Darth Smeg said:

You know that tiny ship called the Enterprise? The one with the bald guy as captain? It still got almost 900 crew aboard and is just 600 meters long. Our ships are 3 times the length, wider and higher as well and much less automated then those are. I say that 20000 people is hardly enough to make them go. If you double the number I still would not blink my eyes in surprise.

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Sovereign_class

See, the way I see it having that many crewmembers stuffed into the available space is actually a hinderance. For a start, they are going to get in each other's way when doing things like moving around cargo and performing maintainance tasks. Then again, my view of 40k spacecraft is - as I mentioned in a previous post - a little less slanted towards human labour making everything on the ship work. I see the interior of a ship as being more like it is in Space Hulk: doors are powered and open when you pull a lever, though they sometimes break down. Essentially, the internal workings of ships that make up space hulks still seem to work with nobody doing any fixing, which is pretty good considering they might have spent centuries floating about in deep space...

Now granted there is some dispute about this, and I respect everyone's opinion on the matter, but I am of the opinion that a requirement for 20,000 people on what is considered a small ship by 40k standards is a fair way off the mark.

Nah, there's not really much dispute at all. Aircraft carriers are truly huge... and you could fit several in your 1.6 km long 40K warship. Quite easily.

In short, 20K is probably around the minimum for getting the work done and having everything actually hold together for more than a few weeks; you have families there, you need tailors, cobblers, etc. It really is a floating town with a large proportion of the people aboard not being formal members of the 'crew', in the way we'd understand on a modern warship.

The argument of how much space you have is well detailed in calculations done earlier in this thread. I read from those lines that there is more then enough space. But somehow when I picture crewquarters in an enclosed environment the picture of a submarine comes to mind. Cramped, a lot of pipes running everywhere, hot bunking and no privacy. Sure the officers and passengers might have big staterooms, but most of the crew probably don't.

If we take the U boats from WWII as example. 57 crew on a 60 meter long ship for the U 563 (a supply submarine which seems somehow fitting for a RT).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-463

Sister Callidia said:

The problem is that a Type fourteen could only remain down below snorkel depth for a few hours, half a day at best. Even a modern Typhoon class can only stay down 180 days. Even on a sub, life support does not exist in the same proportions as it does aboard a space vessel.

A note: according to fluff, an Imperial escape pod only holds 20 people. Logically, there would be enough for the ships compliment, not because the Imperium is particularly interested in the survival of its men, but rather so that the officers would have room no matter how many had already launched. Each one is large enough to manuver and spend over a month in space.

A single macrocannon has a barrel diameter of 30 feet. (determined by using the men in the image for scale)

And, no, servitors do not have to breath. You may want to check your Rogue Trader and or dark heresy rule books on this, but the machine trait is rather specific. Further, fluff also states this.

Darth Smeg: If 20k men had quarters as large as those in Star Trek, the crew quarters would have a lrger total volume then the entire ship. My calculations were using an area 8x6x10, or about the size of an old time prison cell.

Sister: a note on the Enterprise: The enterprise also victuals thier ship by way of synthsizing matter. They don't have to store food (or probably even oxygen) because they are directly converting energy to matter. This saves a LOT of space... Notice that the Enterprise with that scott bakula guy only has about thirty crew members when they had to carry their own stores and is 200m+ long

Gaidheal, I've been aboard both LHDs and CVN's and in all honesty, the crew is only half the compliment (A fact you seem very intent on dancing around)

A Yamato-class battleship only had something like 2500 men on board. And it was one of the largest warships ever built. (Longer then a Nimitz Class Carrier)

Something I noticed recently: SSV Normandy 2 from Mass Effect 2 is actually the closest to correct I've seen yet. If you go through the ship, you'll notice that there's only quarters for 20 odd people. (And is still rather spacious.) The ship is close to 200m long (walk from one end of an area to the other and figure a 36 inch stride. May be a reference to the Enterprise mentioned above. Bioware's games are lousy with that sort of thing)

Just to weigh into this one, I have to say I disagree with you, Baron. I think the crew complement for the Frigate scale vessels (circa 20,000) seems just right to me.

