The problem [if it is one] for 40K is that canon is not fixed. Take Space Marines; in the early days their armour was not only for protection but contained auto-injectors to administer the drugs necessary to keep their super-human physiology from tearing itself apart, now they can go without armour for long periods and suffer no ill effects.

As to BFG I always took my size / crew figures from the books Execution Hour and Shadow Point (Cruiser: about 3.3ish km long and 12 - 14,000 crew); now the RT corebook has given us the 5km cruiser & 95,000 crew.

Which is canon? - Both of the them; each source is every bit as authoritative as the other.

The real question is which suits your version of W40K better? Choose and go with it!

DW

Traveller61 said:

Exactly what I've been trying to say.

Traveller61 said:

Or there are different sized ships, just like in real life.

Except that two ships of the same class are the same size (or fairly close), in real life

Are people taking the Population rules into account here? If you want to cut costs to the bone, you can run a ship on 40% crew, and you still get the benefit of all your cargo holds etc. A 20% crew still works pretty well in combat (at least until it suffers a point of damage). So if you really want to run a ship the size of a small town with only 4,000 people, you can go right ahead. The rules fully support it.

The point has noting to do with cost (RAW it the penalties would actually end up costing you more for having less then a full compliment of crew) . The point was that not only is there no need for that many people (unless you're rowing the ship ) but also that having that many crew breaks both (a considerable amount of) fluff and reality. We reduced the crew compliment of the Lunar to 1/10th the listed total and still don't have enough room for everything.

For some reason the design team at FFG decided to make the crew a scaling stat that seems to be tied to ship armor. Not, say, the size of the ship, or how many guns it carries. (Why that is, I have no idea. Damage control is handeled by a different mechanic altogether. Perhaps Imperial ships are coated in the frozen corpses of the crew to increase armor?)

The debate, such as it has been, has been on if Andy Chambers (the guy that created all these ships in the first place) is correct in his statements of crew and ship size, and FFG simply wanted to try and make the game more grimdark by requireing huge numbers of people, or if they really require this many people, and exactly what Games Workshop, the actual owners of the property, think. (Personally, given GW's 'there is no fluff' response to everything, there are only three things which would make them say no: The Emperor returns to life, The Ultramarines fail at something, or the lot of the average Imperial citizen improves above the 'serfs in space' level.)

However, given the level of decay over the last two editions, I'm surprised that GW doesn't have them rowing through space between the Reikland system and the Brettonia system. There is such a thing as 'too much' like Warhammer.

My PC's Light Cruiser has about 20,000 corpses on board after a pretty heavy battle followed by an emergency warp jump.

The players really hope that those 20,000 people aren't doing very much at all!

Mind you, there is that other reason, so that the GM can't flood the ship with plague zombies, as noted above.

Grandfather Nurgle. You'll run out of ammo long before he runs out of servants.

I imagine that each deck is like a town in its own right with the attendant "civilians" growing food algae, praising the Emperor and recycling the bodies while the only time someone leaves their deck is on a work gang or other mission. And then there are the... Things living between the decks: Hrud, Genestealers, mutants and deserters. They'll keep you busy!

As far as I have been able to determine (after sending a lot of emails), the difference is that Chambers was counting only sentient beings, where as FFG is counting everything that contains a human body part, such as servoskulls and cogitators.

So, there might be 10k human beings on a lunar, and twenty times that many servitors of one type or another.

I don't consider a data slate to be a member of the crew, even though it might contain organic bits.

BaronIveagh said:

It actually explicitly states that servitors and the like aren't included in the crew population figures.

Then how exactly does the crew reclamation facility work then, since it reduces crew loss by converting them into servitors?

I'm just saying what the book says, is all.

And I'd guess that it would be because the increased number of servitors would be able to keep the ship going efficiently (which is what is covered by the Crew Population figure) for longer than it would do if those people just died instead.

Dead people = new servitor parts. Thus you make up the loss of dead crew with servitors. This doesn't make the crew happy thus the morale hit. One expects that ships suffering heavy losses could end up with more servitors than humans for a crew.

BaronIveagh said:

Probably because crew loss is abstract? Afterall, at no point is it ever stated that 1 point of Crew (in terms of the rules) is 1% of the crew; the crew value represents the ability of the remaining crew to continue to operate the ship, rather than a precise representation of the total remaining number of men on board.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Achem "Therefore, if a Crew Population was 98, that means that 98 percent of the ship's original crew compliment is still alive." - Page 224, RT Core Rulebook. I'd say that it clearly states 1 point of crew is 1% of the crew.

BaronIveagh said:

Fair enough, I missed that part. It's amidst a large and wordy chapter, and a paragraph that isn't hugely relevant to the ability to actually run the system (it's easy enough to interpret the effects of crew loss without it).

Even so, the system as a whole is not without (extensive) abstractions, as is the case with any RPG system that is even remotely playable. Mechanical effects are seldom perfect representations of the processes involved, but rather approximations of the end result.

