There are plenty of rogue traders in the 40k novels with only one ship. Included would be Orrelius from the Ciaphas Cain novels, who only has one ship, and Tobias Maxilla, who also just has the one ship. Both have them have been rogue trader for ages, and yet only have one ship, and it's unsure what size vessel that is. So it's entirely reasonable for a RT to only have a single ship.

Plus, I wouldn't look into Battlefleet Gothic too much, that's the same game that says cruisers are eight times as tough as escorts, and escorts don't have criticals, they just die, which is totally unlike the ships in Rogue Trader. Best not to use miniatures games rules as a basis for an RPG, because miniatures games are simplified to an amazing degree compared to RPGs (as demonstrated by the power, range, etc of some weapons in Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader).

....

Then again, the BFG community had agreed upon more realistic sizes for spaceships and crew. Based on talkings with Andy Chambers. The Rogue Trader RPG has increased them a lot!

I mean.... 26000 people on a 1600 metres long ship, with 800 metres abeam.... a bit crammed....too crammed.

Black Library agreed upon the smaller sizes as well, was on the old BL forum stated by one of the authors:

Lunar cruiser ~3000metres long

Dauntless ~2400metres long

Escorts - 800-1300 metres long

For crew sizes they went with 1 hitpoint equals 1500 crew. Much more realistic, even if we did stretch it to 2000 crew, seen the size of vessels.

If you read the foreword by Alan Merret Battlefleet Gothic is perhaps the founding idea of Warhammer 40k!

Truth to be said in BFG : I do not like the fact escorts die flat out against a critical hit. Even by the beliefs that the vessel isn't really destroyed but put out of action by the attackers.

ps I'm not dissing the RT book, I love it, but I want to get the facts straight. And thus BFG maybe has a flaw with the resilience of escorts but Rogue Trader has its flaws as well regarding Space Ships.

horizon said:

I think you are thinking in two dimensional terms here.

Sure, trying to fit 26000 people on a flat surface 1600 meters long and 800 meters wide might be a bit crammed. But starships have several decks/levels as well. So to get a true surface area for all those 26000 people you'd have to multiply those 1600*800 meters a few times to get the real "living areas" of a starship.

Besides, the numbers do add up. Compare it to a modern Nimitz class super carrier. These "boats" are quite small in comparison to even a frigate sized vessel in WH40K (Nimitz class = 332.8 meters long and 76.8 meters abeam in the widest points of the ship), and the Nimitz class have a complement of nearly 6000 people, and are perfectly able to fit 90 fixed wing aircrafts and helicopters to boot, without the crew having to feel to "crammed in".

Now compare that to the size of a space faring vessel 1600 meters long (thats roughly FIVE TIMES the length of a Nimitz) and 800 wide at it's widest points (thats almost TEN TIMES the width of a Nimitz) a complement of 26000 people (roughly four times the amount of a Nimitz) wouldn't be that unlikely.

Of course, all sailors will claim that quarters aboard any ship feels crammed, but my reasoning here is that if nearly 6000 people can fit into a Nimitz class super carrier without having to elbow eachother constantly and feeling packed like sardines, 26000 people could just as well fit into a vessel the size you're refering too and even have room to spare. (I'd be surprised if such a 40K vessel didn't have at least four to five times the amounts of levels/decks than a Nimitz does, even if some area of these decks are occupied by massive gundecks and holds taking up several levels of space)

If we use the Nimitz as an example and just increase its proportions so that it is as 1600m long, it would have 111 times the volume: (1600/333)^3

Meaning that such a vessel could hold six hundred thousand people with no more cramped conditions than aboard the Nimitz as long as the cargo requirements aren't proportionally larger.

Sergeant Brother said:

Which they would be - at the very least, you have significant life support and artificial environment considerations (heat, light, gravity, air, water) to make.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I agree with this. Although water seems to be recycled throughout the ship through moisture recyclers that gather ambient moisture and refuse and then filter it to make clean water. Heat and light are produced by the plasma reactor that also powers the plasma engines, so the heat and light sources come from one and the same source. And gravity is induced by passive "grav plates" bolted across all deck floors and are probably powered by the plasma reactor as well (so it's not like the ship needs a "gravity generator" or something esoteric like that taking up a shitload of space, since the gravity comes from each floor).

