The Warp cov'reth many sins. :¬)

theshadowduke said:

Shadow, let me run some numbers back at you then: One, you are assuming that the ship is a perfect rectangle 400m x 400m x 1600m. I can't think of one of these ships that's more then vaguely square. Second, you're using the game mechanics that are designed as an abstraction to create balance rather than actual measurements to get that. By way of proof that the mechanic doesn't work: if you assume that a lunar is a rectangle 800x800x5000 you would have a volume of 320,000,000m^3 or 12.5 times that volume of your raider. However, the space stat doesn't even double. So, your method doesn't hold water.

To try and steer us back on topic, here is my proposed division of labor on-board the Bastard Magnificat , a modified Sword-class frigate.

Thoughts? General exclamations of praise? Scathing rebuttals?

Deck Gang: 8200 – General grunts. Many of the worst paid members of the crew call themselves members of the deck gang, and they are the largest segment of the crew. They do less-specialized maintenance, handle the mooring lines and docking mechanisms, load and unload cargo, provide general purpose labor to other departments. They do the laundry and cook the food, deliver the mail and mop the corridors. Most importantly, they stand ready to receive training to replace casualties in the ranks of the other departments.

Dropcraft Wing: 2100 – Everyone needed to run a voidship, in miniature, several times over. Pilots, gunners, repair crew, and ordinance handlers are but a few of the specialists in this crew-within-a-crew.

Maintenance crew: 2700 – Everything from airlock seal fitters to damage control teams to vac-wielders. This department works closely with the priests of the Mechanicus to keep the ship from falling apart. Most of the ship's voidwalkers are found in this department.

Black Gang: 2500 – Thousands of ratings and voidsmen toil in hot, cramped, noisy quarters to keep the Bastard's mighty sublight plasma drives roaring. This includes such tasks as monitoring guages, tending fuel trunks, adjusting the burn rates of the plasma ovens, maneuvering thrust vectoring mag arrays, and lubricating moving parts both small and massive. They also man the small maneuvering arrays spaced throughout the ship, and orient some of the smaller ones by hand.

Gunnery crew: 2600 – Experienced voidsmen and voidswomen man the ship's macrobatteries and point defense turrets. Several massive turrets armed with planet-shaking cannons firing atomic broadsides give the Bastard a sharp bite, and her scores of flak turrets make the space around her a nightmare for hostile shuttlecraft. Her flak battery is notable for being an example of the rare Morgantha VII pattern array, where the turret gunners fight in voidsuits in unpressurized gunpits on the outer hull.

Manufactorum staff: 1500 – A ship the size of a destroyer requires much in the way of material and equipment, and it is not feasable to carry spare parts for everything that could need replacement. This is where the ship's own manufactorum comes into play. Conditions are hot, loud, cramped, and awkward, They home to a full-time staff of dedicated workers, almost all former hive-dwellers or forge-worlders, as crewmen who grow up in other conditions tend to get killed by the machine tools. The survivors are proud of their ability to build anything from bayonets to airlocks. They gave up trying to create a homebrew nav computer after the fourth test pilot died.

Ship security force: 1500 – The voidsmen of the Bastard live and die far from home, beyond His Blessed Sight, and usually for lousy pay. The perks and prestige of serving on a Rouge Trader's ship are many and bountiful, but the carrot will only take you so far beyond the borders of the Imperium. The ship's security force is used to keep the crew in line as much as they are to repel boarders. They are primarily armed for close combat, favor autopistols loaded with frangible rounds and swords.

Ground combat troops: 1400 – The remnants of two Imperial Guard regiments seconded to the Bastard Magnificat at the outset of her journey, some15 years ago, along with a hodgepodge of mercenary forces hired as replacements at various ports of call. They're principally an air-mobile force, intended to be deployed from orbit to a secure LZ, and then from there launch lighting strikes deeply into the enemy's vulnerable areas. They are not equipped to fight and win wars of conquest or attrition. They do, however, excel at a particular kind of raid that can be likened to a large-scale version of a "smash-and-grab" robbery.

Warp drive crew: 700 – Exclusively drawn from forge-worlders and closely supervised by the priests of the Mechanicus, the members of the warp drive crew are typically feared and distrusted by the rest of the crew. Who but properly soul-bonded Astropaths and Navigators can be trusted to deal so closely with the Warp?