Let’s do the whole Nimitz comparison here. (You talk about the Yamato WWII battleship as being the largest warship, but according to Wikipedia that had a crew size of more like 2500-2800 and was 256 metres long to the Nimitz’s 332.8 metres.)

I am not a naval expert, and don’t have any particular insight into the meaning of “complement”, but I tend to take it as the number of people on board.

According to Wikipedia, there is a “Ship's company” of 3,200 on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier and an “air wing” of 2,480. I take this as being a total of about 5680 people on board the ship.

Given the scale of the Nimitz class, with 5000+ people on board, put that side by side with some of the SMALLER 40k vessels:-

img714.imageshack.us/img714/1253/comparitive.png

(that's a Nimitz class supercarrier at the bottom right, by the way.)

To me, 20,000 seems entirely plausible as the crew size for this sort of vessel, given its vast scale. These are genuinely colossal ships, on a scale never seen on Earth.

I’ve seen nothing in the background for 40k to contradict these crew complement proportions. You say in a different post how the RT figures need to be “brought in line” with Battlefleet Gothic: I’ve not seen anything to suggest they’re out of line with BFG.

Lightbringer said:

I am shocked to see how close in dimensions it is to the smallest 40k vessel that I assume is the Cobra destroyer. But it gives a good idea how collosal these vessels are.

Yes, I should explain that the top vessel is a sword class frigate, the middle vessel is a Hound class corvette (a ship I invented for my own Rogue Trader) and the bottom is a Cobra Destroyer.

Only the Sword is "Canon" ie there is a source (Rogue Trader) for its size, 1.6km long. There is no "canon" (I hate that word) source for the Cobra Destroyer that I'm aware of, I'm simply extrapolating its scale based upon the relative size of the miniatures. This is a very imprecise method, to say the least!

However, a scale of about 750 metres for a Cobra Destroyer *feels* sort of right to me. The Nimitz class supercarrier is to scale with the Sword, which is the main thing!

I can't remember where I've seen it, but the Cobra is 1.5km long, Light. I'll try to find a source.

This backs me up though:

www.merzo.net/10mpp.htm

They have the Cobra at 1.5km in that image of it too.

I think that Merzo site is fantastic, Millandson (it's been a shortcut on my PC for years) but I reckon they overestimate the size of a Cobra destroyer.

They've had it at that size for a good three years at least - the artwork is really really beautiful, but at the time they put their size estimate up there was no "canon" (ugh) on the size of Imperial vessels. There was some stuff about the size of cruisers in BL books, but that was inconsistant and varied from 3km to 8km for a Lunar class. It seems to have now stabilised at the 5km we see in RT.

So at the time Merzo put it at 1.5km, (I think, but I'm always prepared to be proven wrong) there was no canon source on the size of Cobra Destroyers. Which means that they were doing what I'm doing with it: guessing.

I'm prepared to accept that 750 metres might be a little small for some. In my view a size of 750m to 1km *feels* right, based on a number of factors:

1. The relative size of the miniatures. OK, I accept that to some extent size variations in the miniatures is symbolic. But equally, why make them different sizes if it's all purely symbolic?

2. The Cobra is a different CLASS of vessel to the Sword. Destroyers are traditionally lighter vessels than Frigates (though this depends what era you're comparing Imperial Fleet vessels to: Age of sail? Jutland? WWII? 21st century?)

3. We know a Sword is 1.6km long. If the Cobra really was 1.5km long, that makes it only 100 metres shorter than a sword class. I can't do it at the moment, but if you expanded the Cobra to that length, given its proportions, it would actually (I suspect) be a far more massive and bulky vessel than the 1.6km Sword, which is actually quite slim and wasp-like.

So to conclude, while I would always treat Merzo's stuff with tremendous respect, I don't regard them as a "Canon" (uuuuurghh) source for BFG data.

All that said, I make enough mistakes in my job every day to know full well that I am far from perfect, and if anyone can point me in the direction of a GW/GW affiliated "official" (yuck) source for the scale of Cobra destroyers, I will gladly concede the point!

Like I said, I'll try to find a source for that. I'm sure I've seen it stated as 1.5km by GW before, but I can't for the life of me remember where. I'm over 21 now, it's all downhill from now on

I might point out that if we go by the minis, a Lunar is only 3km long.