I've run into a lot of things like that contradiction. The rules actually make sense if you only have BFG levels of crew on board, but if you follow FFGs numbers, you can have situations where the rules clearly state that you taking more crew than there are people living on the planet (due to FFG's very small planetary populations and very large ship crew levels.) This is due to the rule stating that crew population automatically returns to 100 and this can be done at any human world with an aquisition check.

(RAW, all the GM can do is modify the check.)

However it does mention in aquisition that in a sparsely populated world replenishing crew may be more difficult, whilst on a hive world potential crew are abundant... it's 40K - the one resource that humanity has in it's favour = humans...

...

...

Haemonculous Mal: Ah, Scintilla! We will hold the world ransom unless they give us twenty-five billion humans...

Incubus Bigglesworth: But isn't that their entire population?

Mal: 'Nonsense! This in an Imperial hiveworld! They run to the hundreds of billions everywhere else in the galaxy, why would it be so small here?"

Yes, but even ramp that check up to unique and tiny population and it's still possible to make it if the party has been profitable, and they instantly get 100%.

I hate to say it, but by the standards of the rest of the galaxy, the Calixis Sector is pretty much empty. Agriworlds with only a few thousand people, the largest hiveworld in the sector is less then a quarter the population of other hiveworlds. Hell, some worlds have hives that have been entriely abandon. I'd say that the sector is undergoing demographic collapse.

Ironically, under Lord Sector Hax, the Imperium appears to be short on supposedly it's greatest resource.

BaronIveagh said:

Well, to defend the Calixis population numbers, it is, Imperially speaking, the ass-crack of no-where. It's the 1800's St. Louis of Segmentum Obscurous, recently settled gateway to the Halo Stars and mankind's manifest destiny. Of course, there's nothing saying you have to stick by the numbers given, if they even come up. I usually just say there's countless billions in a hive, countless billions will die if X dose Y, etc and don't sweat the numbers. No reason for exact population numbers to be given usually, though if it ever dose come up, i do usually multiply the population of Hive Worlds by 10 (in 40k, you can never go wrong by making things bigger).

When it comes to a ship's crew, you could simply divide them all by 10 if that matches your vision better. After all, there's no rules tied to a ship's exact crew number (there's a crazy lack of them to be honest), just the percentage of that crew so you could make it **** near anything you want and nothing mechanically will change (within reason). It's just flavor, go with the flavor you prefer.

As for filling your crew complement at a planet or station that has less available then the crew you need, just say "no". It's easy and it should happen from time to time with any acquisition check. Some things are just plain impossible. You're not going to find 1,000 Caidian Pattern Las Guns for sale or theft on Orn no matter how good the PC's roll, just as you're not going to fill you're missing 35% crew complement at a planet that boasts only a small research outpost of only 102 souls, even if your max crew is only 700 just the same as you wouldn't be able to get that 35% if your crew was 26,000 and the planet you're docked at as a population of 13,000.

Still, I'd agree that there's a slight disconnect between sip crew numbers and the given planetary populations of DH, but I get the feeling different writers were involved in those areas -one could just chalk it up to the efficiency of the Administratum Cubile-Farms. While they are, on a grand scale, quite efficient in cranking out the various resource reports, the high adapt burn-out and sudden (and spectacular) death rate dose mean that occasionally a decimal will get misplaced, a system will starve to death, an regiment will be placed in the wrong theater of war, and a brief overview of a sector's planetary populations will seem woefully small.

In the end, we all have to alter what we're given in these games to match our own tastes and idea of the flavor of the 40k universe. My self, i tend to skew everything to the absurdly large -if it's not stupidly and mind boggling ginormus, then it's just not 40k. Others prefer a more reasonable flavor of 40k and have to scale things back. Ship populations (and size for that matter) is really a minor thing to alter in your version as doing such will have no real impact on any of the rules to have to worry about.

The Administratum does not make mistakes. The commissar says so.

The point isn't that I need so say no (I have been saying No on this issue) It's that logic was not applied in this case when the rules were written or, as usual, the 'rules lawyer' and 'power gamer' segment of the population was not taken into account (I have to deal with both at my gaming table). I discovered that I got lucky when they rolled reliquary of Mars. They had some real plans for Death Cult...

BaronIveagh said:

Actually, the entire point of my argument was that given even basic dimensions of a ship that size, you can easily fit everything into it that you would need to house a crew of that size and still have room for all of the other crap on the ship. Please note that I left off the command tower in my calculations, and even admitted that the number would be flawed as I was basing things off of a game mechanic.

Besides that, the size of a macrocannon is note a known quantity, unless you take one piece of background over another. 40k has been kept deliberately vague by GW authors, because they want some wiggle room with their fiction, and hard numbers takes that away.

Also of note, the vast majority of imperial ships are cuboid.

Drakar said:

A 40K Trooper is maybe ten times the size of a Star Wars soldier. The average Imperial Guardsman can fit a Clone Trooper in his shoe!

Rakshasa said:

Joking aside, most of them won't be soldiers. Maybe about 500-1000, tops? At least comprising the ordinary crew, and most of them would be security forces, rather than proper soldiers. The ships seriously need that many people to keep them going.