So, my PCs recently managed to complete the meta-endeavour where they managed to recover the Light of Terra from LotE. This was all well and good until someone asked me about stats and I panicked slightly. This is what I'm looking at throwing their way and I'd like the opinion of the internet, because apaprently I have no sense of self preservation. It is overly long, rules heavy, and complicated, because it's an Emperor-class battleship, dammit! It should be!

You'll have to forgive dimention, mass and crew numbers at this stage - although if people have more up to date information as to what these numbers should be, feel free to throw them into a comment. Keep it friendly though; even idiots have a right to their opinions.

Emperor-class Command Carrier

[Fluff stolen from BFG]

Dimensions: 12 kilometers long, 2.8 km wide

Mass: 52 Megatonnes

Crew: 150,000

Accel: .5 gravities max acceleration

Speed: 2

Maneouvre: -25

Detection: +20

Hull Integrity: 120

Armor: 19

Turret Rating: 5

Space: 144

SP: N/A

Weapon Capacity: 1 Prow, 3* Port (2 automatically assigned) , 3* Starboard (2 automatically assigned), 2 Dorsal

Special:

Battleship: This vessel can mount any component usable by a Cruiser, Battle Cruiser or a Grand Cruiser. It may install up to two Plasma Drive components, treating them as a single component for the purpose of critical hits. It may mount two void shield generators, but no combination of generators may increase its total shield number above 4 at any time. Shield generators are treated seperately for the purpose of critical hits. Battleships cannot be bought with SP, they can only be granted by the GM.

One hundred thousand mouths to feed: The crew population of the Emperor-class rivals many imperial planets in size. Unless a dynasty allocates three transport class vessels to supply the Emperor-class, each endeavour the Emperor-class is involved in loses 5 profit factor after all other factors are considered. 2 Goliath-class or 1 Universe-class transports can be used instead.

Unbreachable: Every point of Hull Integrity above 75 grants +1 to both Crew and Morale scores. All rolls to defend against boarding gain a bonus of +40. No bonus is gained against Hit and Run attacks, due to the difficulty of mobilising against pin point atttacks. Every point of hull integrity lost below 50 deals 1 point of morale damage to all friendly ships in the same fleet and restores 1 morale to every enemy vessel in the same action.

Stormbreaker: Due to the immense warp wake caused by a vessel of the size of an Emporer-class, all difficulties for Navigation (Warp) rolls based on poor conditions in the Immaterium are reduced by one step. This applies to all vessels travelling the same path as the Emperor-class. Due to the size and amount of power required by the warp engines, however, the Emperor class takes an extra 1d5 days to reach a safe jump point outside of a system.

Strategium: The Emperor-class is known for its large and well equipped Strategium centres, allowing embarked military commanders to conduct entire planetary assaults without having to step one foot off of the ship. This vessel may equip an additional bridge component. If affected by the Decapitated critical result, randomly determine which has been affected. Embarked characters should decide before ship combat begins, on which bridge they are located. An additional Auger system can be installed on this vessel, filling the Prow weapon slot. This auger is treated as a supplimental component for the purpose of critical hits.

Carrier: The Emperor-class Command Carrier fills a total four weapon slots with Jovian-pattern Landing Bays. The space required has already been accounted for, but a total of 4 power must be provided for these components.

Slow and Stately: No combination of components can increase the ship's speed above double its initial value or raise its manoeuvrability above +0.
Energistic Conversion Matrices require 12 power to add an additional point of speed and are not otherwise exempt from this rule.

Ancient and Unknowable: The Cogitator core for each Emperor-class is a relic that has seen ten millenia of battle. Roll twice on the Machine Spirit and Past History tables, rerolling any duplicates. Background packages cannot be purchased for this vessel.

darkreign40k.com/drjoomla/index.php/component/docman/doc_download/260-ships-of-the-imperial-navy

The above link is to the Dark Reign website that has the rules for several Imperial ships, one of them being the Emperor. It's a bit less complex rules-wise and a bit stronger in some of the numbers. Though of course the Light of Terra could be a modified model as these were not churned out like our cars are today.

I had a look at those rules, but decided against them for two main reasons:

1.) I didn't like the fact that it WAS so simple. It brought them in line with being 'jsut another ship' and didn't really feel like something special. It just had more numbers.

2.) it required too many new components. I prefer using components from the books as often as possible.

