do all ships have them, and if so how many craft does it contain and how many of each type. will this be covered in the next supplement book?

Yes

No rules on it, so houserule something.

We hope so.

just asking because my last GM said that i had 30 guncutter, 10 halo barge and some shuttles, little crowed for a sword class frigate

Very crowded for a Sword-class Frigate.

I'd likely link it to Hull Size, say 1 shuttle for every 2-3 hull points, giving frigates about 10 or so shuttles without taking Lighter Bays, and maybe double that if they did have Lighter Bays.

Depends, the way it works with my group is.

12 smallish non combat shuttles for a transport/raider/frigate, 24 for a light cruiser, and 36 for a cruiser (these are base and can obviously be upgraded to military models such as gun cutters through acquisition) . That is base, additional transports are gained based on the components you buy, buying a cargo hold gets you a number of larger transports (the bays are considered part of the component), and buying a barracks gets you some combat ground transports, the luxury quarters get you 2 small luxurious people movers to move around your VIP guests, etc.

So if that sword frigate had a barracks and a cargo hold it may be doable. (I forget how big a halo barge is so take with a grain of salt). At least according to how my group has things set up.

so 4-5 guncutters if i lose the shuttle

Guncutters are just armed and armored shuttles. You could probably substitute them for shuttles on a 1 to 1 basis.

llsoth said:

Compare the stats for an Arvis Lander and a Guncutter. Guncutters are about the size of a Thunderhawk.

Void_onion213 said:

I made a huge thread about this about a week ago. Nice to know I'm not the only one with these kind of questions.

IN MY WORLD:

Every ship has a dedcated rudimentary loading bay, designed to be used when it's either moored at a station or in high orbit for taking on supplies via a few (3-4) Landers and a Guncutter. The point should be that the landing capacity without a dedicated cargo bay component should be enough to send a "Shore party" to any place they need to, but not enough to fill the entire ship with swag. That would require coming back with a treasure ship.

Fortinbras said:

Could be, I don't have all the books where can I find the stats (just ordered the ones I do not have though)?

We were using some fan built stats for guncutters which had them as fairly small capable of carrying maybe a platoon or a chimera (with the troops inside).

If the Guncutters are much bigger I will have to do some reworking of our rules. Probably just rename our version of the guncutter to something else and rename our homebrew medium transports to guncutters

I just assumed the ship had about a half dozen arvus lighters, a dozen or so cargo barges, one or two of those scout planes, and one guncutter or suitably flashy Rogue Trader transporter. Bigger ships, and those with cargo bays, obviously get a few more of the grunt vehicles, but anything combat worthy requires acquiring.

I also assumed the ship has a good number of sentinel lifters, unless it has a all servitor crew, plus a few hauler trucks and maybe an A.P.C or two for ground side excursions. Nothing fancier than a rhino or chimera, and a limousine equivalent.

I think I told my plyers that their Firestorm class frigate has enough capacity to land a force of almost 500 men in half an hour. But they do have a lighter bay, a barracks and a teleportarium to do that with. Even so, I feel that I may have been to generous with this after reading this thread.

llsoth said:

The Arvus Lander is rated Enormous-size with capacity for 12 people or cargo.

The Guncutter is rated Massive-size with capacity for 30 cargo and/or 6 people, I'm not sure which.

Hygric said:

Well 30 minutes probably means a single load of all your available transports. But then they would have to return to the ship and load the next set which could take quite some time.

If you have any medium sized transports this is easily doable and may even be a low estimate if talking just men. If all your troops are mechanized (say with chimeras) it will probably take longer as your smallest shuttles probably cannot carry them.

Though this brings up a good question.. how many men / cargo can a teleportium transfer and how often?

Based off of hit and run raids with a teleportium you can infer that at a minimum it can be used 2 times in 30 minutes and can transport enough men for a hit and run raid(either at once in in more frequent but smaller groups).

The only number I have seen for a hit and run raid is a bare minimum of a dozen murder servitors. But I would say at least a company of normal troops would be needed to emulate them.. say 100-200. Mileage may vary. Well actually your teleportium could vary as well depending on its quality.

Fortinbras said:

Thank you for the information.

Hmm massive is listed as about the size of a battle tank or greater daemon.. so it should not be too hard to carry a few of them.

Still going to have to keep our homebrew medium transports which are similar to the longboat that Agmar_Strick created.

It just seems to make sense that there would be a company sized combat transport to get troops down on the ground. A company is enough to put up a fight but not so much that if one got blown out of the sky it would jepordize the invasion.

Fortinbras said:

Actually you could name Thunderhawks: Astartes Guncutters. (Same thing they did with the Bolter in DW), COuld be based on the same STC, with the Thunderhawk being simply better made.

