Rogue Trader focuses on the big ships, miles long, crew in the 10s of thousands but is there any definative answer to how small a ship can be and still travel the warp?

In the Inquisition Wars books by Ian Watson (mid 90s) Inquisitor Draco had a ship about the size of a 747 that housed his team and seemed to need no more than few crew and servitors.

In Eye of Terror (early 2000s) we had a Rogue Trader who owned only his ship and had no crew just a navigator. Again it seemed to be around the size of a 747.

But both are old sources.

Anyone had a definite answer?

Although not an answer to your question i think the ship the strike team had in nemesis was quite small to,and thats a new book.But they were a very important mission with state of the art equipment and top level resources.

transport ship can be small, nothing would prevent you from downsizing a transport ship by a few notch and making small version of each component, making them a bit rarer, probably no shield and a very limited guns.

Things in 40K are big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big things are. I mean, you may think a 747 is big plane, but that's just peanuts to things in 40K.

As far as I know, the only reason starships in Rogue Trader are so huge is because everything is 40K is big, dipped in molten iron, and rolled in skulls. As far as a reason to justify the size of ships in-game, here are a some explanations I've tossed out the few times it's come up during a campaign.

• No one knows how to build smaller ships. The technology is lost/so difficult to build and maintain that no one bothers.
• It's too expensive. Crafting a workable starship that small would require proportionately more resources than building one that big. You're better off building one bulky ship that can house and transport millions of tonnes of people, supplies and goods. Unless you are a High Lord of Terra, Chapter Master, senior Lord Inquisitor, etc. For those rare few at the tippy top it might be worth having a small specialized ship.
• It's the Navigators fault. You can make all the small ships you want, but soon you'll have more Warp-capable ships than you have Navigators to guide them. Better to have a few giant ships and enough Navigators to go around than countless small ships forced to deal with the vagaries of the Warp and unreliable calculated jumps.
• It's Tradition! Mankind has been using giant ships for millennia, and they aren't going to stop any time soon. If they aren't using smaller ships now it's obviously because they tried them in the past and they didn't work out. If smaller ships did work out obviously Mankind would have been using them for millennia. Giant sized starships obviously exist in accordance with the God-Emperor's divine plan. A smaller ship would be nothing more than hubris, progress, and several other forms of heresy.

Kid Kyoto said:

Both are fiction writers speculation and nothing more.

If you must, though, I would craft a ship consisting solely of a warp engine and a regular engine, and use the smallest size possible. Take the smallest ship on record and its measurements (a raider, presumably), divide its measurement by its space rating, then multiply the result times the space rating you get from the space-rating of the two components combined.

That, I would estimate, is about how small they can get without running into problems.

Attila-IV said:

Great answer!

I think that's what I would go with. 747 sized ships do exist but the cost of the advanced tech, navigator etc vs the small cargo make them impractical except as courier ships for the very, very, very wealthy and important.

Sort of like trans-Altantic/Pacific ships. Most of them are huge container ships, cruise liners or tankers because the cost and time of sailing a tiny yacht across the ocean doesn't make sense (of course we have planes as an option too but that's outside the point). A small warp ship is a white elephant.

Fortinbras said:

Unlike RPGs which are based the real facts of the 41st Millennium

Also a good answer on how to do it by the rules, thanks.

Kid Kyoto said:

If you think Black Library is the guilding light by which you should perceive the fictional world of 40k, I won't stop you. Just be sure to take the good along with the bad (Ciaphas Cain, anything by C.S. Goto, etc.)

Kid Kyoto said:

Kid Kyoto said:

The short answer is ......yeeesznooo. Eye of Terror as you mentioned is one of the examples I can think of an Inquisitor (Draco) is another. The latter is from the earliest days of 40K and includes (whisper it...) the bearded abhumans that we are forbidden to tell of, so canonically it is very suspect. However its is not beyond the possibility of a high ranking inquisitor to possess archeotech small warp capable ship that can no longer be replicated by the mechanicus.

Eye of Terror was a 'cargo carrier', which along with oft mentioned 'tramp freighters' I think are suitably non descript ships of small dimensions of little range or mission scope...I think that it may be possible to have smaller ships but as desribed in E ye of terror they would be of little use to a rogue trader, the problem is thus:

" The Wandering Star stood no more than ninety feet high. To a citizen of Gendova that would have seemed enormous - larger than
almost any building in the city. To Rugolo and any other spacefarer it was small. He had seen armed scout-ships almost as big.
Had he a bigger ship, he might have found life less difficult. As it was, he was forced to carry small-volume, high-value goods,
which brought two problems with them. Either he had to buy such goods himself, for which he did not always have the money, or
failing that he had to find a merchant who would trust him to carry them, which wasn't always easy. Often he found himself
transporting cargoes which barely covered his running costs."