That being said, thanks for the feedback

So, how did your group manage to recover the Light? The ol' feedback-loop-to-the-captain trick, making him think he's back in command of a properly functioning starship?

Your rules have a problem.

150k crew is nothing. The ship has more than 10 times the volume (Well more) and only 50% more crew than a Lunar. But since that is canon we work with that.

Since 150k crew is assumed, its not that hard to feed them. 100k crew is no problem after all. Why should 150k be a problem?

OTOH if you want the ship to scale up properly if a Sword class frigate is taken as semicorrect (its smack in the middle after all ^^):

A Lunar class cruiser receives 500k crew.

A Battleship would then sit at around 10 million crew. Now you have a population that rivals many space stations.

@Errant - Oh my yes. Hooked up a Mimic Engine to the auger arrays backwards then fed it straight through to the Captain agter performing the Rite of Setesh on him to remove that pesky "withered corpse" issue. I believe the group has been talking about building a crude augmetic body for him and using psychic powers to slowly restore him to sanity (largely by deleting massive amounts of memories and building more appropriate ones) so they have a skilled navy commander on the bridge able to walk around and give advice. My rule of thumb is to follow the Rule of Cool; if it sounds awesome, there's usually some way of doing it... they just need to find people with the abilities they need to assist them.

@Voronesh - Aaaaand this is what happens when you attempt to make up numbers with out double checking prior canon! Danke. I might up the numbers to a solid 2 million, discounting servitors and the various teams required for the launch bays. In a lot of respects, the transports rule is probably something that ould be removed, I just really wanted to ram home exactly why it is that only the Navy usually runs with Battleships, not Traders. Besides, you bring up an awesome point for an endeavour - finding more ratings than the capital city I live in has population

Just a few quick comments.

I think you are seriously underestimating the speed and manoeuvrability of a battleship. If we convert speed from say BFG, where a Mars moves 20 cm, an Emperor would move a respectable 15 cm. Based on this I would judge that it have 3 or 4 speed.

The battleship has too little manoeuvrability. At -25 it is currently the most cumbersome voidship out there. Manoeurvrability is one of the most important factors when designing a warship. Size of ships is inconsistant if you check various numbers GW and FFG has released, but going by your assumption that an Emperor is 12km (I think this is too large by the way - 10km at best is a more reasonable estimate), it is even more clumsy than a Universe. Lets just say that a naval ship designer who presents a design for a new warship which is clumsier than a bulk hauler of the same size would be quickly shot, dumped and a new designer found. Based on the way manoeuvrability degrades with size in warship classes, a battle ship would have around 0 maneouvrability to a low of -5 max.

I didn't really calculate space, but how you should determine it is by slapping together all the weapons it has as per BFG then add the essential components (not the best but what you think it should have). Everything should be ordinary quality. That is the amount of space it has. Warships don't really have things like spare space lying around.

All thing being said there is nothing wrong with your stats per se - the ship has been sitting adrfit in rings of a planet for god knows how long. It is possible for it to have detoriated to this state.

A whole bunch of good points. Just going to throw out my reasoning on these so we're all on the same page.

Speed/Man issues: The low speed and Man I chose to represent the very slow speed of hte Emperor in BFGH (speed 15cm) and the fact it couldn't use 'Come To New Heading' orders. I toyed with the idea of simply removing the option for CtNH, but I figured that at rank 8, the Pilot can damned well come to any new heading he pleases in whatever ship he's in - it should just be quite difficult. In a similar vein, I thought a huge penalty to evasive actions would be more appropriate for such a large vessel, rather than simply removing the option. I'm trying to ensure that this ship is considered a slow and stately beast that isn't designed to be thrown around the skies.

Size wise, the 12km was something I seem to recall finding somewhere in canon. If anyone has a more up to date canonically printed scale, I'll use that. Right now, I like the sheer ridiculousness of a space ship twelve freaking kilometres long (which also happens to be th edistance between two of the players houses, give or take a couple of hundred meters. As they're both new to 40k rp, it's nice to be able to display scale by saying "Drive to [PLAYER A'S] house... that's the length of the ship").