In regards to number of shuttles. A cruiser has a crew of 100k people. If one person needs one kilogram of nonrecyclable stuff (food, shampoo, anything you can think of), you end up with 100 tons of supplies needed per day. That cargohold for 6 months (by 30 days) means you have 3k tons per month, 18.000 tons of supplies need for your crew. Depending how good waste reclamation is, that number might be even bigger. It shouldnt be smaller, otherwise you wouldnt need chartist vessels supplying hive worlds.

Now if you dock at some port, you hould have some capability to restore those 18 kilotons within relatively short order, unless you rule that resupply only happens at space stations. Halo barges carry 40 tons. Depending on the amount of time needed to get to a planet and back; inluding loading and refueling. Im going with 15 runs per day (Prolly pretty tight since every run includes a full launch from the planet and a reentry). That makes 600 tons per Barge per day. If you want to be able to resupply at a rate of 6 kilotons per day (pretty cool) a cruiser would only need 10 Barges.

On full resupply handled within 3 days by 10 barges.

But that all hinges upon the ability to quickly move the cargo and make 15 trips per day.

On problem i have with ships are the rather strange crew numbers. A frigate is not even half the length of a cruiser. Meaning it has less than a tenth of the mass of a cruiser. I am looking at the tyrant and the firestorm right now. Cruisers are apparently very undense, or frigates use some seriously heavy materials. So basically someone at GW/FFG looked at the length of ships and scaled appopriately.

But did forget that mass (in this case actualy volume) doesnt scale in a linear fashion.

If you want to make those numbers realistiv, using the frigate as a base (both being navy vessels and having a more or less equal application as warships) Cruisers would need crews closer to a quarter of a million. (Im scaling up because 40k is supposed to be big, rather than downscale frigates).

Just some numbers i quickly calced since we are talking the numbers of available hangar space. Would actually give us 25 barges for a cruiser. Still a nice number.

I am rambling here

Ok extended supply vaults would give us only twice the deep storage. No extra space needed.

Barracks give us troops. Now the question is how many. I could imagine a dozen regiments OR MORE stationed on a cruiser. 100k crew and barracks arent small either. Frigates would receive smaller barracks. One can include training areas and lots of workshops which the crew doesnt need, so that we dont have to use the equation of "but the crew quarters arent that much bigger", nobody wants 100k troops on a RT cruiser.

Inclusion of hangar space for also another dozen barges or guncutters. And inabilty for large combat drops. 40 peeps per barge. Thats on platoon. No walkers or anything like a Chimera though. with the 10 barges available (only form the barracks), youd be able to transport 400 people. 2-3 companies. YAY. Too bad its only imperial guardsmen. Maybe a battalion or 2 (only if its pure infantry) if you use every single guncutter/barge available. But getting those regiments down on the ground. LOTS of return trips needed. Lots of them.

Cargo holds. Everyboday has them (i hope). At least the small one with a lighter bay. Now you can store a HUGE amount of cargo there. Otherwise people will start storing stuff in used up supply storage. 3 kilotons per month used up, so some stuff can go there. And yu need another dozen or so barges to move it. Making it maybe the best aquisition to go along with a barracks. Since you get EVEN more transport capability.

But thats a few random numbers, hinging on way too many "maybes".

Voronesh said:

You are talking about a barge launching from the ship, performing re-entry, landing taking on 40 metric tons of cargo (properly stowed and secured), taking off, flying up to the ship in geostationary orbit (36k kilometers out), landing and off loading, and refueling for the next run. In 1 hour and 36 minutes.

Voronesh said:

By the numbers and being conservative about it a lunar cruiser would have 22 times the mass and internal volume (space) of a sword class frigate. It is 3.125 times as long 2.667 (rounded) times as wide, and I I used the smaller of the 2 numbers to represent is change in height 2.666 (rounded down).

Voronesh said:

The way we handle it is a a barracks for a escort ship gives you 2,500 men with vehicles (double without), a light cruiser 5,000, and cruiser 10,000. The barracks also comes with 3/6/12 company sized combat transports to help get your men on the ground (this is still pretty slow but better than nothing).

We run a couple of options for ferrying stuff back and forth. the first is the lighter, small dependable and able to carry about 60 of so people without cargo (think shuttle from Avatar and you're there), then you get the Landers. bigger bulkier and usually used for bulk cargo these can carry between 300-500 men plus a bit of cargo (or a lot of cargo and no men).Then come barges. these are much bigger (5000 men or a lot of cargo) but very slow on descent and ascent so make sitting targets for AA fire. These are unusaual outside of transports who need to haul bulk goods or a lot of people. Cargo holds come with larger lights and more of them, so a frigate might have 6 landers and a dozen lighters, wheras a jericho might have a dozen landers and thirty lighters.

as we give each barracks 10% of the crew (soldiers need more space and supplies then serfs, especially if they have tanks artillery and chimeras) a frigate with a barracks does not get extra landers (if you want those in my game, you've gotta give up room for a lighter bay). on the other hand, transport with its main hold converted to a barracks, and a couple of extra barracks just to store more troops (plus a lighter bay) might have a pair of Barges to deposit 10,000 men in one go onto the surface of an unsuspecting world. We've run one invasion of a hive world so far, and the players seemed to understand that the slow, wallowing and poorly armed transports were their golden gooses, which is in keeping with the fluff and theme i think.