Eye Of Terror, Barrington Bailey

A ship of this size could only be a tiny ship belonging to a Dynastys holdings running at best a background endevour such as surveying, but your Dynasty would soon run at a PF of between 10 and 20 and no ability to get better unless you get yourself some seriously precious cold trade. In Battlefleet Gothic it is possible to get system ships which as far as I'm aware are probably the dimensions you are talking about:

(Details Taken from the Rogue Traders GM kits)

System Ship
Hull: Transport
Class: any number of a variety of tankers, bulk transports, or
void-freighters
Dimensions: .65 km long, 0.45 km abeam at fins approx.
Mass: 4.5 megatonnes approx.
Crew: 2,000 to 5,000 crew, approx.
The intersystem ships of the Svard system are slow and
unwieldy craft, ill suited for battle, and chronically undercrewed.
Even armed with macro-weapons, they are dangerous
to a true warship only in mass.This vessel cannot travel through the
warp, and does not require a Warp Drive or Geller Field.

In order for it to be warp capable I suggest that the Cargo bay prow and dorsal thunderstrike cannons (Power 6 Space 8) be sacrificed for a warp Drive and Geller Field (11, 10). You could House rule that transport "Class D Plasma Drive" can only run a (rather weedy name) warp drive and that all the power that would go to running armaments and other systems, can only run a very simple rugged Warp Drive and geller field that can really only be used on well trodden and calm warp channels, and that anything else woul be...risky, like trying to drive a moped down a motorway. Possible but not a good idea,

Either that or Hope that Battlefleet Koronus comes up with some interesting goods.

Fortinbras said:

Oh no, my guiding light is the Blood Angel codex where Necrons and Space Marine are best buds and regularly team up.

IN several sources including Codexes, Forge World books, FFG's own RPG books, and white dwarves there is the occasional mention of small warp capable ships. Mostly these seem to be servitor manned probes, Inquisitorial ships sent into warp storms on suicide scouting missions, and archaeotech not commonly available to any but the most epic of epic doos. Oh also there's a class of ship known as kill ships which are servitor manned warp capable vessels which are little more than the engines, and a exterminatus inducing warhead, and they are relatively tiny and used en masse.

I would say the smallest 'common' warp capable vessel would be about a kilometer long, maybe half a kilometer if it's a highly advanced piece of kit such as an inquisitorial kill ship.

Though nothing stopping you from having some ancient millenium falcon sized equivalent that you have show up just to show how important an NPC is.

If memory serves, Eye of Terror was published not that long after Inquisition War (the latter being part of the GW Books imprint, the former being one of the earliest Black Library novels), so both of them are "early versions of 40k"- although one was written along with 1st edition, the other with 2nd.

There are a number of very small ships in fluff, and those which aren't ridiculously restricted archeotech, or grandfathered from earlier versions of the fluff do tend to be pretty **** big. Thankfully, we have some help from Gav Thorpe (Throne-of-Terra, I never thought I'd ever say that): in Angels of Darkness , he describes a ship 750m long, and states that it is " only just larger than the smallest possible size ". Of course, whether that's due to technological limitations, or economic restrictions, I don't know, but I treat anything less than 700m as 'OMG that ship is too small for warp travel- but it's working!'

Attila-IV said:

Don't Panic!

Forgot to mention that some Xenos vessels have FTL capabilities and are still quite small. IIRC the Tau Manta is not just a mobile air base, but a fully functioning starship in its own right. Though Tau warp travel is far more limited and slower than Imperial standards and resembles Star Trek style movement rather than the 'other realm' trope used by most other races.

In other words, Tau have really tiny ships that can do small warp jumps, but they prefer to use larger vessels that 'tow' their escorts along and even then they're slower than an equivalent imperium ship of the line. Also a Manta is about the size of a warlord titan.

If I recall my fluff correctly, the Cobra Destroyer is one of the smallest warp capable ships in the Imperium - certainly the smallest fully functional ship. Tau ships need to be much bigger to enter warp - the Manta can't do it definitely. That's why they have gravity hooks to attach their escort-sized (raiders/destroyers) vessels to much larger cruisers in BFG.

I've always been fond of the idea that small warp capable ships are possible but in no way economically feasible. Sure you can build a 100m long ship, but your living area is going be the size of a closet, you'll be eating nothing but corpse starch rations, and recycled water for the entire trip, and when you get your destination the ship is going to need maintenance since no one has been attending to the Machine Spirits that entire time.

1) In one of the older (but not Inq Wars old) books by Dan Abnett there's a small, warp capable scout ship... in fact, it might have been a flight of three (about the size of a maurader by description), crew of navigator, astropath, pilot, co-pilot and a couple of gunners. So, there is PLENTY of background to show that there are small warp-capable ships, they're just rare and the one in Dan's book was shot down relatively easily (which is a mark against wanting to even BE on such a small craft).

