Somehwere at the beginning, someone asked about "how is crew replentished? Are women on board"?"

A player of a void born figure asked the same to me. Hence I did not know and hadt no source material at hand, I ruled that his ship (and a lot of other ships) had "Keepers of Bloodline" (Adepts) who´s job was to minimize inbreed in the ship & needed to sanctionize a mariage. (me thinks...for this there WAS fluff somewhere!).

In addition, we came up with the concept that if ships meet (most likely, at port!) there would be some "marriage market" held, so both ships could "re-fresh" there gene pool with "stock" from the other ship. Of course, the captain of both ships would have the final word of such "bargains".
This give the whole ship affair an additional "feudal lords trading serfs" touch. .

... and of course, not only do the press ganges try to hire on the planet...but sometimes some people simply get "stolen" if the ship is in need for "fresh blood" and is unlikely to visit this world again during the next five or twenty years...

Gregorius21778 said:

I love the marriage market idea! You come up with some great ideas! Yoink!

Some of you are forgetting the scale of Imeprial ships.

http://img2.ak.crunchyroll.com/i/spire4/ae425eb94161aaae45a8f4d30b1b886e1231740125_full.gif

Lord Commissar said:

Were did you get this? Are you sure they are that big? Though I admit I kinda hope so.

Lord Commissar said:

Lord Commissar said:

Were did you get this? Are you sure they are that big? Though I admit I kinda hope so.

Cynical Cat said:

This is correct. In fact, a ship the same size as a Nimitz class super carrier wouldn't even count as a frigate when it comes to Wh40K vessels. In fact, mere dropships are almost flying Nimitz class ships, and their only purpose is to ferry troops and tanks from orbit to the ground. (meaning, they are just barely void capable, but aren't designed to handle any longer trips in space)

The deduction here being that if more than 5.000 people can fit in a Nimitz class super carrier today, 20.000 could easily fit inside a WH40K frigate and even have gigantic cargo hold sized areas to spare.

Besides, the bilge scum and bilge mutants has to be able to hide somewhere too, right?

Varnias Tybalt said:

And at least two cathedrals, if it's a proper Imperial ship operated by a suitably devout and Emperor-fearing Rogue Trader.

InquisitorGray said:

To be fair, that's a battleship . The upper limit of Imperial ship building technology. Hell, the upper limit of ship building tech from any era of humanity.

A cruiser would be a mere 2/3 that size.

RocketPropelledGrenade said:

Yes, and that had occurred to me when I posted it, but then I remembered the size of an ISD and figured it didn't matter. Even a small vessel in 40k is going to be huge.

That was kind of the point of the last line of my post. Maybe I should select my emoticons more carefully....

It should be noted that Super Star Destroyers are nearly 4 kilometers long. Torpedo spheres are 2-7k oblate spheriods. Then there were the death stars.... Of course BFG has Blackstones, Abaddon's Planet killer, and Ramilies Starforts....

I regret to say that that scale comparison is pulled straight out of somebody's butt. The canon size of 40k ships as described by Andy Chambers and then upheld by Rogue Trader rulebook is 6 km for largest battleships and 1km for smallest frigates. Nowhere near the size of that monstrosity. CELS, the author of "Divine Intervention" render and many other awesome BFG artworks has many times expressed his anger at people taking his art and then rescaling it as they see fit.

That said, 6km is still a lot.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Navy_(Warhammer_40,000)

The general consensus in many novels is that escort vessels are anywhere between 750 meters and 2 kilometers in length, light and standard cruisers are anywhere between 2500 and 3500 meters, grand cruisers anywhere between 3000 and 4500 meters, and battleships range from 4500 to 6000 meters, with certain rare vessels exceeding this range. (An example would be Warmaster Horus' flagship, which was noted in the Horus Heresy series as being nearly 15 km long.) The general aspect ratio of standard imperial ships of cruiser or greater size average 1/6th (prow) to 1/5th (stern) of the total length of the vessel in height. This excludes the large number of prominences such as sensor arrays and additional decking which tend to exceed this height amidships. Overall, a 6 km long grand cruiser would have an average height of approximately 1 km.

What about troopers?

A great amounto of these 20k people must be soldiers, whole regiments of them. Battleready!

Drakar said:

No, the soldiers are in addition to the teeming hordes of menials and press-ganged labourers...

As with most things 40k it is hard to find any hard facts concerning starship sizes (hopefully Rogue Trader will help with this somewhat) but I personly use this site as my reference.

www.merzo.net/index.html Go to the tab -10X and theres a Imperial Retribution class battleship and Cobra class destroyer, they are the 5th and 6th down from the top.