Supply section: 500 – The supply section are the bean counters, in some case literally. They are the merchants, the interpreters, the quartermasters and so on. They don't actually move any cargo themselves; that's what Deckmen are for. They are tremendously boring, but absolutely vital to the mission's success.

Reactor crew: 500 – Only members of the Mechanicus are allowed in the reactor room proper, and the Mechanicus living quarters are directly adjacent to this chamber. Auxiliary compartments are crewed by properly devout lay crew under the close supervision of adepts and lower priests. There are more servitors in this part of the ship than any other.

Mechanicus (non-reactor/warp): 375 – Those members of the Omnissiah's cult who are not lucky enough to work directly with the reactor, or for whatever strange reason prefer other work, service the rest of the ship from several shrines placed throughout her hull. They conduct regular orthodoxy sweeps to ensure that crewmen with more technically inclined jobs do not stray from the correct path.

Officers: 280 – With roughly one officer for every eighty crewmen, the leadership caste of the Bastard's crew isn't stretched thin so much as “stretched taut.” This forces them to place a large amount of trust in the senior ratings, particularly in the Deck Gang. Officers are allegedly specialized and qualified in whatever area of the ship's operations they may be supervising, but this is often more formality than practice. In many cases a junior officer's job comes down to little more than relaying orders for the senior ratings to interpret and carry out, screaming at slackers, and looking impressive. There is a surprisingly low amount of violence committed against them, despite their small numbers. This may be due to the fact that one in fifteen people on-board is a member of the ship's security force, and smart officers never walk alone in enlisted territory.

Ecclesiarchy detachment: 250 – See to the spiritual welfare of the ship, and raise the children. They mostly inhabit the ship's cathedral which is perched atop the superstructure. They are offically a seperate entity from the crew, but the Abbot is no fool and has made sure to position himself as a trusted and loyal adviser to the Rouge Trader.

Administratum: 200 – On paper, at least. After one too many efforts to extend His Most Holy Red Tape into areas that are not their concern, they were all tragically struck down by food poisoning after a Candlemass Day feast. The illness did not spread to the rest of the crew because their meals were prepared in the ship's new (non-regulation) soup pots, while the Administratum delegation was served out of standard issue Ration Preparation Device: Cauldron, Soup Mark IIs, which were discovered too late to have mysteriously grown large patches of fatal mold along their inner surfaces. The crew takes solace in knowing that they now requisition paperwork extension authorization forms in triplicate at His Side.

Lounge/brothel staff: 200 – The Bastard has six lounges for the crew to enjoy. The Officer's Club, Muddy Boots, the Old Canteen, Maddy's, the unnamed bilge deck dive, and the Whoratorium. The lounges are not sufficient to comfortably service all off-duty crewmen at once, and after several riots sparked by an overcramped bar a system of recreation authorization tickets was instituted in which each crewman must present his “rec-tick” to the doorman before being allowed entry. Each crewmember is issued two tickets a week with a bonus third ticket being issued by lottery to approximately 2,000 crewmembers each week. Tickets are not required for entry into the Officer's Club (which is restricted to officers and dignitaries) or the Whoratorium. When the ticket system was first introduced, the Whoratorium was, like the other lounges, subject to the ticket system, but the crew nearly mutinied only a month later. A compromise was reached in which added bouncers kept order in the (very) long line that always stretches through the door and several dozen meters down the hall.

Apothecarium staff: 90 – Chronically overworked.

Navigator household staff: 75 – The personal staff and bodyguard of the three Navigators who call the Bastard Magnificat home.

Rogue Trader household staff: 75 – The Rouge Trader does not need this many people to attend to him, but he'll be damned if he lets somebody else's entourage be bigger than his on his own ship!

Astropathic choir staff: 30 – Four astropaths, plus menials, transcriptors, and counter-demon suicide squad. (You only need to have that happen on your ship ONCE before you get real cautious.)

Sororitas detachment: 10 – Nobody knows what the Sisters are doing out here, except the Abbot, the Rouge Trader, and the Sisters themselves. They stand guard at the cathedral entrances and conduct occasional roving patrols of the ship on the thin pretext of ensuring the moral rectitude of the crew. Why they feel the need to bring three flamers and a melta with them when they do this is anybody's guess.

