I have seen several references to salvaging derelict ships and refitting them for use in the Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy books but nothing concrete as to how a ship is towed back to port. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Are there tug boats in the forty first millenium?

A good question really. I think it be posible for a ship to pull another ship with them in normal space, but at a must slower speed. So if it aint to far from a planet that might have the needed repair fatilities then that should be doable (or drag it into hiding behind a dead planet so you can get to it later when you got the stuff+ techpriest needed to repair its engine/warp/gellar engines.

But i dont think you can drag it with you in the warp, but i gues thats up to each gm to deside. I would make some serius penalty on all the navigations rolls if they where allows to do it.

Asolr said:

The problem there is that often it would be implausible to repair and refit a wreck (such as the Bounty for example in Forsaken Bounty) in the wild and woolly place the pc's find it, and taking it back to a repair dock somewhere is surely more likely.

I would guess perhaps a ship of equal or lesser size can be 'shackled' to a working voidship and 'carried' through the warp - perhaps at a slower speed than normal?

That possibility is certainly possible (and is, in fact, how they move Ramillies class starforts into position; it apparently takes 17 navigators and a 'fleet of tugs, supply ships, warships and system craft', and, if memory serves, 6 battleships (according to the original article) to tow it through the warp).

Another option is to tow a hulk to a relatively secure anchorage within the system it was discovered, and repair it there, either a nasty jury-rigged, spit-and-bailing-wire job from your ship's own resources, or leave it there (preferably under guard) and come back with a dedicated repair vessel (or possibly simply your own ship, a hold full of spare parts and some hired shipwrights/mechanicus adepts/shipbuilders).

If you were to try and tow it through the warp (or even simply restored air, power and life support to the enginarium a few crew decks and the Geller Field), the new Sandy Mitchell novel, Innocence Proves Nothing , shows that the Geller Field's realspace bubble can extend for several kilometres from the ship's hull, so it would be possible for two ships to travel in company, provided they kept incredibly close station upon one another (or at least, one of them was capable of doing so, and had a sufficiently skilled navigator and helmsman).
I'm not suggesting that the larger (and/or more agile) ship carry both hulls in her Geller Field, but that the two vessels sync their Geller Fields just prior to translation, so that they overlap.

Personally though, I favour towing it to some secret anchorage and either repairing it then and there, or leaving it under guard and going to hire fabled Magos Stark, who could build you a new ship IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!

...sorry, couldn't resist.

You know, I was never quite sure how large the Gellar Field was. A few kilometers sounds like you could fit a small ship (anything sub-cruiser) in there if you tied it to your own. Acceleration would be slower, but in zero-gravity you'll get there eventually.

Cruisers are rarer, you wouldn't risk a bit sticking out and filling with demons. You'd have to conduct some field-repair there and take it back to a port, under heavy guard. A prize like a cruiser is something a lot of people would want. I imagine unless it was kept very secret, while the repairs were happening anyone with an interest in it would try to fend off their opponents, taking carefully aimed shots so as not to hit the prize. Send down boarding parties and raiders to clear out other factions engineers, and take their supplies to further your own repairs.

It would take years, a small war between anyone after a prestigious new ship until finally one faction claims enough areas to take it into the warp and cut off their opponents' reinforcements.

I could imagine Mechanicus Salvage Arks, essentially massive hollow hulls outfitted with an oversized plasma and warp drive and thruster units as well as a Geller Field and minimum Bridge and Life Sustainer. The hull is fitted over the ship to be be salvaged and pulls it with itself to the next available dock.

I'd always imagined that ships the size of imperial warp going ships are simply too big to pull through the warp. To salvage one (as in recovered, not as in strip) would thus more be a process of tugging it in realspace into a stable and preferably hidden anchorage and then refitting/repairing it with the bare minimum, gellar field, warp drive and plasma drive. Then a skeleton crew with a small life sustainer could hobble back to a port with it for full repairs. Of course it would move horribly slowly, be utterly defenseless and be rather dangerous for the brave salvgers.