Space wise, in fairness I used a fair approximation, rather than calculating everything to the last point. When you consider doubling up on Engines, Bridges and Voids, then fill everything else with broadsides, torpedoes (if desired) or even additional launch bays, auxillary plasma banks and barracks, there's not going to be a lot of space left to play around with. Unless I am wrong and that statement made me look like an idiot. Given that I'm at work atm and pulling out the RT books to double check sizes might get me in trouble, I might leave the calculations to those who have knocked off for the night. If the boss is reading this, hi Brad. You're awesome! This is totally work related!

And that final statement really does sum it all up. No two battleships are going to be the same, really. It's not like they're mass produced

Once again, thanks for the feed back, ideas have been taken on board/stolen shamelessly.

A google on size of a BFG battleship found me sizes ranging from 5-10km and I cannot verify any of those lengths as cannon. but I am pretty sure a Universe-class is larger than a battleship at 12km.

A battleship is pretty nimble for it's size. It has to be to survive the amount of fire its going to take - Armor only goes so far you know....

Aux plasma bank? why not just make up a battleship plasma drive? Heck you could just throw it in as a non removable component - I can't imagine your PCs wanting to try to swap a battleship sized plasma drive - even if they wanted to... Where would they get one? there are no other battleships in the Expanse. Working and loyal to the Imperium anyway..... Actually you can do this for any other component you don't really want them to replace. Like shields, which u used 2x /Void shields 2 versions.

Hrmm i distinctly remember 12 km for battleships as well, dont know where to find it though.

The Maneuverabilty is really a tad bit low. Its in the range of: "Why even attempt a maneuver?"

And for power issues, i would use a scaled up plasma drive. Give it something in excess of the weaponry + essential components needed.

A great suggestion I saw (maybe on this very forum) was that ships that are theoretically of the same class are *not* the same size and configuration. The Imperium is a big place with wildly varying resources, technology and time to allocate to a given ship under construction. Even segmentum or sector preferences could make a huge difference, never mind changes from repairs and customisation which may well make a ship more or less size-efficient.

So two emperor-class battleships could be noticeably different to the eye.

Honestly, battleships are such a big investment IRL and in WH40K that unless the 2 ships were built at about the same time, they would probably look different the newer one receiving improvements address some weakness or flaw found in the older design after field use. Class for star ships would probably be a performance guide line (like the stat line) for the original ship design rather than a specific look. Future retrofits do not change the class unless very extensive (convestion from cruiser to battlecruiser for example).

If nothing else, the fact that many of these vessels were built anywhere up to ten thousand years apart kinda allows for some changes to the plans

@Maneuverabilty issues - Well, the opinion out there pretty much seems unanimous - raising the man. rating. I'm thinking to -10, given that the thing really isn't nimble. At all. I know the general opinion seems to be somewhere in the region of +0 to +5, but I'm not willing to go quite that far. Were this a Retribution or similar battleship, I'd be with you guys one hundred percent, but the Emperor has always struck me as a majestic leviathan, with the handling characteristics and nippy acceleration of a small european village.

@Component issues - the reason I used the doubled components rule was to represent exactly how difficult something this size would be to injure through the time honoured RT tradition of critical hitting anything to death larger than a light cruiser. So, you teleported your Murder-servitors over to the ship to take out its void shields? It still has a functioning double array. Surly techsprites have taken the Enginarium offline? Sorry, half hte reactors are still firing. That sort of thing. It's a way to add to the resiliance of the thing.

@Scale - So it looks like none of us can remember any canon well enough to point out a page ref. Let's just all agree here that where it says length, we'll all just put in the value we think is appropriate, and roll from there.

@Everyone posting - again, awesome feedback. Keep the ideas/inspiration coming.

As Manoeuvrability goes, why not take a slightly different tack: give it a reasonable manoeuvrability that allows them to reliably execute standard moves, but disallow the 'Come to New Heading' manoeuvre (in essence the same solution as in BFG). Compared to the real world, a battleship isn't a nimble craft either, but it is not just a ponderous barge. I would allow it a similar speed to cruisers as well. Big ships are and were not by definition slow ships. Todays carriers can easily race many small craft.

I do like the redundancy idea. It makes sense for a battleship to have void shields that take more then one lucky hit to get down. But perhaps it might be an idea to use the same tack as RT uses for redundancy: give them a good chance to survive damage (say, 4-10) and coming out unharmed when damaged.

