I was wondering will a ship that just has the compartmentalised cargo space have no way to store transports. The ship my crew has is a light cruiser. I imagine it does have a large shuttle hanager as shuttles and landers would be needed for such things as well landing cargo on worlds with no orbital dock.

As I have said the ship only has explicitly stated the compartmentalised cargo space but I just want to bekind of realistic with this as my crew wants to buy some apcs and thus they would need large landers to get them to the planets surface.

Should I be totalitarian and say " you didn't get the lighter bay so you can't have the transports"?

When you consider the immense size of even the smaller ships, and the enormous amounts of cargo and supplies they must need, i'd say that EVERY starship has a large number of surface to space craft from smaller aquila landers for important dignitaries to large cargo lighters that can carry multiple battle tanks at a time.

If the ship has any kind of cargo bay component (cargo and lighter bay/main cargo hold, compartmentalised cargo hold) then i'd say the ship has even more space/surface craft to feed these vast holds.

Nuada_Obliage said:

The way I understood the workings of a ship from the books I have read and the RT core book is that there is no way for a ship of that size to get to the surface. Everytime you read of a planet landing, they are always taking a shuttle of some sort. (Of course, most of the books I read deal with war time. So this may be just the fastest way to get to the planet without putting all the eggs in one basket and without giving the enemy a huge target.) However, it makes sense that the ships would not be able to make planet fall and if they did they would not have a decent place to land.

These ships are roughly the size of a good sized small city. I mean... 1 km is equal to 0.621371192 miles. So, if a ship is 1.6 km long that would be approximately 1 mile long. That isn't taking into consideration the width and the height. There are a few questions that come to mind if you were trying to land something of that size on a very dense city with a very dense population... or just a planet with any population size. One question would be how to do it without endanging the whole side of that planet. If it crashed, it would likely decimate the whole city... or at least most of it depending on city size. The resulting fallout (dust, debris, and what not) would probably kill the rest of the city and most of the continent. And the rest of the planet would suffer.

Looking at some of Earth's meteor craters... the Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is a crater about 1.2 km (roughly 4,000 feet) in diameter, was only created by an object that was 50 meters (54 yards) across. Of course other factors would effect the size of a crater... such as speed and shape. But still.... ouch! Now, if this rate is proportional (which it wouldn't be)... but if it were... then a 1.6 km long ship crashing would leave a crater 384 km in diameter. This would be roughly 618 miles in diameter. This would kill New York City as well as some of the surrounding area because the ship crash landed on it.

To land safely, you would need approximately 700 some odd square miles of open land.

Of course, this is 40K. I am not sure if they would care about such things in this universe. I just know that if I were in charge of that city, it wouldn't land anywhere near me.

So that was my first argument.... My second is this....

Every machine has a machine spirit in it. Would you risk the machine spirit of a vehicle just to land? Would the tech priests allow you? Not to mention that this is dying technology. There are a finite number of ships. Would you risk something that is irreplacable and very precious just to land it on a planet?

Just food for thought...

Elizabeth

PS - Sorry for all the math/science stuff. I geek out at times.

I'm with Gribble, The vast size of these ships makes it seem insane that they would not have the room to host shuttles and tanks and whatnot, but with a compartmentalized cargo hold you may want to hold them to just a few tanks and whatnot, due to the history of my PC's they have 3 thunderhawk gunships (the rogue trader is from a powerful noble family on calth in ultramar and hence can often get former marine equipment when it is finally getting de-commissioned)

Remember Rogue trader is a game where the players and their ship is supposed to represent a major force in planetary politics. in general you shouldn't dis-allow your players from doing or having a piece of equipment or a vehicle, you just need to explain exactly what they have and if it is strange, how they got it. except for additional ship components, size should not be a limiting factor on the ship. Espessially if they have a light cruiser, those are big **** ships.

Just an after thought.... err question... does the RT: Into the Storm book cover ship to surface transport shuttles and/or more info on this?

Elizabeth

I agree that the wordings are not very clear about this. However, in the adventures and the fluff samples you see examples that they do have in effect shuttles aboard every vessel.

As I ruled it. Every ship has a shuttle bay with shuttles, lighters the personal guncutter and even assault shuttles. When they buy the lighter upgrade they have quite a lot of flying ships. They can haul cargo efficiently, land troops and or passengers by the bulk and when they like, they can transport vehicles like Chimera's or Battle tanks to the surface.

I've been trying to figure out this problem myself. I have Into the Storm, but haven't read it fully yet. I didn't see any ship components for flyers to be housed except for pods. I've just said that the PCs have a shuttle because the adventures require it. To borrow a few references. The star trek enterprise ships all had shuttles. The Galactica had shuttles, but then it is essentially a heavily armed carrier. Some star wars ships have shuttles and some don't. As far as Rogue Trader. They need to have at least one so they can get from ship to planet and back. I don't know what I'm going to rule as far as the amounts of craft they have. Given the needs of ships and role playing purposes. I'll probably give them a half dozen and just say that is what they have. Was really hoping that they would list launch bays as a component though. With a basic component that cost 0 space and 0 power and held a specified amount of smaller craft.

A good general rule for most things (shuttles, weapons, etc.) is that if they didn't pay for it they can only fit enough to operate on the party level, if they did pay for it they have equipped themselves to do something on an organizagtional level. If they buy a component it comes with everything. Components come with everything they need to operate effectively, i.e. cargo holds with mass loaders and barracks with troop transports.

So if you don't have a cargo hold you still have room for "party" levels of cargo i.e. a crate, a chest. You can still transport parties worth of people, 6-30 people. But you can't bring shipments, you cant deploy thousands. You have to pay for that.

riplikash said:

Thing is, every vessel will have (and require) bulk storage of some sort, even if it isn't strictly a cargo hold - the crew do, afterall, need food. Trying to resupply an entire ship, or drag new press-ganged crew to the ship will be extremely impractical if you've only got a single shuttle capable of moving a couple of dozen people at once. Simply by merit of being a kilometres-long starship with tens of thousands of crew means that numerous small craft (small being relative) are necessary in order for the ship to function.

Into the Storm has Aquila Landers and Lighters.

A ship which can't land on a planet has to have some way to transport goods and personel from planetary surface to ship and back. This is not a problem with space docks, but on primitive worlds, or just worlds which do not have a space dock, things have to be moved about. Now as for the number of such small craft, I still need to read the book more!

Ahh.. Thanks for the info on where to find the shuttle information. At least I know where to get this information for when the time comes.

Elizabeth