Hangers-on: 830ish – Not part of the crew, but present none-the-less. Families, passengers, chartered poets, and so on.

Servitors, general use: 2000
Servitors, reactor: 500
Servitors, voidwalk: 200
Servitors, heavy duty: 100
Servitors, combat support: 10

55% of the servitors are fixed-placement models.

Gaidheal said:

Could you elaborate on those points? I'm a physicist-in-training with one journal publication under my belt, so I think I should be able to understand a detailed argument.

As for acceleration, I'm aware myself of the problems that might follow from (so-called) g-forces acting persistently on people for long periods of time. However, I'm not seeing how spaceship size would affect that.

As for actual structural strain from acceleration, well, you can spread out the strain by using arcs and other structures that distribute force over a larger area for less pressure, wouldn't you? Now, I've done no hard calculations on it, but in the real world, there are structures of similar size that manage to stay together. The most ludicrous new skyscrapers in Dubai are almost 1 km tall, in the same order of magnitude as an RT raider-class ship. And those skyscrapers are standing upright, the weight of the entire thing resting on the supports on the bottom, but somehow they neither break down nor sink into the ground.

As for the thermodynamics, I take it you mean the problem of getting rid of excess heat? That's certainly an issue, as indoor temperature would have to be maintained at a human-friendly 20 Celsius while every warm (36 Celsius) body would heat up the place, as would all engines, reactors and electric systems. Nor does the large volume/surface ratio make the ship radiate away the energy very efficiently. But hey, cooling it down would only require an inverse heat engine, pumping heat against a temperature gradient into some matter, and then ejecting it out of the ship, or simply letting it outside it to radiate off the heat more effectively. Sure, heat pumping requires lots of energy to be put in, but then, cheap and plentiful energy is a staple of sci-fi, and not a completely arbitrary one due to the assumed availability of fusion power.

Konrad von Richtmark said:

How often do you see one of those towers accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light? Just curious.

Haha! Physicist, maybe but not an engineer. Those towers were built with a specific design to exacting standards and in parts, to the limit of the materials (or as close as allowed by statutory margins, in fact) for acceleration along a very specific vector and with an essentially fixed magnitude. In other words, no, not comparable even before we get to the fact that the vessels are not 60% glass on the exteriors nor use materials like concrete which are fine under compression but fail in tension.

P.S. That magnitude never exceeds 1 g, by definition, the lowest figure I've seen is a vessel rated at 2.5 g along the main axis but imagine what happens when the acceleration is non-uniform with respect to the vessel and not along that preferred axis even if it really can take 2.5 on that axis.

P.P.S. I said nothing about people, we already have to fudge that one for any kind of space travel or everyone is a mess on the rear bulkhead, furthermore, those towers? They already sank - that's what the foundations are and why they have them; consider the ratio of the base area to the mass, too, because that's probably pushing the limits of ground pressure, Titans, Mechs, etc, etc, are impossible because they would massively exceed it.

BaronIveagh said:

One might also add that (as an example) voidsmen's quarters on a frigate take up 3 points of space, for at most 30.500 crew. Whereas for a cruiser, voidsmen's quarters would take up 4 points of space for 100.000 crew. So assuming that the standard of habitation is the same, a "point" of space on a cruiser houses 25.000 people whereas a "point" of space on a frigate only houses 10.000 people.

Then there's also the issue of "everything else" on a ship needing space. There is no specific component for, say, food stores, so I suppose one must interpret it as either being part of some listed mandatory component (like crew quarters), or that the listed "available space" of a ship is simply what's left when all things that are essential but not worth mentioning as essential components. It wouldn't make much game design sense to clutter the rules with lots and lots of minuscule essential components. How many crappers per capita does a ship have, and how much space and power do they take?

But I think you are failing to see the forest because of the trees. Individual details in his calculation may be questionable, such as the direct conversion of space points to cubic metres. The conclusion, though, wasn't dependant on that. It was only dependant on the total volume of the ship, and essentially showed that even with a semi-arbitrary (i.e. proportional to space points) division of space between different functions, each function would have more than enough space. Allocating the space in some other way might even be more effective.