Friedrich van Riebeeck, Navigator Primus, Heart of the Void

Carriers are much faster than battleships - historically the last battleships were slower than their carrier escorts. This has led to battleships being caught alone without support and sunk. It also led to (among other factors) carriers replacing battleships as the primary flag vessel. In fact, in naval warfare today, battlecruisers and cruisers are almost obsolete with only a few nations still using up to date cruisers, the destroyer is currently the most common surface combatant.

Acceleration is based off the amount of thrust power vs your mass.

The bigger you ship is, the bigger the engine will be. Size does not dictate speed in space.

So in theory, all this battleships move slower stuff is based of planetery navies and air forces, where drag does reduce speed dependent on aerodynamics. But those vanish in space.

So making a Battleship speed 10 is in fact very easy to do. Cue Explorator and flank speed.

Well, the reason carriers superseded battleships was not so much speed as the range of their main armament. The speed advantage of carriers in WW II towards many of the then serving battleships had more to do with the Washington Treaty that effectively froze battleship construction during the interbellum and forced the navies of WW II to fight many of their battles with modernised veterans of WW I, like the admirable Warspite. But all battleships constructed just before and during WW II were fast battleships, at most a few knots slower then carriers, if not as fast or faster. The US Iowa's are just a tad faster then the Essex class, for example.

The main advantage of a carrier is the range and versatility of its weapons: Aircraft tend to outrange guns by a load. The ability to strike a target at 250 miles or more instead of at 25 miles at most is what gave and gives carriers their dominance (these days the ranges are a bit longer, but the idea remains the same). In RT this vast range difference is luckily not present, as I do like the idea off slogging it out in gun battles.

These days the carrier still reigns supreme, together with the submarine. The rest is there mostly to escort and protect, still being given old names as frigates, destroyers and cruisers, but in essence escorts. Missiles might give them some strike power, but nothing compared to what a carrier can do and can keep doing. Of course, naval warfare these days is not really sailing on a high tide. These days the questions are not under ice warfighting between SSN's, but rather how to deal with pesky speedboats with some suicidal idiots. I guess it is progress. Or a form of progress.

FvR

Unless of course you build a ship so big that even the most powerful engines available to the designers are insufficient to provide the sheer thrust required to move it swiftly.

The big reasons why I would view 40k Battleships as slower then Carriers are armaments, armour, and available power. A Battleship, rather then Launch Bays, has broadsides and lance turrets, which replace a massive amount of empty space with enormous adamantium barrels and huge holds filled with solid shells. Likewise Battleships, due to their general position right in the thick of it mixing it up with the enemy grand cruisers compared to the Carriers' ideal position hiding behind the Battleship with escorts blocking firing arcs and the Carrier launching waves of attack craft, it makes sense the Armour is twice as thick. Finally, those lances are generating beams of fusion-level energy, and keeping the capacitors on those bad boys charged and ready to go means that a huge amount of power has to be allocated to the batteries. A Carrier might have half the power-guzzling armaments of a Battleship.

It makes sense a Battleship sits at 2 speed, -25 Manoeuvrability. Don't want it to be like flying a golf cart? Install Retro-thrusters, and trade it in for a fleet of Raiders. The Armour should be a few points up from a Grand Cruiser, and they should have at least 8 weapon slots. Again, big, slow, unwieldy, carry a really, really big stick.

One thing people should keep in mind about BFG: It's irrelevant. They scale it completely differently for an RPG, and the ships make for great inspiration, but don't bother trying to formulate an equation to convert speeds, ranges, etc. Just determine if it's fast or slow, and if it's heavily armed or not, and pull the numbers from a vague generalization.

Yes, battleships are not nimble, but they should not be less nimble than a mass hauler, especially one that is of the same size of larger which is what most of us have been saying. On the other hand it's not a spanking new battleship, with no parts easily available it could well be at that level currently. 2 speed is certainly workable even for a full functional battleship but it should not have the universe class limitation - this isn't a cheap 45 sp hull after all.

One more thing I forgot to mention - When you design power and space for a captial ship, after putting in all your components and weapons (common quality) you ought to have to function as a brand new warship, keep the space (the trend in RT is that capitals are short on barely being able to fit standard weapons complement) but increase power by about 5 - 15 (the trend in RT is that capitals will have excess power with standard weapons complement). Hope this helps.