And I think that your image of the carrier makes my point that they crews cannot be that large wonderfully, considering a Yamato class Battleship was even larger and only carried 2500 men. Figuring that the ship has to carry munitions, food and water storage for six months to a year, and life support for all those men, on top of thier much larger engines, you might see how that would make up the difference in size.

I vaguely recall Chambers stating they were something like 1/2500th scale.

BaronIveagh said:

Where do you get that from? There isn't a scale on the models. Indeed, there was a distinct effort made with everything made for Battlefleet Gothic to avoid defining how big things were.

Lightbringer said:

As far as I can remember from the old Specialist Games boards not long after BFG came out one of the designers stated that the miniatures were all in scale to each other, just not to anything else (like the planet markers in the boxed set).

Also, and this is purely incidental (I think), a BFG Chaos cruiser is 9.5cm long, that gives a total length of 3.8km at a scale of 1:40,000 Just coincidence I wonder?

DW

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Back on the old BFG boards they mentioned they were to scale ot one another, if I remember right. How i got that was I took two BFG swords and put them end to end next to a Lunar. If a sword is 1.4km long, then a lunar is equal in length to two swords + the ramming spar.

... if FFG changed everything to make all the ships 1/40,000th actual size, I'm gonna strangle the guy that broke canon to make a joke....

Wait... in fluff a cobra is small enough that a tyranid spine passed through one end to end. That would mean they can only be a few hundered meters long.

BaronIveagh said:

IMO, that does depend on who told you, and what his sources are (or if he was one of the game's creators, the designers of the miniatures, etc; people that know what was intended). Given that GW's miniatures in general are seldom in scale with one another, this isn't the kind of thing I'm going to take on faith unless Andy Chambers, Jervis Johnson (two of GW's most senior designers at the time BFG was developed, and the game's designers), Tim Adcocke or Dave Andrews (who designed the models for the BFG range) say that it's the case.

... I will now use the power of fluff to disperse the crew argument.

Achem:

Soul Drinkers has a battleship with a crew of 20k.

Angels of Darkness states that a Dark Angels Space Marine escort is 500m long.

Exicution Hour and Shadow Point both state that cruisers are 2-3 km long.

Flight of the Eisenstien states that she's around 2 km long, and that she's and older class. (a comparison is made to the 'newer' Sword class, suggesting she's longer then it)

The hardback copy of Daemonfuge , the Lunar Class Cruiser Hammer of Thor has a crew of 2,123.

Which is less then even I figured, admittedly. (Then again, in the CC series, they operate a fireship with six men...)

Though it could be that it's only equipped with two lance batteries. (I'm guessing the launch bay we see at one point has replaced it's forward macrocannons.) If true, this would lead one to belive that lances require fewer men to operate.

I might point out that for some reason FFG's ship crews scale up in proportion to the ships stats, not it's size, ie a sword gains 100m in length and six thousand more crew than the smallest raider, due to having better armor.

If you will only accept the word of Andy Chambers: here it is. He wrote an article on crew sizes in BFG once

www.wolfedengames.com/battlefleetgothic/crew.htm

BaronIveagh said:

Except the 'fluff' (I personally abhor the term; It seems frankly disparaging, as if it implies that the background is less important than the rules) is commonly vague and/or inconsistent (and deliberately so), as letting people make their own minds up about the setting is deemed more important than making sweeping and absolute statements.

BaronIveagh said:

Seen it; that's all fair and good... but it does also depend on what one defines as 'crew'. Do you only count the officers and ratings (producing a lower figure), or do all the slave labourers and assorted menials count too? How much automation does the ship have (this will affect how many menials and labourers you'll need to supplement the trained crewmen; Astartes vessels have a lot of automation, for example).

Bringing the two conflicting sources into line, a Lunar Class Cruiser by the approximate rule-of-thumb that Andy Chambers defined has roughly 8,000 crewmen... and about ten times that many slaves and other unskilled menials, collectively viewed as 'mortal fuel' rather than crew. That's nearly 90,000 men. Accounting for natural variance and the imprecise nature of those estimates... 95,000 souls on board is easily possible.

