What would be the largest size starship that can land on a planet without some Forge World based Archaotech dry dock facility?

Some Cargo Transports and Pilgrim vessels should be able to land without issue. Titan carriers can land obviously, but will those be the largest capable of landing or would some Raiders and maybe Frigates be able to land without special facilities?

Should we come up with an extra ship component for landing gear?

I don't think normal starships can land on planets. Naval Shipyards are orbiting planets instead of being located on the planet's surface for a reason after all.

They have bulk cargo landing craft, lighters, shuttles, troop transports and Titan landers designed for getting things down to a planet surface.

Doublepost... Sorry

I'd say that starships shouldn't be landing on a planet, but that some of them can. The largest that I recall reading of actually making a landing and lifting off again was an Astartes Strike Cruiser (of the Grief Bringers chapter) in Warped Stars , which we can assume (from dialogue in Execution Hour , and information from Battlefleet Gothic) to be about the size of a Dauntless-class light cruiser. It is worth noting, however, that an Astartes Strike Cruiser is designed to act as a blockade runner and planetary assault vessel, so it is presumably built with that option in mind.

So, if you were to take a ship smaller than a Dauntless (20 Mtonnes, which is pretty much anything aside from the Lunar, so far), then yes, it probably could land (unless it was mounting a keel armament), but unless designed for it, they'd handle like a pig- maybe require manoeuvre tests at a -40 or harder, with failure requiring some serious repairs, and no guarantee that the repairs needed to make her spaceworthy could be done on the ground...

A Chaos grand cruiser could in Dark adepus by ben counter

greystroke said:

But it must be noted that it was "just" flying in the atmosphere of the planet, which wasn´t entirely normal (being in warp isn´t very healthy).

Another Astartes Strike Cruiser which was able to fire up from ground towards stars was described in Salamander.

true the place was not the norm but the books said it could land

That's as may be. It was written, however, by Ben Counter, which is a major strike against its' credibility (in my eyes at least). The man should not be trusted with anything longer than a short story without major editing oversight. The only author with worse credibility is CS Goto (I am aware that there are a lot of people that like Ben Counter, but I find his books to be poorly paced, slightly stilted, with flat characters, and generally badly written, even for the pulp novels that make up virtually all of the Black Library. My point is, however, that Counter still has quite a sizeable following. When they were asking for authors to do signings for Conflict a couple of years ago, everyone was trying to get Abnett, McNeill or Counter; Goto's name was raised (by BLP), and every single event organiser turned him down flat).

Sorry, rant over. Back on topic. Did the book say it could take off again? Landing a ship is easy- every ship can be landed at least once (to paraphrase the old paratrooper's joke), although in some cases 'crash' is possibly a slightly more appropriate verb. Getting it to take off again and reach orbit is a different matter. Of course, as noted by Torog, it was in a slightly unreal area of reality at the time, so I guess anything is possible.

And in any case- there is a counter-example: in Simon Spurrier's Lord of the Night , a chaos cruiser (Heresy era, a Murder-class if memory serves) failed to successfully land, and did a pretty good job of half-collapsing under its' own weight.

Sorry the hellforger may not have been able to land but was meant to have atmo flight

and your right about Ben Counter his work is not always the best

In some of the Horus Heresy books the Emperors personal ship is shown to land, for example at Olympus Mons on Mars. Admittedly, this is the Emps personal ship and hence can be expected to be significantly more awesome than pretty much every other ship out there, but still. Big ship. Lands on planets.

It might do it again in the first Horus Heresy Dark Angels book too, not sure.

While it apparently has happened before in the books, an Imperial ship being able to land on a planet and then leave again seems a bit off to me. Just looking at the images of them, they really don't seem like they would be able to do such. heck, most of them have those really big rudder looking fins on their underside that would require long, long landing gear (.25 km in length at least) which, aside from being long would still need to be strong enough to hold the massive weight of the ship. I guess they could do the old sci-fi reverse rocket landing and land on their arse-end but it still just doesn't look like the ships were really designed for such. In the end, one of the massive Imperial void ships landing on a planet feels rather like a captain sailing his Schooner down the road and parking it in the field outside of town instead of leaving it in the docks in the water where it belongs.

I would say it depends on the ship's design. The Emperor's personal flagship of doom? Sure, it probably was built with landing on a planet as a show of force/power/etc in mind. A Lunar? or another of the cruisers with an angled bottom or rudder sticking out, it POSSIBLY could, in water where it wouldn't crush the parts hanging from the bottom of the hull, obviously they're not made for that, but I would think it could work in a pinch. Aside from that, any ship with a flat bottom may be able to do it, transports, the pilgrim ship, cobra destroyers, most of the BFG space marine escorts,

Battlefleet Gothic makes the broad assumption that all escort vessels (any 1 hit craft, covering transports, frigates and destroyers, broadly speaking) are capable of safely landing on a planet to some extent (though how easy it is for them to leave again is another matter), while anything larger (Light Cruisers, Cruisers, Battleships, etc) are incapable of doing so.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

That I can live with. I mean, sure cruisers, light cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships are pretty massive, it seems like most of them are still just basically a mountain of metal with a big ass engine strapped to the back of it, using small and strategically placed guiding thrusters and retro thrusters to guide it's flight through the voids. But even in such a non to extremely low gravity enviroment, their sheer inertia coupled with the strength of it's main drive make them extremely hard to turn in the game which is why they can only turn at a maximum of 45 degrees without any special orders.

45 degrees is not very much when you consider that it is happening in an enviroment with zero air resistance and no significant forces of gravity affecting the body in question. Now if that same vessel were to try and land on a planet it would be come next to immobilized and probably tear itself apart during re-entry.

If it can just barely move in zero gravity enviroments, it would be a beached whale if it ever found itself on a planet.

However, smaller vessels such as frigates and destroyers would be a different story. They are, after all more agile than the larger vessels. This could be because of less inertia of course, but it could also be that their secondary thrusters (normally used for steering in the void) are more powerful in relation the the size of the vessel. Meaning that if they diverted full power to their hull thrusters and gunned their main drive in concert they could gain enough lift and enough speed to reach escape velosity without tearing the vessel apart due to the relatively compact design compared to vessels of cruiser size and upwards.

Still, I'd imagine that landing and taking off with even small vessels such as frigates would not be an easy task, and would probably require a lot of outside support (think of the tower control on airports that help commercial jumbo jets to land safely... Times a hundred). The more standard way for frigate vessels to interact with the planet surface would be to use designated shuttle craft of different kind (vessels from the small arvus lighter to the gigantic cargo shuttles and troop transports).

Um, if I remember my fluff correctly, and I may be mistaken, the Emperor's flagship was (obviously) an Emperor-class Battleship (which is in orbit around Terra as yet another monument)

In reality they'd be torn apart trying to land, in almost all cases, but then again, in reality they'd be torn apart when the engines fired in just about cases, even if you could build them in the first place (which you couldn't; material strength issues).

My personal feeling is that it's a game balance / game mechanic issue and that you want to keep all but the smallest ships up in orbit, making the players get into much smaller and vulnerable vessels themselves and / or use lots of these same vulnerable vessels if they intend to land a sizable force on a planet, too.