http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=123&efcid=3&efidt=432304&efpag=0#432934

"1. Ships without a Hanger Bay or equivalent component do still have
hangers, they just have smaller hangers with less small craft.
Concrete rules are actually provided in the upcoming Battlefleet
Koronus, but as a rough guideline, you could allow a ship to have
three or four bulk lifters with the carrying capacity of a commercial
jetliner."

MILLANDSON said:

Heh if thats 4 Halo barges for a frigate, i feel sorry for that RT, once you start resupplying.

Four commercial jetliner equivalents...well, lets assume that jetliner is the Airbus A380 which has a passenger capacity of 853 and there was a planned freight version that would have carried 150 tonnes of cargo. Given the way space works and how much more advanced ships are in 40k compared to our present technology, you could certainly increase that cargo weight limit to maybe 200 - 500 tonnes of cargo easily (i.e. volume is a more limiting factor). This is not an unfair assumption as the 'slow and unwiedly' halo barge still moves at one and a half times the speed of sound in atmosphere and is quite capable of casual trans-atmospheric operations (something we can currently only dream of acomplishing).Whatever estimate you want, however, you're still looking at barges several times the size of a halo barge which should allow you to shift cargo in a reasonable time frame for smaller ships.

Cannonball said:

Ah i though Halo barges were supposed to be like that. Rather because of the name barge than the actual carrying capacity. If someone cant calculate mass and volume correctly, i tend to assume, that other things have been calculated just the same. FFG does good work on alot of stuff, but the hard science numbers are sometimes pretty (actually no way to put this) wrong.

BUT i must say for a British company like GW did screw up far harder on the Armageddon war, that would be a piddly minor WW2 battle.

Voronesh said:

Kinda.

The numbers are almost exactly equal to the battle for Manchuria between Japan and the Soviet Union right at the very end of the war.

It took less than a month. The war for Armageddon... somewhat (ok a lot) longer.. Though to be fair neither the orks or imperials have T-34 tanks so you can't expect to much from them.

llsoth said:

Well youre right on that. But of the many theatres of war during WW2, europe 44-45 had alot of huge battles, and even bigger operations. That a Hive world in a highly militarized setting (true for the 3. Reich) id except bigger numbers. the 3. Reich doesnt equal a Hive world, and Japan alot less so. Think how many steps the Imperium of 40k would have to take, that the PDF of a hive world is smaller than the Wehrmacht.

Something to remember as well, in BFG ships of ecort size (ie frigates, raiders and transports) can land on a planet. Makes invasions a lot easier when you land a frigate on them!

This could explain how cruisers and larger ships can efficiently resupply. Support ship lands on planet, quicly fills up it's cargo holds with supplies, takes off again and docks with a cruiser in space.

For those who are interested, these are the homebrew cargo lifters I did.

Lamprey Halo barge
The Lamprey is a massive Lifter at over 300 meters long and 50 meters high; it is capable of transporting vast quantities of cargo and super-heavy vehicles such as Hephaestus Ore Seekers and Baneblade tanks. The Lamprey is so large that it requires a specialist dock connected directly to the ship’s Cargo hold, it is far to large to fit inside a standard Lighter bay.
While most halo barge’s home berth is an orbital or spaceport, The Lamprey class Halo Barge is designed to accompany a cargo vessel, giving it the ability to move huge cargo loads without relying on any planet-side infrastructure.

Type: Spacecraft. Tactical speed: 15m / 7 au
Cruising speed: 800 kph / 3 VU in space. Manoeuvrability: -40
Structural integrity: 60. Size:Massive
Armor: front 20 side 20 rear 20. Crew: Captain, 1 pilot, 1 co-pilot, tech priest, 6 tech laity, 12 gunners, Loadmaster, dozens of rating stevedores
Carrying capacity: 200,000 tonnes of cargo, 20,000 troops with support vehicles, an armoured company, an entire prefab colony.
Weapons:12 turret mounted heavy stubbers (stowed during air and void transit, designed to defend the ship on the ground)

Special rules
Spacecraft: (normal spacecraft rules)
Fragile: Though it is an exceedingly large vessel, a halo barge is not a military vessel, and it's sides are easily split. Add +2 to any critical damage.
Bulk cargo lifter: A halo barge is designed to do one thing, transport large volumes of material to and from orbit. To do this it requires a spaceport,or at least a hastily constructed ferrocrete platform. A halo barge making a rough landing is never to return to orbit, its fragile spine broken under its own weight.
Home berth: The halo barge is too large for most lifter berths, requiring a specialized hanger attached to a cargo hold, this is typically found on the on the keel, though need not be so. In order to accommodate a Lamprey Halo Barge, a ship have have a Cargo Hold and Lighter Bay, Compartmentalised Cargo Hold Shadow Blind Bays or Main Cargo Hold component.
Availability: Rare

‘Longboat’ Cargo Lighter
A sizable lighter, the longboat sees service across the sector.The Longboat is large enough to transport a sizable cargo, small enough to land in a standard Lighter bay and durable enough to make hot landings, make it extremely popular.