Besides, my comment about 'only accepting the word of Andy Chambers', etc, was in regards to miniatures scale and using that as a frame of reference - that's one of those things that is seldom discussed, and given GW's typical inconsistency in regards to miniatures on the same supposed scales, not something I'm inclined to rely on.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

'Well, that would depend on what the definition of 'is' is.."

So in other words, "I accept Andy Chamber statements since Chambers is right except where he disagrees with me"?

Can't find quote, but Port Maw and Lexicanum state that BFG minis are in the 10 cm scale? (Never heard of this scale before, but would imply that they're all the same scale to one another.)

*edit* Someone told me this equals 1/1250th scale, but that seems a bit small to me...

I might point out that even pressed men in the crew are still considered 'crew' For some reason a lot of you seem to think that the Imperiums ships are rowed through space by galley slaves. Basically: "They have 90k crew." "Well, they have 20k crew but the game's creators arn't counting the slaves they keep."

Did the Imperium of Man fall to the Dark Eldar when I wasn't paying attention? I seem to recall quite a bit of background where the Imperial Navy disparages the keeping of slaves. Even pressed men are counted as crew (albiet with distain) both in Navy background and in the Rogue Trader novels.

I'll toss further fuel on the fire: the original, unedited scale chart based off the old BFG sites. the-first-magelord.deviantart.com/art/Battlefleet-Gothic-Scale-Chart-82219217 (still has the original typo over the firestorm class)

... and I'm fairly sure that the only one's still claiming enormus ship/crew sizes are Dan Abnett with his 20km long Lunar Classes, and....ugh... CS Goto.

So, if your battlebarge fires multilazors, by all means...

BaronIveagh said:

To quote Marc Gascoigne, the man who previously ran Black Library, up until around the time Black Industries was closed: "Everything is canon, nothing is true". With regards to the 40k universe, words to live by. Everything is subject to opinion and interpretation.

I'm not disagreeing with Andy Chambers' original intentions as to the sizes of starships... what I'm doing is working to rationalise some of the disparity that now exists, because like it or not, every legitimate published book set in the 40k universe is canon to some extent. Shouting "I'm not listening!" when I see something new that doesn't mesh with my personal interpretation of the setting is something I try not to do.

BaronIveagh said:

Rowed through space, no. But there's a lot to do on board a ship that size, and much of it requires nothing more than dumb, expendable muscle.

BaronIveagh said:

Try the novel Relentless . There's plenty of slave labour on the lower decks, and they have next to no contact with the rest of the ship. Doesn't fit your view of the Imperial Navy? Tough... it's in print, thus it's canon. How true it is, however, and how you choose to interpret it overall is an individual decision.

BaronIveagh said:

Meanwhile, GW itself (as opposed to Black Library, who are, it should be remembered, a distinct company owned by GW whose output is produced entirely by freelance writers of varying familiarity with the settings they write for) has always made a point of avoiding giving any sizes to the starships of the setting (indeed, a comment to that effect was made in White Dwarf when Battlefleet Gothic was released).

Meaning that, aside from the well-intentioned speculation of the community, and their preferences as to which sources are 'good' and which are 'bad', there is actually very little concrete information on the sizes and crew compliments of the starships of the Imperium.

Throwing around snide remarks because I'm so much as daring to consider that the assumed and preferred values used by the Battlefleet Gothic online community might not be the whole of the picture or even that I might chose to interpret things differently is frankly petty. You cannot justifiably claim that I'm engaging in some form of badwrongfun just because I choose to have a different interpretation to you.

Rowed through space, no. But there's a lot to do on board a ship that size, and much of it requires nothing more than dumb, expendable muscle.

I'm curious how you figure that there are all these tasks requireing dumb muscle. Cargo is servitor loaded. Ammo is servitor loaded. (Admittedly this is from Black Library, so...)

Try the novel Relentless. There's plenty of slave labour on the lower decks, and they have next to no contact with the rest of the ship. Doesn't fit your view of the Imperial Navy? Tough... it's in print, thus it's canon. How true it is, however, and how you choose to interpret it overall is an individual decision.