I use this as my reference because the site aurther does try to be acurate to fluff and the site is mostly accurate, as hard as that can be to do with 40k.

I'd like to do a small reflection on the other half of the OP: What about women?

Imho, the WH40k setting is patriarchal by habit, rather than by design. This means that because the creators of the fiction lives in a world where men are generally seen as the "doers", the world they describe tend to function this way as well. Women that can be movers and shakers are an exception (the single female member of a party of adventurers) or a "gimmick" (sisters of battle, howling banshees). It is indeed very uncommon that creators of fictional worlds manage to break away from this predjudice. Look at the more or less un-gendered species across the galaxy; very few, if any, of them tilt towards female imagery. Excercise: Count the number of available 40k-models with female characteristics.

Since I find this dominance of male imagery to be unintentional, and it is rarely used as an important story element, I feel very free to change perspectives for my campaigns. Hence I've risen to the challenge of describing a world without a slentrian patriarchy. So, when I desig/describe cities, IG-regiments, officers, important NPC, shipcrews etc etc I try to make them as well spread between genders as possible, wich is a lot harder than it seems. Hence my starships would certainly house a mixed crew. Depending on how my captains dynasty wanted recruitment of new serfs to work (by birth in-ship, or by recruitment), sexual inception would either be encouraged or discouraged by various means.

Encouragements could include: bonus feeding/pay/compensation and easier work for females that become pregnant, similar bonus to the appointed inceptor. Communal childcare (preferrably handled by creepy servitors, this is a GRIMDARKworld after all). Institutionalised ****-centers (please try not to make this a hurhurhur-moment...). Test-Tube-inceptions with sperms (either meticulosly controlled to avoid inbreeding, or all of them using the female captains fathers sperms, thus all her crew will be her halfsiblings, and easier to whip into loyalty). Or even, if you wanted to take the path of reproduction-after-love, a whole day off for opposite-sex-newlyweds! Etc.

Discouragements could include: Sterilisation of all males, females or just everyone. Encouragement of same sex relationships (by bonuses as above, or punishments for the alteratives). Physical barriers between members of the sexes (20 m bulkhed is a pretty good pregnancy prevention method). Good availability of anti-reproductive chems (maybe distributed in the drinking water?). Regular pruning of all individuals below useful age. Etc.

Finally, there is a rule, probably a bit mythic but still fantastic, from the golden age of sailing. It is about the rules considering sexual relationships on the all male crews of the brittish empires military sailing ships, anno 1700-something. They were forbidden to engage in sexual activities ("buggery" ment pretty much anything but a woman having vaginal intercourse with a man) onboard the ship, but...

Buggery is punishable by up to 10 lashes at the main mast, except after 30 days at sea.

So, even the prude brits of the 18th century felt that one month, that was the time anyone was expected to be content with only themself for physical company. Now to ask yourself: Does your crew spend more than 30 days on board between stops? And what strategy does your savvy captain have to handle this potential problem?

Most interesting post. The BFG novels Execution Hour, Shadow Point & Relentless all feature women on board ships but not official part of the crew, they are mistresses to the officers and it is suggested that they are part of the "camp followers" society that seems to exist in the lower decks.

Incidentally, thanks to a very strong minded female player I have taken a lot more care in my ratio male: female NPCs / organisations and even major villains.

DW

Interesting about the buggery penalty. Let's all remember that "Void Born" means you were born and raised on a ship..meaning there is room to suggest that, at least on the really huge ships, that there are men and women and provisions for child rearing, education, entertainments, consumable household goods manufacturing etc. etc. etc that has to do with families aboard a ship. I would say especially merchant vessels and non-military vessels.

Heck, even Captain Kirk was born aboard a starship. Ok, a shuttlecraft, but you get the point.

You're quite wrong about women onboard Royal Navy vessels, by the way. They were frequently present and sexual relations taking place onboard were not forbidden in the way you suggest, also buggery is exactly what it is today - homosexual intercourse between men - and the penalty lenient, as you could be sentenced to hang, on land, for the same offence at various times in English history.

When I first set about designing the ship for my campaign (the players don't get to choose for this once, since the ship itself is important to the plot), I tried to break down the total crew into its constituent departments so I could figure out how many of them worked, for instance, on the port side macrobattery during Shift Tertius. I'm basing the ship loosely off the Sabre from the RT core book, and it confused me how somebody could find jobs for 25,000 people on a ship that size since I agree with Fulminarex, the idea that the main deck of a destroyer would be thousands off press-ganged serfs loading a 90 meter-long torpedo (about the size of a 25 story condo tower) with little more than block and tackle.