Type: Spacecraft. Tactical speed: 20m / 9 au
Cruising speed: 1,400 kph / 4 vu in space. Manoeuvrability: -20
Structural integrity: 40. Size: Massive
Armor: front 24 side 24 rear 24. Crew: Pilot, Co-Pilot, 2 gunners, Loadmaster, 4 Rating Stevedores
Carrying capacity: 70 passengers plus either: 100 tonnes of cargo, 300 troops, 2 enormous or 4 hulking vehicles.
Weapons:
1 Dorsal Gunner-operated Autocannon (Turret, 360 degree Facing, Range 300m (3 AUs), Heavy, S/2/5, 4d10+5 I, Pen 4, Clip 60, Reload 2 Full)
1 Forward Gunner-operated Autocannon (Facing Forward, Range 300m (3 AUs), Heavy, S/2/5, 4d10+5 I, Pen 4, Clip 60, Reload 2 Full)

Special rules
Spacecraft: (normal spacecraft rules)
Availability: Scarce

Halo Barge Receiving Dock

A Receiving dock is a specialised dock designed to offload mass cargo Lifters, such as the Lamprey Halo Barge. it is also designed to safely shelter large lifers and shuttles such as the aforementioned Lamprey.

Cost: Power:1 Space:1 SP:1 (the space is low as the majority of the component is outside the hull,. compensated by the unwieldy trait)

Receiving Dock: the Receiving Dock is only useful if there is somewhere to store the goods, therefore to install this component the ship must also have installed a cargo hold (see lamprey description). Additionall, the receiving dock allows good to be loaded and unloaded more quickly. When working towards an a Trade objective, the players earn an additional 25 achievement points.

Unwieldly: Having what amount to another ship clinging to a starship reduces performance, decrease manoeuvrability by -3.

Hygric said:

I had forgotten in BFG that escorts could land. But in RT they probably cannot, based on the the resupply rules and the tidbits we have from Battlefleet Koronus. Possibly special troop or cargo transports could though.

llsoth said:

Uhh crap, must have missed that, only got the Necron ship landing on Mars. But then were talking Necrons (best tech in the galaxy and all that).

OTOH having a frigate fly planetside, why do you need titans or lesser tanks? Orbital bombardement carried out at point blank range.

Yes it makes sense to let that one be retconned away.

Voronesh said:

I would just rule that firing its main weapons (designed for the void) inside an atmosphere would have disasterous consequences.

Yeah but it works for the Zayth landships. Ok kinda crazy they fire 300 klicks up, and you down, Yet there is little power difference. Low orbit needs to be aquired for bombardement anyway, (for FFG at least) so bringing the ship down even further hardly changes that. Might increase BS by 10, but beyond that...

Besides you still have dozens if not hundreds of turrets, they might not have these near tacnuke like effects, but would still be deadly for a titan.

Voronesh said:

Aye I am going to have to give in on this one... I guess I would outlaw it... with the exception of a slow controlled descent into a huge specially prepared landing cradle.

The Idea of frigates landing has no basis in fluff that I can think of.

Even in BFG landing removed the ship from play so it was not like it was some cool tactical move.. probably more like a semi-controlled crash (which I would allow).

Voronesh said:

Yeah, it might be inconvienent. Till a Shadowsword but a defence laser shot straight through your engine compartment.

Then it would get messy.

Besides, I have always though the main guns on a Titan were the same size as macrocannons. I do know that the Shadowsword was an orbital defence laser designed to shoot down starships mounted on a mobile mount.

Chalk that up to the missing edit button. (I always put out rough drafts and edit them to what it really should be; to get rid of that anxiety to get the post out.)

I must say, that i do not consider that a good rule. Especially when into the storm also mentions (ship history, planet bound for millenia) that only a controlled crash is the best to be achieved planetside.

I rather wanted to point out, that it makes littile difference, since according to lure of the expanse, one has to be in low orbit for accurate orbital bombardement. WHich also makes little sense, if i can shoot a 1 klick long cobra 100 megametres away, why do i need to be within a few hundred kilometres for a landship? I would even hazard a guess and say, that the cobra has a more erratic movement than the landship.

llsoth said:

The short story Warped Stars , an Astartes Strike Cruiser lands on the surface of a planet.

Barrington J Bayley's novel Eye of Terror , a tramp freighter regularly lands on a planet, and mention of sharing the landing field with much larger ships is made.