2) Tau ships barely have warp capable vessels, and their version of warp travel is incredibly slow and inaccurate (according to BFG), similar to taking a floating bathtub toy, taking it down to a river, and pushing it under water and letting go, and hoping where it pops back up on the surface is where you really want to be. They use another one of their Greater-Good races to really find out where to go and how (begins with an N).

3) GW Fiercely defends its (stolen) intellectual property whenever it can. Anything written by BlackLibrary, GW proper, Forgeworld, and even Fantasy Flight now, and what's left of the smaller side company that used to put out BFG/BloodBowl/etc, is Canon. Why? Because if GW didn't like it, they'd court order them to stop faster than George Lucas can ruin a masterpiece of film. GW goes out of its way to get sue-happy on anyone or anything that is Games-Workshop IP related that they don't overtly control (as just about any GW inspired web-comic will tell you, as most of them only last a few years, get popular, and then GW threatens massive law suits to shut them down. Most recent one I can recall being Turn Signals On a Land Raider).

4) And, on a random note about *Censored by the Inquisition*... stunties make a recent appearance in the new Battles of the Space Marines book Purging of Kadilus Harbor, and Forgeworld pretty much renamed and relocated the race before that <.< >.>

BrotherHostower said:

This is absolutely incorrect. Canonicity isn't the same thing as defending intellectual property. Simply because George Lucas wants a cut of the profits any time someone runs the Star Wars Christmas Special doesn't mean anyone's bound to acknowledge it, much less cite it.

For more on this subject, go see George Mann, head of the Black Library's thoughts on the continuity of their novels. In essence: Each author's work is a differing interpretation of the world of 40k, and for the reasons of artistic license said authors are encouraged not to stay within the bounds of official material from Codexes or other releases.

If you want to cite things from novels, fine, but please stop throwing them out as compelling reasons why your group should have a 150m warp-capable ship. That's just stupid.

I would generalize it as:

Anything under 500 meters in length that is warp capable is the domain of the Mechanicus, the Inquisition, and the High Lords of Terra. Anyone else who has something that ancient and powerful will be getting visitations from the Mechanicus or Inquisition pretty shortly.

The smallest I am aware of in any fluff is in the Grey Knight books. It carried a Navigator who also was the pilot and one passenger. It was controlled by the Inquisition and rarely ever used due to fear of it being lost to the warp, or anything else. They weren't specific but it was implied that it was tiny. Probably well under 100m in length.

Not really using any specific cites, but just themes, it seems to me that there isnt really any reason you couldnt make very small warp capable starships. Surviving their use would be another matter. Heck, one could make a case that a displacer field is a full up warp drive that only goes on meter scale hops.

Seems to me that the real restriction is on the protection side. How small can one make a Geller field? You dont see them on most personal scale warp packs, so it seems likely that it would be hard to make one that small. Without a field, you are meat if any daemon finds you in your little ship. Then there may be a power output factor in the safety of the field. Even a small transport still has a big reactor pumping juice into the field.

Which brings us to another problem with really small ships. What happens when the ship is small enough that a daemon can just shove it around in the warp? With multi-million ton ships, there arent alot of daemons that can push it around, but were you to go down to the size of a fighter, something fairly large may be able to push the ship away from an emergence zone, leaving the ship stranded in the warp.

So, I dont really think that there is a technical reason you cant have a warp capable ship of very small size. It is just that it is far less safe to do so.

The way I'd spin it is that in the past, humanity had the ability to make tiny, warp capable ships...but that they've lost the skills and technology to do so.

A representative example of this type of miniscule vessel is mentioned in Nemesis, as has already been mentioned, but it's described as an artefact ship, a priceless treasure. Presumably Draco's ship from the Inquisitor novels was something of the type. There are probably only a couple of dozen ships of this type left in the entire Imperium, and you can bet they're in the posession of powerful and influential Imperial agencies like the Officio Assasinorum, Grey Knights, Inquisition etc.

The modern Imperium can make new spacecraft, but they tend to be the vast and crowded ships we see in Rogue Trader. There's not a lot of hope, in my view, that Rogue Traders in a realtively obscure backwater like the Koronus Expanse would be able to purchase a tiny artefact vessel only a couple of hundred feet long.

However, a ship like this, or the rumour of such an ship's existence, could make an entertaining endeavour for a Rogue Trader.Perhaps the players could find such an ancient ship of this type adrift in the Expanse, and there is then a bloodbath as they try to sell it to one of the multiple agencies interested in it.

You might get one by striking a deal with the Jokaero. If they can make digi-melta's, they might be able to miniaturise the essential components of a ship too.

Badlapje said:

How do you deal with the jokaero? What to trade , where to find them, how to aproach them? I don't have many ideas.

According to the little fluff that is known about the jokaero, they are a barely tolerated race of Cenos, living under, if i remember correctly, inqusitorial control somewhere in the Segmentum Solar and the coordinates of their homeworld are a mystery.

According to the very old fluff on Jokaero, they go where they want, and their ships are so advanced that no one can really stop them!