And I do know that ships aren't perfectly rectangular cuboids, but most pictures of Warhammer 40.000 ships come fairly close anyway, close enough that using it as an approximation wouldn't lead to more than maybe a dozen or so percent error.

Trouble Entendre said:

It's the magnitude of the acceleration that matters, not the final velocity the ship reaches. As long as the velocity is constant it doesn't matter how big it is; volume elements of the ship won't have any velocity relative to each other and will thus not strain or push each other.

And who says that the ship moves at a significant fraction of the speed of light? The highest speed any ship will move at outside warp is 10 VUs in a half-hour combat round. With a VU being 10.000 km, that's a velocity of 200,000 kilometres per hour. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometres per second ! That's only 2/(3*60*60) = 1/5400 c, hardly a "significant" fraction. Yeah, I know that the space combat movement rules are simplified for gaming considerations and bonkers from a physics point of view, but still, the "max speed" in space combat should be somewhat representational of typical highest values of spaceship velocity during typical conditions, and should at most be off by an order of magnitude or so.

For combat, you're talking about relative velocities, not absolutes but in any case, in order to make it in-system from the edge or out to the edge of a system in anything like the times given they need to get to much higher velocities. Also, you're a physicist, run a 4.5 g three hour burn for me? (I make it about .16 c ;¬) ).

Edit: by way of integrity, I'm leaving the error above alone, teach me to be casual with my calculation; it's more like 0.0016 c, the general thrust stands though. Vessels must make long burns as they drive out to the edge of a solar system (or vice-versa) and it makes sense to do so at maximum thrust all the way to the flipover point (if there is one), which means reaching very high velocities indeed.

Gaidheal said:

Meh, how many journal publications do you have? I might be engineering-impaired simply due to not having had to consider issues of structural strength in my studies or work, but when presented with arguments of the type made in this thread, I'm perfectly capable of evaluating them.

Sure, the skyscrapers are glass and concrete, but 40k ships have metal hulls. Metal, which can take both compression and tension, being both hard and malleable, thus metal > concrete. Sure, 40k ships are bigger and under more strain than skyscrapers, but they're also made out of material better suited for it. And let's not forget, 40k starships have hulls with outer walls several metres thick, which is a bit more than the Burj al-Dubai's walls, I'd guess. Sure, the scaling effect means that the required wall thickness would grow geometrically with size and take up a bigger proportion of total space, but that does not necessarily imply economic inefficiency since thicker walls would double up as protection in combat.

Obviously not every wall would be as thick as the outer hull, but with smart use of archs, the strain of acceleration could be directed to and from the outer hull, as well as presumably to and from similarly thick decks running parallel to the ship's axis.

And as for acceleration not being entirely along the main axis, that'd mainly happen when the ship would use retro-thrusters to turn. But then, turning isn't overly fast in 40k space; an "agile ship" turns no faster than 90 degrees during a half-hour space combat turn! Doesn't sound like too huge angular acceleration would be needed to achieve that, not anything resembling translational acceleration anyway.

Coming anywhere near a planet, which is where I mentioned it, would definitely cause there to be acceleration perpendicular to the thrust axis and with varying strength along its length, too. Steel isn't better than concrete under compression, that's one of its more useful properties and why it is used the way it is but never used to carry force under tension, finally, If you're into boasting about journal entries and papers you automatically lose - that's what we call 'appeal to authority' and it's considered equivalent to a logical error. :¬)

And that's an appeal to logical fallacy. The truth of a position is unaffected by what arguments (and non-arguments) is used to support it. And it's only an appeal to authority if I claim that my articles prove that I am correct. Until I do that, it's not a fallacy, simply an act of blowing his horn. And I dare say you initiated the dissing . Peace to you.

How can concrete stand compression as aptly as steel? Concrete is a ceramic lattice, right? There isn't much flexibility in a lattice with differing particle types, less than in a metal with only one kind of particle which thus allows individual particles to move around in response to external forces while still maintaining a lattice.

But even if, the point about structures being much thicker on a 40k ship than in a skyscraper stands.