Considering that the plot of the book was about how badly the officers were violating navel regulations and conspiring to keep up their life of piracy, that might not be a good example.

Meanwhile, GW itself (as opposed to Black Library, who are, it should be remembered, a distinct company owned by GW whose output is produced entirely by freelance writers of varying familiarity with the settings they write for) has always made a point of avoiding giving any sizes to the starships of the setting (indeed, a comment to that effect was made in White Dwarf when Battlefleet Gothic was released).

Meaning that, aside from the well-intentioned speculation of the community, and their preferences as to which sources are 'good' and which are 'bad', there is actually very little concrete information on the sizes and crew compliments of the starships of the Imperium.

Throwing around snide remarks because I'm so much as daring to consider that the assumed and preferred values used by the Battlefleet Gothic online community might not be the whole of the picture or even that I might chose to interpret things differently is frankly petty. You cannot justifiably claim that I'm engaging in some form of badwrongfun just because I choose to have a different interpretation to you.

Um, by that logic, how does FFG even fit in, since they only license the setting from GW, making what they do even more removed from the source?

BaronIveagh said:

Is it? Can you say that with absolute certainly regarding every single ship in the Imperium? Given that this is a setting where a significant portion of technology is based on fragmentary, shoddy copies of STC data, which itself was designed so that technology could be constructed using all manner of locally-available components and in a variety of ways, there's a lot of variation when it comes to technology like this, both through the basic nature of the STC designs and through misunderstanding of the designs. Remember, the Imperium is almost defined by technological anachronism - steam-powered monorails rumbling overhead while horse-drawn carts pull around cargo on cobbled streets below, and so forth. Some ships may be heavily automated or contain tens of thousands of servitors (who, it should be remembered, are essentially slave labour themselves - a servitor is, afterall, a cybernetically-augmented lobotomised human being). Others may rely on more mundane slaves. Others still may vary from deck to deck and component to component. There are no hard and fast rules about this - which is, and always has been, my point.

BaronIveagh said:

Remember that the Captain - who ends up amongst those much-maligned slaves - mentions being aware of their presence but never really considering it in his years as an officer, suggesting that it's more common (and more acceptable) than simply being limited to a single rather recalcitrant vessel.

Even so, good example or not, it is an example, and thus a matter for consideration.

BaronIveagh said:

Everything FFG do has to be approved by GW, no different to anything done by Black Library, and there's a similar reliance on freelance work. For practical purposes, there's little difference.

...

GW also approved the Blood Raven's novels... their approval doesn't mean it doesn't violate canon with a 2x4. It just means that they think it will make money.

And while, No, I can't say that Battlefleet Nooneeverheardoficus might not row thier ships through the stars as millions of slaves toil at thier oars to move the Battleship Anacronism, I tend to file it away with the idea that millions of pilgrims lay down in long lines to form railway tracks for trains powered by human bonfires to drive over hauling freight between hive cities.

It was my interpertation that the Captain had never really considered the crew as individuals, which is (unfortunetly) a common problem with commanders who inherit rank.

BaronIveagh said:

Is it actually possible to 'violate canon' in a setting where canon is, at the best of times, a matter of opinion? And even assuming that the novels (and, similarly, every single product that isn't produced directly by the GW design studio) are a decidedly unreliable source... who gets to decide which ones are 'legitimate' sources for valid consideration, and which aren't? If there's no difference in the processes the books go through to be approved by GW, then either none of them are valid, or all of them are... because anything else is setting a personal double-standard, which is no better, and tends to create problems like this, where people get so attached to their own interpretations of the setting that they protest loudly whenever something comes along that doesn't fit the setting the way they think it should. I'm sorry that X product's depiction of the setting doesn't match the one in your head... but something not matching your particular expectations does not make it invalid or inherently wrong. It just means that it contradicts your interpretation, which when dealing with a setting as frequently nebulous as the 40k universe, is pretty much all "canon" actually amounts to.

The problem with the 'there is no spoon' response re canon is that you can then justify anything. (It's frequently used to justify female space marines) I could claim that Imperial ships are powered by by giant space hamsters in wheels. They still wouldn't require 30,000 men to feed them and clean thier cage.