And looking at the models, I'd say any ship with a prominent keel (which includes Swords and Firestorms, but not Falchions, as well as Dauntless, and most if not all cruisers) cannot land on a planet, absent a very specially prepared landing cradle. Even those which do not have such a keel (Cobras, Monsk, and the Vagabond at least) are going to be at one hell of a disadvantage trying to land themselves, and would benefit from either a water landing or a specially built cradle. It'd be one hell of a long and dangerous evolution in either case (assuming they wanted to take off again).

And odds are nothing larger than a cruiser could ever land without collapsing under its' own weight.

Alasseo said:

Great point that. What about planets with low gravity? It would still require massive cradles to hold these things, I imagine. A low grav world with thin atmosphere would make a decent 'dry-dock' for the Imperial Navy which might expect to have multiple ships needing extensive repairs and so could benefit from concentrating the needed resources in a location that might be more defensible than a field of space-docks.

I think we are looking forward to a little clarification on cargo bays and lighter numbers, which is of course upcoming. I try to keep things that are treated abstractly in the book fairly abstract in the game, so availability of special gear (in this case, efficient transports) is tied to PF and Crew Rating. No matter the size of the ship or it hangar bays, the number and quality of available crew is tied directly to those factors.

Don't count on the "nothing larger than a cruiser can land planetside" thing. The Badab War volume 2 has a Battle Barge entering a planet's atmosphere, hovering over a battle and then leaving into orbit again. Oh, and another battlebarge landing on a moon and forming the basis of a new fortress-monastery.

Plus , wasn;t there that ship background in "Into the Storm" that represented a ship that had landed on a planet and then been buried for millenia? I don;t recall that being restricted to ships smaller than cruisers...although I don't have that book on me at the moment.

Personally, I don't like the idea of the truly vast 40k human spacecraft entering atmospheres (even though it's clearly done in the canon now and again.) To me it seems to defeat the purposes of the extensive shuttlecraft that are clearly in use throughout the galaxy.

To be fair, most examples cited of this happening are in prettty unusual circumstances. This would suggest whole ships CAN be landed planetside, but that it's only used in extremis.

Perhaps some sort of general test vs the ship's basic characteristics could be used, with bonuses for ship handling rolls etc etc. Any failures means that the ship breaks apart in the atmosphere and everybody starts plummeting.

Lightbringer said:

One thing to consider - I've seen a couple of sources that suggest the atmospheric displacement caused by the dropships used to convey Titans to a planet's surface can cause significant disruption to that world's weather systems... if that's the case, then landing a multi-million tonne starship will seriously foul up a planet's weather.

I dont like to too much either. Lightbringer has a serious point, why have this huge amount of dropships, if you can simply bring in battleships planetside. No need for specialized craft to get all those Valks down on the planet.

I can just imagine that, bring the RT cruiser down into really low orbit, and let fly those hundres of Valks.

OTOH as long as stuff like that is only written in novels we can disregard that. BL already said that novels dont have to conform with each other, meaning their as canon as anything you make up. If its in a Forgeworld book, thats kinda more concrete than a simple novel.

But we can still simply say no as a RPG group, since it really removes the need for shuttle craft a little bit too much.

And about weather conditions i dont think itd be that huge, as long as descent is half controlled. When a meteor hits the earth its not the athmospheric part, that make such a huge weather problem. Nukes also displace huge amounts of air, and dont creat instant rainstorms.

Alasseo said:

IIRC, given the figures in RT, the larger vessels have proportionately far less density than the smaller vessels which should mean that they are more capable of a successful water landing given their displacement.

I don't think that the mass values should be given any weight (pun intended), I doubt that the mass value for each ship was carefully considered, let alone correctly calculated.

I wonder if the reason that the navy might hold off landing its huge (and immensely valuable) ships on a planet is the brilliant and slow moving target they would make for every Anti orbit battery the enemy has. Orks land roks on worlds courtesy of reversed traktor beams, and while some worlds might have low enough gravity to make it possible, the lack of prepared landing zones would make the void ship unable to land. that is not to say that specially prepared fields of adamantine and rockrete might do the job for transports outside a massive hive (e.g. Tarsus) and let an entire regiment march into its transports. They evidently can build structures that can support the weight of a starship, otherwise many hives would have collapsed under their own weight.

Trying to use a ship in a battle would also have problems, ship board augers would be incredabily fine instruments to pick up responses over vast distances. the turbulence and heat of re-entry, coupled with the amount of minor (but still very hot) ordinance hurtling around in a warzone would render your auspexes pretty much blind, meaning that your weapons would probably be more accurate from orbit. its this inaccuracy that makes orbital bonbardments on a par for accuracy with space based combats in my game, even though the difference in range in massive.