Better still is to repair it at its anchorage, possibly making multiple runs with new components, repair teams, crew, etc. Given the sheer cost of ships, this would still be a very profitable enterprise.

In addition to making the ships slower through the warp, I would say there is a larger possiblity for the Gellar Field to fail. Same power over a much larger area means less protection. And that could make for some sweet inner adventures, especially if you have some sort of Inquisition characters in the group.

There's several ways that have already been mentioned, but it should also be pointed out that a Gellar field is unnecessary if you don't have any crew on board. The Gellar Field exists to protect the crew from the predators of the warp and isn't necessary for an uncrewed hulk. Space Hulks survive long periods of unshielded exposure to the warp and some of them retain inhabitants (although that's not a gamble I would want to take).

Sort of true- what's to stop a daemon from deciding to make a particular ship, component or solitary struggling machine spirit his home and possessing it? I mean, look at the Event Horizon* (the trip back was uncrewed, after they killed one another on the way out). Look at the Schismaticals of the deep Infotombs (ok, those are probably Abominable Intelligence, or uplifted computer viruses (?virii?), but a possessed dataslate is a plausible explanation).

Hell, look at the Eye of the Abyss - a hulked cruiser drifting in the warp, a tiny shred of daemon lord and you wind up with a possessed Heavy Cruiser terrorising the space ways (when the stars are right) for at least half a century.

And that's ignoring the fact that exposure to the stuff of the warp can leave stuff horribly changed, without a daemon or other entity guiding it. It's entirely possible that whole decks could be weakened, or twisted out of true so that none of the hatches will seal. I sure as hell wouldn't want to serve on a ship I knew had been dragged through the warp unshielded.

*OK, it's not technically 40k, but I've always thought of it as Man's first experiment with travel in the Immaterium.

It's hard for most warp entities to remain in the physical world for very long without rituals and spells tying them there. And possessing a ship is a big, big job. Of course, things can go horribly wrong and highly improbable, worst case scenarios can occur. This is 40K after all. Players will undoubtedly have to deal with one or more serious complications.

Without a crew, a starship becomes far less interesting for warp entities. But the very nature of the warp could warp and mutilate the ship itself.

I'd imagine the potential damage to the ship would make a gellar field a neccessity if you want the ship in a good state when it leaves the warp. As ever, only my opinion.

Just because a ship doesn't have a crew doesn't mean they are not inhabited. Void creatures in the dark holds getting possessed would be a nasty surprise for a refit crew to deal with.

I'm inclined to say that a light cruiser can tow a transport/raider and a cruiser can tow a transport/raider/heavy raider/frigate through the warp but it takes a long time and is horribly difficult/dangerous. In my paticular take on 40k most salvage is done using either huge mobile dockyards (basically you take the dock to the ship) or using tugs that are basically small vessels with huge engines and a very powerful geller field (think something the size of a transport or raider but with cruiser level engines and geller field) which they expand around the salvaged ship. I base the tug on the fact that in Shadow Point (one of the novels about the gothic war) mentions defence moniters being towed through the warp by tugs (defence moniters being system ships which therefore don't have geller fields so the tug either expands it's field around the moniter or they have temporary field generators). The dock is just because I think it's quite cool, rare, only used by the navy and tech priests maybe a few in space marine or rogue trader hands, used to support operations where going back to a dock for repairs isn't a viable option.

I'm very new to RT, but having looked over some of the background material that it was drawn from I would envision this:

The active ship (cruiser, etc) would have to act as a tug to push (tugs on rivers tend to push rather than pull their loads) the dead ship into the warp stream using the active ships engines/drives. The active ship would then have to steer itself and the dead ship at reduced speed to the desired location and exit. All of this would require significantly higher checks for Pilot/Navigation with serious consequences for failure.

Bringing the portable dockyard to the ship or using multiple tugs would be a much better (but more expensive) way of doing it. The second best is making minor to moderate repairs and using a skeleton crew to fly it back under it's own power (an adventure in itself).