But that still doesn't make it unfeasible for a 1600 km long vessel to be able to house 26000 people. I'd say that you could easily double or triple that amount, but the only real danger would be running out of supplies/food a lot faster than normal, which wouldn't be very effective for a Rogue Trader or even an Imperial Navy vessel, since they have to be prepared for long voyages/patrols without being able to re-stock their supplies.

Varnias Tybalt said:

In all those places, the power has to be fed there - I can easily imagine long, thick bundles of power cabling running all through a ship, with substations scattered through key locations before feeding into various crucial systems, each with different power requirements.

Then again, also I imagine that a starship's 'sickbay' would probably be as large as most modern city hospitals, and that there would be crew and officer chapels of various sizes and degrees of splendour spread across the ship for the required regular sermons (from assorted priests of various ranks).

That's before you consider 'empty' space - the cavernous gun-decks, hundred-thousand-tonne cargo holds, the officers' decks (the captain's quarters will almost certainly be mansion-like in their vastness) - and the parts of the ship that nobody goes to anymore, the dank and virtually unpowered corners of the ship where mutants and cannibals and other horrors dwell.

800metres abeam was too wide for a Sword. Must be 300!.

Sword is 1600 long, 300 wide at the fins! So much smaller in the main body. That are also outer edges. And yes I am thinking '3D'.

Engines eat up a very large part of the ship space. Hey...that's in the RT book... numbers to be added.

So Sword is five times as long as a Nimitz, three times as wide (I think less since 300metres is fins, but alas).

Continue later I need the nu,bers..

horizon said:

Still, the overall space if you also consider the height (i.e number of decks) to be between three to five times as large as a Nimitz, a complement of 26000 would easily fit in there without being cramped. The numbers add up.

As for the fins, remember that when I crunched up the numbers I used the beam length at the widest points of a Nimitz, not the actual bulk where most of the liveable space is located, so like with a 40K frigate you'd have to trim some numbers with the measurements of a Nimitz as well, and still they fit 6000 people inside of one.

A Sword has space capacity 40.

The Frigate Jovian engine takes up 12

The Warp Drive 8

So half of available space goes to engines.

... Half the available space. I assume all the stuff like kitchens, hospitals, crew quarters, etc. is already accounted for.

unitled said:

Crew Quarters are an essential component, presently with a choice between pressed-crew quarters (Imperial Navy standard, not entirely pleasant) and Voidsmen Quarters (takes up more space, but better for morale). On a Frigate, Pressed-crew Quarters is Space 2, Voidsmen Quarters is Space 3. The larger quarters take up 7.5% of the available space within a Sword-class - and it's extremely easy to fill the rest of that space with weapons systems and other components (when I worked out a Lunar-class Cruiser as per the Battlefleet Gothic rulebook, I managed to leave 7 space and 3 power remaining for the prow Torpedoes, but that was all that was left, even on a ship with 75 initial space).

The other thing to remember is that crew density varies throughout the ship - it's cramped and squeezed in amongst the workings of the ship if you're amongst the labourers and ratings, but spacious and opulent if you're an officer.

Hope so.

Back on topic:

Have been re-reading the Rogue Trader section, still large fleets to me.

In the book Relentless the crew population for a light cruiser was about 10000 and if I seem to remember correctly one of the characters states the officers are outnumbered 10 to 1 in a mutiny.

What that tells me is that one 1 in 10 can be really called reliable as the other 90% are simply not up to the job of commanding. The officers in command have all their own specifuic duties, and not all of them will be people that are trained for negotiation/exploration/ combat / investigation You have to bear in mind that alot of the crew are going to be servitors doing menial work, say two in ten, as a good deal of the really monotonous work si best served by them (Cargo, auspex, data wired stuff) leaving 70%. Much of the shifts down in the bowels of the ship are going to be pressed crew doing hard back breaking labour which is about 4/10 (I remember calculating this out when reading the book 100 man Shift Crews times I can remember what else...) crew who would be next to useless as they are constantly exhausted and dying all over the place, just human fuel.So that leaves 30% .A good 500/1000 men would be armsmen, though I would pump for 500 as we are not talking about a regiment of men, just security for the ship and anti boarding actions, and to keep optimal security to prevent mutiny they would be spread thin constantly across the ship. This leaves us 25% of the crew for use

Artificiers/ Gunners/ other ratings, pilots/ women/ catering/ mechanicum adepts, navigator atendants etc rtc Thats 2500 men. Many of which have specific duties and have lived a life knowing no other way. Liofe in the 40k universe is much more rigid

Following this train of thought you suddenly realise that yes often enough to maintain the consistency of his ship he need all those men at their station doing their job just to keep the behemoth in running order.