The Imperium may have a wildly schizophrenic technology base, with laser weapons and mule carts appearing along side each other in some IG regiments' inventory, but it seems difficult to swallow the idea that they can't include some basic level of mechanical automation inside a starship that takes literally decades to design and build. If WW1 battleships can grasp the idea of an electrically powered shell hoist, I'm sure that some bright tech adapt figured it out long ago.

So if there's a basic level of mechanical assistance available, why do you need so many crewmen? I think the answer lies in Imperial superstition. For every man doing useful work on the telescope in the stellar navigation optics shrine, there's another standing next to him muttering the Hymn of Proper Focal Length. Before a crank is turned in the reactor room (no digital controls here!), it must be anointed with the Holy Lubrication, but of course we can't give each rating or technician his/her own supply of lube because only an Adept of the 2nd rank (or whatever) is fit to carry His Oil Can, so that's another 50 people scurrying around the starboard anterior reactor fuel feed chamber right there. When the gunnery crew goes to battle stations, they must take care to keep well clear of the incense brazer, for tipping it over would displease the machine spirit and that's so important that what the hell, let's assign two ratings to stand watch and make sure the holy smoke keeps coming.

The trick here is that you have to be careful not to throw techpriests around willy-nilly, or else half your crew is going to end up Cogboy, which is fine on some ships but doesn't make sense on others. The fluff, particularly the IG novels, make it clear that laymen have a basic level of technical "education" which covers things like Hymns of Engine Restart and basic machine spirit etiquette, so one tech adept per 100 or 200 crew is a good ratio IMO, as it it implies that the crew is trusted (but not too far!) to conduct basic technical tasks and their required rituals on their own. In less critical areas, tech adept might come through your duty station every month or so to observe your performance and correct deficiencies.

Also, a lot of labor saving devices that aren't related to moving around gigantic huge pieces of machinery could be plausably done away with. If you've got 20 miles of corridor to keep clean and no power washers, then you're going to need a couple hundred people just to keep the mops going.

So to summarize: Anything complicated requires at least a third of its associated crew to be doing useless, perhaps counterproductive religious activities. Anything simple requires lots and lots of people. Some things require both.

"Anything complicated requires at least a third of its associated crew to be doing useless, perhaps counterproductive religious activities. Anything simple requires lots and lots of people. Some things require both."

I think that's the very core of WH40K technical expertise and technological progress right there, very elegantly expressed. Brava!

Our group is on a sword class frigate, the Last Word of Saint Drusus, Ancient and Wise Emissary of the Imperator It is 1.6 km long, .3km abeam, and probably .3km tall. That ship has something like 26,000 crew. I have no idea what all of the crew do, but keep in mind modern naval ships, such as the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Carl_Vinson have crews of about 3000. The Carl V there also has several thousand dudes on it to maintain all of the planes. And the Carl is not even half a k long! Closer to a third.

The standard Sword class frigate is a long skinny thing, and it is as wide as a modern aircraft carrier is long.

You know, I've been seeing numbers like that a lot recently. Anyone else starting to think the ship crews are too small?

As for gender equality in the 41st millennium, it's more like gender indifference. There's a quote from a senior officer in the Imperial Guard,
"If he is old enough to hold a lasgun, he is old enough to die for the emperor".
If you're giving a pre-teen a gun, you don't care if it's a girl. The fluff mentions female guardsmen, but GW want to stay away from issues like mixed gender regiments and their shenanigans and come down pretty hard on fan-made conversion parts.

"If they can hold a gun, it doesn't matter how they pee".
I imagine the same applies to every imperial job, be it pen-pushing or chemical-stirring. Life is cheap, lets put it to good use. On hive worlds or other large consumers of mortal fuel they probably encourage it, hurrying along the next generation.

The only organisations I can think of that segregate are the space Marines and the Adepta Sororitas. The former uses gene-treatments tailored to testosterone and the male gene sequence*, the latter a convenient loophole in a clause about Men at Arms.

*I know it's nonsense, but it's the nonsense GW supports. Besides, there's some speculation about the two deleted chapters...

GW need stuf to be parent-friendly and they play to a pre-teen geeky boy audience, hence the avoidance of what is an obvious aspect of life, even in the Imperium.