As for gravity, well, there's a reason for why 40k ships never get closer to a planet than is necessary for shuttlecraft to load and unload it. With gravity decreasing in proportion to the square of distance, keeping a high enough orbit to not be affected by it significantly shouldn't be too hard. And (as you seem to identify) it's only the difference in gravity on different points of the ship that makes a difference, not the absolute magnitude of the gravity, due to an object in orbit effectively undergoing free fall. And when the ship's dimensions are counted in km:s and the distance to the planet's centre in (at least) tens of thousands of km:s, the difference is extremely negligible.

You clearly attempted to imply that your published status gives you greater credibility and authority, so don't try that one and I dissed noone, I politely poked fun at you for attempting a similar implication the first time, would you have preferred that I call you on it then? Nice try, though. ;¬)

Anyway, you mentioned the issue above, not me, as I pointed out - the only time I mentioned it was talking about building these very large vessels, which is implied to be done well within the gravity well of a planet, I maintain that this is impractical at the least, if not outright impossible and I think you know I'm right, that said, they would easily be subjected to forces they wouldn't be able to withstand, in my opinion, in other situations too. As for concrete, it's better because its strength under compression relative to its density is better than steel's, since steel has a density of about 8 and concrete about 2.3 (differing grades of bother vary, of course) with strength under compression at 50 MPa or so for concrete and 400Mpa or so for steel. This means that you quickly wind up with a large amount of the force in a steel construction coming from the structure itself as compared to a structure for a similar purpose made of concrete.

I've looked at the physics involved in-brief, fairly much the easiest way to deal with it is to discard any notion of conventional materials we're familiar with and substitute in something that's been altered at its molecular level with 'arcane technology' to withstand the forces involved and/or some kind of structural field enhancement to the chassis itself.

40K is kind of backwards in some aspects in that its ships are crewed by many 1000's of peons doing manual work, but I'd also hazard a guess that quite a lot of technology might just not function (or function erratically) in an environment where quite a lot of space is already taken up with arcane technology to keep the vessel in one piece, move inter-dimensionally and withstand anything from big-arse lasers to small tactical nukes being shot at it. Food, housing and water for peons might just be a short cut in costs which avoids paying for that automatic breach loader on a macro-cannon, the cogitator to run it and someone that isn't a complete idiot in turn to run it. Idiots we have lots of though in 40K, 'smarter' people like your tech priests and void masters are relatively scarce in comparison.

Even logistically in 40K, people are better than clever components. It wont be much fun out in the middle of nowhere waiting on an express service from Mars for some high tech loading mechanism for your guns that wore out, because I think from memory its about 15 years or so IN-WARP from Mars to Calixis sector (which is close to bum-hole nowhere)... where-as, loaders for guns with hands and career dead-ends are in relatively ample supply. All you need is a grox whip and harsh language, stuff gets done.

MKX said:

AKA "Handwavium" which is what I maintained at the start. ;¬) You're dead right about manpower being cheap and automation being expensive and impractical, too. In a setting where human life is an almost limitless resource but advanced technology is barely understood by a tiny élite and in some cases now impossible to recreate, if you can find a way to do it with pious grunts, that's how it gets done.

Konrad von Richtmark said:

The point being that th entire underpinning of his supposition was that SP had soemthing to do with the actual size of the objects in question, where they, in fact, do not, and simply exist for game balance purposes. If they did, that avalible ship points between the raider and the lunar would increase by a factor of twelve rather then two. Further, his allocations had no bareing on the actual size that would be required, but rather again to the system that was devised for game balance purposes. Further, given the shape of a lunar class, the known size of a macrocannon, it's possible to determine that the distance between the port and starboard batteries is about 10 meters. (This would be logically assumed to be occupied by the artillery train that delivers shells from the magazine.)

It states in Whispers on the Storm that each battery (two macrocannons) takes 200 men and (if i recall correctly) 1200 servitors. This means that it would take only 1600 men to fire four macrocannon broadsides.

Further, I'll point to fluff. In Rogue Star, it's implied that automation is actually cheaper then men, when the Rogue Trader is reflecting on how the fortunes of his house have fallen in that they have more and more servitors running the ship.

Servitors are not automation, they are lobotomized grunts and that 1,600 figure? Triple it, because you need three shifts, realistically and you'd want at least that in order to be able to soak up casualties from battle.