Thats why on my ship Ive stuck some barracks. Gives me a excuse to play the odd game of 40K using my Imperial guard when my Rogue trader gets bored and really cant be arsed to do the job himself or because the job cant be done by a handfull of skilfull men. Because most of the time him and his closest aids will have to go down and sort the job down himself. Sure he might take a handfull of expendables, but after a couple of space battles and ship criticals the crew numbers are going to go down quickly.

Mind you I have to admit that the discrepancy between Battlefleet gothic and RT is annoying. You would have thought they FF could have kept consistency. Unless 22000 Is the maximum operational order...

Here, a piece from Andy Chambers on lance turrets:

http://www.redstargames.net/pdfs/Lance%20info.pdf

So a turret is pretty filled with all kind of things.

A Lunar cruiser has 4 lance turrets which would equal to a total lance turret crew between 800-2000.

A Gothic Cruiser would have a a crew of 1600-4000 working on all its weaponry except torpedoes.

(In RT a Lunar has a crew of 95000. Deduct 2000 for lances, Deduct another 2000 for batteries, heck another 2000 for torpedoes and you'd still have 89000 others....).

In a Firestorm (Sword with a lance in short) 2000 from its 26000 crew would be operating the lance.

horizon said:

And I'd say that between half and three-quarters of that 89,000 remaining crew are unskilled labour press-ganged from Imperial worlds, whose jobs are menial and disgusting, and who will never know anything but the brutality of their overseers and the dark depths of the ship. Then let's put, say, 15,000 men to work with the reactors and engines, overseen by dozens, even hundreds of Techpriests of various ranks. Then maybe 10% of the total crew as Officers, so 9,500 men there. You also need crew for the defence turrets, lighter pilots and other men to work the cargo docks (and direct the Monotask Loadlifter Servitors), logisticians and bureaucrats, priests, boarding crews, ship security/enforcers, sanctioned psykers (as noted in Relentless, for checking the crew for the taint of the warp, both when taking aboard new labour and after every Warp Jump), lay-technicians (non-Mechanicus personnel who have been trained and permitted to perform maintenance tasks)... the list goes on. Think of how many people you'd need to allow a vessel the size of a small city to keep running smoothly.

And that's without counting Servitors, who can easily be classified as equipment, rather than crew.

do your crew figures account for the fact that a crewman is not on duty at all times. This means that many critical roles might require 2-3 times their base numbers to operate in the long-term.

Having served on a Nimitz Class Air Craft carrier, I can attest that there is plenty of space for the ship when fully loaded for sea. The hangar bay alone is cavernous... even when chock full of planes.

The crew of 5,000 to 6,000 during deployment is typical. However, no one has considered the sheer number of auxilliary ships that have to accompany a carrier to keep it supplied with food, diesel fuel for the emergency diesel generators, mail, etc. Food especially... there are "food runs" made to the carrier on practically a weekly basis. SO, combine a Nimitiz carrier WITH all of its support vessels into one ship and you'll see that there is plenty of space to go around... and that a RT ship is a vessel that can operate independent of other vessles, hence their huge size.

Also, the population of a Nimitz class is based on operational requirements and rotating deckands to perform work on the ship. In my department alone, there were 350 people. We didn't all stand watch at the same time, however, it was necessary to have that many so that we could rotate on a 12- hour basis... 12 hours on, 12 hours off (or 5 on, 10 off). Once you qualified to something that had a better watch rotation, it became more time off.. hence the incentive to qualify quickly. Keep in mind that we also had quite a bit of automation... I can't imagine having to do some of the things that I did manually... it would have taken at least 3x the number of people to accomplish what I did by pushing a button.