People seem to be coming up with very similar numbers of soldiers for their barracks. When trying to judge how I'd handle the barracks component, I made a search for self-contained combat formations in real world armies consisting of 'a few thousand men' (per the barracks description). I settled on the U.S Brigade Combat Team (between 3000 and 5000 men plus supporting detachments) - firguring the extra space of the barracks module was vehicles, supply stores, workshops, training and extra hanger space for landing craft (both assault craft and heavier transports for when a good landing zone is secured). I was planning to keep that constant no matter what ship took the barracks and ruling that if you wanted more troops, you'd put in a second barracks (or if you wanted better troops, you'd put in a munitorium).

All ships should certainly have enough general bulk freighters to resupply and move cargo in a reasonable length of time, however. I week at most I'd wager. So I guess assuming you had a dozen for a frigate and more for larger ships / ships with bigger cargo bays isn't unreasonable.

after looking through the posts, i think they really needed to give dementions of hanger space for each ship as well as an accurate description of what the barracks consists of and how many troops it holds, guessing it holds at least 1 regiment but of how many men, if it is a mech unit would it have its own motor pool or stables if it is a cavalry regiment. also with the lighter bay, it dosn't really tell you how many transports it hold and up to what size.

@ Ilsoth

Yes i already said im rambling, and that it would be tight. As in really, really tight. And that the numbers would be probably bigger. But hei why not ^^. Just means that youd need 20 or 30 barges. And i only guessed the size increase. Youre correct numbers would yield half a million of crew on a cruiser; actually pretty cool. We are up to 100 to 150 barges needed without the RT having bought any cargo bay or barracks.

Barracks i calculated from crew quarters. But boy, thatd give us around a full army per cruiser. 270.000 soldies, Now that is something to brag about. Problem would be rather getting all those soldiers ^^.

THough Battlefleet Koronus will probably give us hard numbers for those soldiers in barracks .

Point is though. With only around a 1000 soldiers no RT will EVER conquer a planet. Unless were talking ston age people here. Once they reach a tech comparable to WW2, its over for winning anything with those piddly few men.

Voronesh said:

Hehe I probably would not let them conquer even a stone age planet with only 1000 guys. Sure you could claim it and win any fight you get into, but even is you assigned only 1 squad to each village/city/town to let them know they have been conquered you would run out of men and most of the planet would never even know you exist never mind that they had been conquered

As to cruisers and crew.. lets say a cruiser is slightly taller than wide (like the models in illustrations) so 1km tall and lets say an average deck height is 10 meters (very generous but you need to take into account the very large rooms as well as personnel quarters. 5km * .8km = 4 square km per deck with 100 decks giving 400 square kilometers of deck space. This is obviously very rough and uses a solid block shape but even if you knock that in half to account for non-uniform shape you are still looking at 200km^2 of deck space.

Describing them as cities in space is no joke.

Want even more crazyness?

On the lunar cruiser a librarium vault or a Temple-Shrine will take up 2.67 km^2.. That is a LOT of books and a REALLY BIG temple

Barracks weigh in at 10.67 km^2

Just to pitch in my 2 cents.

My players have a Tempest class strike frigate configured for war, it includes a barracks but no lighter bays(or cargo bays, just stowage bays).

I've ruled that they can house an entire regiment of light infantry, 3-4 thousand men. It includes no vehicles whatsoever, just a few large artillery pieces deep in storage. The fact that they have no dedicated space for the embarking of men means they're severely limited in deploying the regiment though.

I've given them ten shuttle 'slots', an aquila/arvus uses up one slot, larger assault landers/barges use 2. This gives them some small capacity to launch assaults but nothing near enough for a proper invasion.

But I'm sure the coming of Battlefleet Koronus will change how I handle this.

llsoth said:

Yeah its crazy fun. Thats not a shrine, thats a full cathedral district. Like a cathedral as bis as you want, along with a whole monastery. Heh thats enough monks to explain that half a million crewmen get their regular confessions .

Crew reclamation facility. Thats enough space for a little sub-forgeworld like area. The arboretum would be actually really cool, as it would include a real forest and quite some farmland.

You know if you think about it like that, think Eldar world ships. If you include the fact that the Eldar are a dying race, those vessels must be incredibly empty.

And youre right on those 1000 troops not really conquering a stone age planet. Basically anything less than a full division of troops (10k) is rather useless unless used in a direct ship to ship action. Where the other guy also has few numbers. OTOH with better crew numbers, a destroyer would be simply swamped by the cruisers crew .