I'm currently in the middle of making a back-up character (or a few) and am curious as to what we know of the Imperial Navy.

1) What is the ranking system like? I imagine it worked some-what like that of the new Battlestar Galatica, since when I read the bit about them in the Inquisitor's Handbook, it sounded like that is what the alternative homeworld was based off of. What do the different ranks attend to? Etc. Any information in general would be great here.

2) What do we know of Navy culture?

In Short: I don't there's a complete definitive fluff answer, it's mostly interpretation.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Navy_Hierarchy

There's a link to the hierachy/ranking system of the Imperial Navy.

Now for culture? You're going to have to find a long out-of-print copy of Execution Hour. AFAIK that's the only 'good' battlefleet gothic novel.

Other than that, that I can say off-hand to help, is the closest to ship culture that's easily findable is in Rogue Trader. Then again, not way too much on the Imperial Navy in there. It's not a heavily written in canon deal as far as I know and searching on the internet. Certain authors like Dan Abnett have done highlights of it with a few of the Gaunt's Ghosts books, notably the first one on the Naverre (and later on with Sabbat Martyr with the Space combat, it seems that all captains of ships are hard-wired into them); I'm not sure if Double Eagle would fully count as well to what you want.

Heh, this reminds me of asking questions of how the Adeptus Mechanicus inner-workings and traditions work.

Forget the new BsG. A far better match would be late 18th-early 19th century Royal Navy (that is, the British Royal Navy circa the Napoleonic wars).

To date, there have been three novels focusing on the IN: Execution Hour and Shadowpoint , by Gordon Rennie, and Relentless , by Richard Williams, although there are fairly hefty chunks in Matt Farrer's Crossfire , Abnett's Xenos and several of his Gaunt's Ghosts novels, all of which tend towards the Napoleonic RN In Space!

Aside from those resources, your best bet, inspiration-wise, are the Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian, and, to a lesser degree, CS Forester's Hornblower series. Another smart idea is to have a poke around Port Maw .

Relentless is a fine novel, I highly recommend it. Execution Hour is a (big) bit of a better, but it's difficult (not impossible) to get a hold of. Relentless does the trick very nicely!

Alasseo's list is thorough, if you can get the hold of them, it'll do you quite neatly. The Battlefleet Gothic rules (and thus the inherent lore) is freely available on the GW website under the Specialist Games section. Plenty of stuff to get to grips with. An addition to it is the Planetkill anthology. It features a short story 'prequel' to (and best read after) Relentless , amongst other excellent tales (some of which include spaceships!)

Toodle-oo!

Imperial Navy

Officers follow the standard navy rank system up to a point. The chain seems to go roughly as follows (inconsistent or speculative in brackets)

Lord Commander of the Segmentum > Lord Admiral > [solar Admiral] > [Fleet Admiral] > Admiral > Vice Admiral > [Rear Admiral] > Commodore* > Captain > Commander > Lieutenant Commander > Lieutenant** > Ensign > Midshipman

* Commodores exist as full commodores, who act as full flag officers, and as commodore-captains, who retain command of their own ship directly. This accords with the Royal Navy practice up to 1958.
* There may or may not be sub-divisions of lieutenant. None have been mentioned that I know of.

Positions appear to follow age-of-sail Royal Navy practice. The master of the ship is its captain, even if his substantive rank is lieutenant commander. Lieutenants are numbered by seniority (there is mention in the BFG BBB of a 4th lieutenant, but given the crew numbers the more junior members may go as high as the hundreds. Senior officers include the master of ordinance, master of arms and master gunner.

Flag captains and flag lieutenants are... odd. Historical practice is that a flagship’s captain is a flag captain and a flag lieutenant an aide-de-camp to the flag officer. Execution Hour has the first officer refered to as a flag lieutenant despite not being a flagship in the first place.

NCOs are less mentioned, but the existence of petty officers and chief petty officers has been confirmed, as well as bosuns (which may be a post rather than a rank). Enlisted crew are ratings, naval troops (who are navy personnel rather than in any way being organised as marines) are armsmen. Also part of the crew are logicians and engineers (not Mechanicus enginseers, who are also embarked), both navy rather than Mechanicus personel.

Flight crews are ambiguous. Bombardiers, gunners etc. Are mentioned, and at least some pilots are officers.

Relentless includes mention of sub-lieutenants, so spot on in your guess there.

The reference to flag-lieutenants in Execution Hou r is definitely odd, true, especially since a flag officer (commodore or above) would have a flag-lieutenant permanently assigned to him, rather than 'borrow' the XO of the ship in which he is flying his colours. I'd almost managed to mentally square-away the reference to flag captains as a bizarre memetic mutation of the old 'post-captain' (that is, an officer whose rank was captain, as opposed to a (social) courtesy promotion bestowed upon some lesser rank with the good fortune to command a ship, or upon a commander (when not serving, or travelling upon a ship commanded by someone other than themself)). Assuming that to be true (and a deliberate decision on the part of Gordon Rennie, as opposed to a SNAFU), it becomes possible that flag-lieutenant is an alternate title used to differentiate a senior lieutenant (for example, it might be used to refer to a lieutenant of greater than 3 years seniority; or yet another grade of lieutenant above the regular, but below lieutenant commander), or used as an alternate descriptive title for the position of first lieutenant. Of those possible theories, I lean towards the 'alternate descriptive for first lieutenant', as the scenes aboard the mutinous Bellerophon suggest, but suspect it was merely a screw-up on the part of Mr Rennie.

I'll note that the Master of Ordnance, Master of Arms, Master Gunner and other major department heads appear not to be line officers (and in some cases at least, appear to be warranted, rather than commissioned), but what one might almost think of as 'staff officers'. It is to be noted that they can be nominated for, and placed in (acting/brevet) command over a surviving line officer should the ship's captain fall, but that such nomination is dependent upon the Ship's Commissar, who also has the option of taking command pro tem .

Alasseo said:

I have a feeling that the Execution Hour rank foul up is due to page 90-91 of the BFG BBB (I do like the acronym for that book), which has the various officers of the Divine Right pictured. Being Ravensburg's flagship it has a flag captain and flag lieutenant, and given that tehre's no non-flag rank charts in said BBB the mistake, if I'm right and that's what it is, is understandable.

I would assume that Ulanti was a lieutenant commander at least, being that he was second in command of a full cruiser, but I honestly have no idea whether the 1st-nth lieutenant system includes officers with the ranks of commander and/or lieutenant commander. Masters I have no idea of, but I'm assuming that they would be commissioned officers but not line officers (if I'm not messing up my terminology). Operations rather than command, to go by the Star Fleet way of running things that I'm far more fammiliar with (TNG onwards, of course).