupidity of one of the Wolf Codexes where they had hundreds of ships and several Ramilies class stations....

 Crimson wrote:
Ultramarines might not be the best example though, as there is a good chance that they have more assets than an average chapter.

maybe on the other hand blood angels have a similer sized fleet, as do grey knights, dark angels are a little bit bigger (being a fleet based chapter that makes sense) and space wolves are stupidly large.

So I find a good rule of thumb proably is for a marine chapter to have ~a dozen cruisers and battle barges.

In old BFG fluff there are purpose-built Battle Barges/Strike Cruisers with their own hulls (the ones you see in Armada), but there are also more normal Navy ships (with the pointed prows) retrofitted for Astartes use.

I'd expect 1-3 battleships, 2-6 cruisers, and 6-8 frigates depending on how the Chapter's expected to operate; a fleet-based Chapter or one with a remote fief is going to need a bigger fleet than a Chapter located more centrally that can expect Navy support, for instance. I'd also expect the fleet to be much larger than what's technically necessary to carry all the Astartes in the Chapter, because you might want to give a small Astartes deployment a lot of backup just to secure their lines of movement instead of risking your valuable assets getting cut off somewhere because you packed a Company into a frigate and then the frigate got ambushed and blown up.

 Crimson wrote:
Of course realistically even the smallest escort could easily carry the full chapter. So none of it makes any sense.

I've always assumed they're what they can combat drop simultaneously, rather than pure transport capacity (or GW doesn't understand scale again).

we also know BTW that apparently stealth strike cruisers are a thing now. I'm guessing chapters each have 1 or 2 of those,

my head canon is that they're more lightly armored, but are faster and harder to detect. not as good for rushing troops to a target location under guard but great for ambushes.

beast_gts wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Of course realistically even the smallest escort could easily carry the full chapter. So none of it makes any sense.

I've always assumed they're what they can combat drop simultaneously, rather than pure transport capacity (or GW doesn't understand scale again).

No, the strike cruiser is supposed to carry a company.
Obviously with 26000 crew, yes, 100 marines vanish into the noise.

Where they actually matter is that a company brings 10 rhinos, a flight of thunderhawks, a flight of thunderhawks transporters, some battle tanks, pre-fab bastions, and several thousand helots (one quote I recall in white dwarf accompanying the fifth edition marine codex was that a chapter of 1000 marines has maybe 40000 support staff, so a company might have 4000 helots) along with practice halls for individual, squad and even company-scale training exercises.

Essentially, carrying 100 marines is trivial. Carrying 100 marines combat-ready, provisioned, armed and trained, is not - especially since a strike cruiser does that without impacting it's combat power relative to a 'normal' light cruiser, so it's still carrying megatonnes of weaponry, gun crews (okay, largely servitors in this case), armour, and so forth.