St. Jimmy said:

Like N0-1_H3r3 says, much of that is up for debate.

Do remember that the Imperial "scientists" claiming that Ork technology shouldn't really work are also the same people who believe that lasguns and other forms of basic technology are inhabited by "machine spirits", and that you have to make small prayers and such to them in order for them to work.

For all we know, their wierd concluscions could very well be chalked up to the same superstition they have towards all technology, I mean:

-"Them Orks build tech out of broken Imperial machines without worshipping the machine spirits properly? The machines 'shouldn't' work when they do that, but yet they do. Perhaps it's just Ork magic?"

So to summarize, I wouldn't trust many of the concluscions made by anyone connected to the Adeptus Mechanicus regarding alien technology. Half the time they have no idea how even their own technology works, let alone alien versions of it...

Isn't it much more likely for an Imperial vessel to ram, board and capture an enemy vessel and fly it home with a prize crew? In fact, Imperial vessels in BFG have reinforced prows for exactly this tactic.

I think we need to get away from the Star Trek mentality of tractor beams and think more 'age of sail in space'.

Kryptykfysh said:

I couldn't aggrey more, BFG has all way had something of the run out your gun and border away mentalty to it howere under some contions ships in the age of sail would tow pizes (battel damaged) by for me big chains has to be the way, in the case of the ice ship in the maw cant you just fine the chains in the wech of an old miner.

another thought I had on geting ship home, if the target craft has low moral then large parts of the lower deck could defect assuming a pc tarked them in to it.

Varnias Tybalt said:

I know im quoting myself here and I know this is a rather old topic but I just stumbled across the source of where I read about how artificial gravity works according to Imperial technology:

From Inquisitors Handbook, page 156:

The mechanisms that enable space travel are often overlooked by the common sorts of citizenry of the Imperium, for a variety of systems mask the experiences one would expect from travelling through the void. One conspicous absence is weightlessness - in fact, many people do not realize that they should be floating around inside their tiny ships. Grav plating througout the ship allows humanity to travel in a somewhat normal manner. Grav plates are mostly autonomous once activated, creating a pseusdo-gravity field complete with inertial compensation. Most ships replicate one Holy Terra standard but a few customise to slightly more or less of that level. Like most Imperial technologies, the secrets of grav plate construction are now almost lost and thus even the smallest vessel (and its integrated plating) is a priceless artefact to be maintained and preserved for generations.

Like I said, probably not an issue anymore, but I stumbled across the specific text I was thinking about and I did promise Mellon that I would get back to him about it.

My point was, that originally all ships had Tractor Beams. All Imperial ships had Tractor Beams, Teleportariums and Grav Plates.

So shouldn't they be available as Archeotech components? Teleportariums are Archeotech.

I'm not talking Tractor Beams like the Orks use them, as originally they were described in a non-combat function. The way the Imperium used them is so mundane that it's really no wonder they aren't mentioned in BFG any more than the details of the toilet facilities. Towing ships and routine docking isn't something you do in BFG, it's something you would do in an RPG which BFG is not.

Think about the 'Giant Chains' thing. If your ship is moving at a speed of 4, and a VU is 10,000km, then you're moving at 80,000km/hour...and that's a pretty slow ship. So what happens when you slow down? Remember, the whole reason you're towing them is because their engines don't work. You get rammed in the Plasma Drives by the ship you're towing.

Somewhere out there somewhere under three inches of dust in an abandoned Factorium on a long-deserted planet is a machine. Your Rogue Trader thinks it's just a pile of junk, but your TechPriest begs to let him take it back to the ship and study it.

After several years, the TechPriest and his lackeys have disassembled, cleaned, catalogued, studied and re-assembled the parts. Finally, he's proud to announce that the machine's purpose is to stamp out Graviton Guns at a rate of 10/hour. There seems to be a the small problem that some of the raw materials are expensive and difficult to obtain, but he's pretty confident that if you shove the raw materials in this end, a working Graviton Gun will pop out the other. Maybe even to STC standards, who knows? The thing is ancient.

Does he know how Graviton Guns work? Not a clue. Maybe if he studies one for the rest of his lifetime he'll figure it out and become published in "Archeotech Today". Will Graviton Guns suddenly become common? No. It's a big galaxy and even if the thing cranked out 10/hour for 10 years they'd still be uber rare. Besides, a smart Rogue Trader wouldn't want to flood the market even if he could.

Anybody get my point? Anyone?

Just because the Mechanicus doesn't know how or why something works and therefore can't build more machines to mass-produce them, doesn't mean they aren't in production somewhere in the Galaxy. You may find a world where they're common, like in the Rogue Trader novels where Suspensors (again, Grav-technology) were so common they were used in street lamps. Power Boards, another example.

Grav-Tanks. They used to be in 40k. They were made from deodorant bottles... But the point is, why Land Speeders but no hovering Land Raiders?!? The answer is: They no longer understand Gravity as a physics principle and can't find any working manufacturing equipment that makes flying Land Raiders. They do, however, have working machines that make Land Speeders . Emperor forbid one should break down irrepairably. No wonder they worship their machinery.

Tau got some sort of "Gravity Hook" to Tow Orca Escort with the big ships through their small "hop" in the warp, but they're Tau, they know what they are doing, and they are on the other side of the galaxy.

Check it out in the BFG supplement for Tau.

From memory WH40k grav-plates used something called a gravitic reactor material which counter-acts gravitational effects by using a magnetic field and they did have a reserve of the material on Earth, but it is a finite resource because people 'forgot' how to make it. They seem to forget lots of things though

*nerd brain*

Sounds like some kind of advanced semi-conductor technology, basically anything with a magnetic field- coil of wire, earth magnet, living organism, battery pack etc wandering near it will power the semi-conductor to produce gravity. Course the clever thing there on a ship is having the material know to produce 1G when a human stumbles over it and being able to differentiate that field to the one being caused by the ships reactor which is probably expotentially larger and mashing people into meat cakes. I guess part of the manufacturing process might mean it will only ever produce 1G regardless of the field its near.

I guess if a PC asks, its made of holy dirt from Terra and just works...

The Imperium seems to have enough grav plates though, I've yet to read about an imperial ship that had no artificial gravity.

The problem is also a conflict of tropes. You can't have a ship run on human chain pulling power and also gravityless at the same time, there is no way 1000 guys pulling on chains in 0 gee could load a space cannon. Thus you are ironically stuck with the limitation that in order to have sweating chaingangs performing all the work in your space ship you need high tech artifical gravity to do it. If your ship has no high tech grav system then it will require automated machinery to perform all the tasks...

Hellebore

Well, all you really need is Grav Plates in the critical location. Anywhere with a chain to pull for example. I imagine a cargo hold is much easier with no gravity and a lot of rope. Large sections of the ship would run on low or null gravity, with the crews expected to deal with it. It may even be used in security checkpoints to slow trespassers, or ladder shafts to save time.

After all, void-born don't treat zero-g as difficult terrain, they must get that practice in somewhere.