Thanks for that reply.

On why a Rogue Trader only has a small ship:

Why did no one tell me the obvious answer? It is the setting! It takes place in the un-chartered Koronus Expanse! The Expanse is only to be reached through a small path which is loaded by Warp Storms. Now a smart Rogue Trader won't blow his whole fleet into such a dangerous area! He would have his large fleet at normal trade routes, making the obvious money. He would have his WoT secured just as heritage. Perhaps even in the Calixis Sector. Also in the pirate century on earth: in the Carribean small ships like barques and pinnaces had the advantage of being able to go through shallow waters without getting stranded; like the big galleons did. So the Rogue Trader takes a pimped Frigate or similar as it is smaller and has less chance to be detected in the Warp by mean creatures, etc etc etc

Of course the Rogue Trader himself goes into the Expanse because he is all cool and such.

horizon said:

I guess nobody told you that because far from all Rogue Traders actually have an entire fleet of ships. Most only make do with just one vessel. Also like you've mentioned there are different pro's and con's for having multiple vessels, but normally Rogue Traders don't do "normal" trading along stable trade routes. That's a job for chartist captains.

It stands to reason that the size of a Rogue Traders assets depend on a multitude of things.

Rogue Traders that have just been granted their Warrant of Trade probably have to do with whatever ship they have available - and might end up with an old, burnt-out freighter if they're short on funds (or sponsors) - which is especially likely if they get promoted from Guard or Navy duty (though RTs with naval background probably have more pull to organise something shiney). Never forget that a Warrant of Trade is also sometimes a convenient way of "disposing" someone who is a bit troublesome - not just higher-ups, but also starting-ups, who might not be off so well, finance-wise. Also, even those RTs that are offspring of a long dynasty could be stuck with a single vessel - quarrel with their siblings or hard times could have struck, and all that remains of their long and noble line is a single Sword, filled to the rim with a rookie crew and in dire need of repairs.

The only RTs that can afford more than one ship are those that have A been very successful, B are descendants of a long line of successful RTs, or C have already been well off BEFORE becoming a RT (imperial Warlords, governors, whatever).

The reason you read mainly about the big and succesfull RTs is simple - those are the celebrities of the 41st millenium. Forget Brangelina and that Hilton-brat; a well-off Rogue Trader easily surpasses them in terms of prestige, wealth and renown. Of course you don't hear about the hundreds of struggling RTs; their light - bright it may shine - is outdone by those few that are much larger than live.

Cheers,

-Bone

CmdrBonesaw said:

Yeah, well... You know, reconnecting entire planets worth of human population with the rest of civilization, destroying their alien enemies and setting up thriving colonies on planets not yet populated by humans, while still finding the time to explore the dark reaches of the void and discovering things that will sooner or later improve the Imperium as a whole (either by finding lost STC technology or by providing vital intelligence concerning hostile alien species), will make some ancient and long dead celebrities on ancient terra seem pretty insignificant.

It's fame and renown on steroids and acid, that's what it is.

guess nobody told you that because far from all Rogue Traders actually have an entire fleet of ships. Most only make do with just one vessel. Also like you've mentioned there are different pro's and con's for having multiple vessels, but normally Rogue Traders don't do "normal" trading along stable trade routes. That's a job for chartist captains.

Same with Bone's post. No disrepect though. But you are truly underestimating the Warrant of Trade. On the 'disposing' subject: true, but read that part again.

I refuse to believe a Rogue Trader only has 1 ship. That is simply illogical. Even when not trading. And if they had 1 ship it would not be a simple escort.

Why?

I generally assume that Rogue Traders usually grant leases to Chartist captains for profitable things after acquiring exclusive rights to them. This way, you get to profit from assets without needing a fleet of your own which you'd need to protect and keep together somehow.

horizon said:

I think you are truly overestimating the Warrant of Trade. Ships in the Imperium aren't that easy to come by. You don't just walk into 'Earls megadeal starships - buy a Lunar Cruiser today and get an armoured prow free!' and walk away with a new vessel. Ships take decades, even centuries, to build. Old ones rarely come up for sale. Yes, some RTs have fleets of ships at their command - but they are the exception, not the rule.