Well, I'm certainly not so up on my physics as previous posters in this thread. 20,000 + crewmembers on a 600 meter long spacecraft (small for a 40k warp-capable vessel) just seems a bit wrong to me. I mean, you're recycling the air all the time for a start and then there's the vast quantity of resources that this crew would consume. So I knocked off a zero. Two thousand is still a lot of bodies to get things done. I feel that many people (and probably the writers of Rogue Trader for that matter) see nearly all of the systems on a ship being manually powered, with lots of people running round on big treadmills to turn the gun turrets, open cargo bay doors, etc. I'm inclined to use my GMs prerogative to interpret things rather differantly...

Good fun RPG though.

It takes 6,000 or so to run a US Aircraft carrier, which is a much smaller proposition and has extensive automation, to boot. These vessels are truly huge and two thousand people could occupy one and never see each other whilst having a palatial area to live in. Two thousand people isn't very many at all, in reality; I went to a school with three thousand pupils and knew every one of them, we were not considered a large school.

GM sets the rules, though, of course. Also, which vessel are you using, at 600 m?

Gaidheal said:

Opps. That was my typing error; it should have been 1600 meter long Havoc class merchant raider. In my game it's been rather heavily modified with (highly heretical) xeno technology. Essentially, the father of the PC Rogue Trader did a bit of unsanctioned dealing with some Elder and had his ship built to be extremely fast and warp travel efficient, so he could transport stuff from A to B far quicker than his rivals... The PCs have to be rather careful about who they let on their ship and what they let them see and therefore a large proportion of the crew are actually servitors.

Gaidheal said:

I might point out that that's incorrect. Historically speaking, on gun centric warships, gunners do not man the guns 24/7. The reason is it's waste of time and men (On a titanic scale, in this case). Example, in battle, before the advent of current navel doctrine, which escews the use of direct fire from warships in favor of aircraft, most crew members had other duties and reported to thier combat station when battle was joined. (example: my own grandfather was Electrician's Mate. He was also the loader on AA turret 2 [A quad bofors 40mm])

And second, servitors do not breath, eat, require a pressurized atmosphere, sleep or think beyond a few pre-programmed tasks. I'd say that makes them just as much automation as a robot. They just happen to incorporate nuero tissue rather then silicon. (Though for purposes of grimdark, most look like the borg)

BaronIveagh said:

A good point. There's not a great deal of point in manning the guns all day if you're not going to be using them. You might want to do the odd bit of gunnary practice on a passing asteroid perhaps...

I didn't say they manned the guns 24/7, silly! My point is that those 1,600 are triple that. You're wrong about servitors, too - they are biological, they do breathe and they do eat.

I could dig about 3-4000 crew at a stretch for a 1.6 km long, 400 m wide vehicle. My school probabIy also had about 3000 people in it; but then most of them were only there for 7-8 hours per day and it was not situated many light years from the nearest food supplier. I worked in a large general hospital for a little while, and I remember it being described as a bit like a small town (they even had a Burger King) with a total staff of somewhat over 6000. Then again, it was a large sprawling site rather than an enclosed space, the air wasn't recycled and food was delivered regularly. You could go outside for a stroll on your lunch or tea break (which are admittedly luxuries you wouldn't be getting in the 40k universe).

You could probably fit 20000 people into the space on the ship - even allowing for all the essential components onboard - but I doubt very much you could store the food required to operate for the months of potential travel time. As for servitors requiring food too, well I guess they wouldn't be too choosy about what they ate. Some kind of algae-based paste perhaps...

The current real-world comparisons are not really appropriate, as we have become accustomed to a life of decadent luxury by Imperium standards.

Consider the british man-of-war from the earily 19th century, where the crew didn't have "quarters" but slung their hammocks in the decks. 14" to a man. That's it. Able seaman? 14" of space is all you get

These boats carried with them provisions for some 6 months, and had "communal" eating facilities. Basically it was all the same decks that were cleared and prepared for different purposes. Granted, they didn't have to fit in scrubbers air-blesser, but it's more in the line of what you should look at for comparisons.

This ain't Star Trek where the crew have their own quarters for sleeping and playing various music instruments. The captain and his officers do, but they are very few in number.