If RT follows the same logic is has done in BFK with the Grand Cruisers and Battlecruisers they completely follow the course they have followed till now, and that is adapt the BFG ships to the RT system. Just like Grand Cruisers and Battlecruisers are a step from the cruiser, so Battleships will be a step from the Grand Cruisers. Slightly less manoevrable (say by about 5% if we follow the RT logic), more weapon slots, more shields and the plasma drive to match the power demands. So, say, SP 4/5, Man +0/+5, Prow, Dorsal and 3 Port and Starboard Weapon slots, 4 shields and the Plasma Drive to Power it all. And as allready remarked, not a ship that is more ponderous then a Mass Conveyor. There is no reason why a big ship should be less fast, especially in space, where it is all a matter of power.

Now, Carriers. Carriers in RT and BFG are not comparable to carriers in the real world. In the far dark future they will have to get stuck in with the rest of the fleet. Why? Because it is a question of range. During WW II a carrier had a 500% or more range advantage of its main armament compared to a battleship and its aircraft had a 1000% or more speed advantage, so they could stand far back and pound battleships to oblivion. In RT, an Imperial bomber has a range of 36 VU and a speed of 6 VU. Compared to the potential 24 VU range of battleship armament and 4/5 VU speed of capital ships, that is only a 50% advantage on both the theoretical range and speed. And as the fight is mobile and ships can increase their range and speed, bombers can easily be outrun even by Grand Cruisers. Now try that in the real world. The result of this is that carriers in RT and BFG are not pure carriers but hybrids, armed with both aircraft and macrobatteries and lances, protected by the same slabs of armour that protect cruisers and battleships. In fact, Imperial Dictators are no more then adapted Lunars who sacrificed weapons for launch bays, but are in no way less capable of standing in the line of battle. And with good reason. They might be able to hang back, but there is no way they will be able to avoid getting involved in the battle, so they are quite properly well armed and armoured.

Furthermore, escorts blocking the arc of fire? How does a ship block the line of fire through 1 VU of 10,000 kilometres? Not even the largest ships described in BFK would get even close to blocking that amount of space. Perhaps that a Craft World could block the arc of fire, or that a small ship might hug a larger craft and stay shielded by it, but there is no way a Sword will be able to block the arc of fire to a Mars. At most, they can draw torpedoes on themselves who will aim for the first target, their simple cogitator units hungry for blood. Just as in BFG actually.

FvR

Errant said:

Impossible. Since the engine only needs to be scaled up respective to the vessel. Starship engines are probably not single engines anyway. A matter of concern is stability though. The mass increases respective to the volume. The strength of a material obly with the diameter.

The larger a ship, the weaker its superstructure, relative to its size.

And why BFG is so important? It gives us a guideline regarding which ships exists. And FFG already has ships it cannot reporduce with its own ruleset. (AdMech Gothic ).

Carriers are originally based off cruiser or battlecruiser hulls at least originally if i'm not wrong. This coupled with less armor and big guns made them much faster - cruiser speed in fact. As for the Washington Treaty, it was not signed by Japan which is why they had their super battleships.

Of course, there are a lot of types of carriers, escort carriers for example served as transport escorts and were slow - but these were not generally used in main fighting and were designed for u-boat protection. The main combat carriers were fleet and light aircraft carriers, both based off cruisers hulls or converted from cruisers, were fast and able to keep up with their cruiser escorts. True super carriers such as the Enterprise were built after WWII.

To make a carrier in RT just replace all broadsides on a imperial cruiser to launch bays. You can use torps or a nova cannon in the prow if you have a couple of escorts it works pretty well too.

Of course if you take BFG as a standard of how a space battle should go, Imperial battleships are very tough, unlike their real world counterparts. Essentially a mobile base, they are the idealized concept of what a battleship should be rather than what they actually were.

Hantheman said:

Stop comparing space combat to sea and air combat. What works for sea and air combat will not work for space combat. In space all ships are fighters. It just of different size but having the same aerodinamic profile.

In real world carriers and fighters in space will not exist, because of distance time and easy ability of space ships to dodge fighters and bombers or to kill them before fighters or bombers will be able to attack the warship. Because of their size fighters will find hard to match speed or acceleration with the capital ship(normal rule the bigger the ship the more fuel it will carry and the more powerful the engine to unit of space ratio is and will move through space faster, manuver for more times and stay at the same speed and accelaration for longer than smaller ships), and it will do this for a shorter period than a capital ship.

Normal weapons for ship battle will be energy weapons, mass drivers and missels that are cheaper than a fighter and have the ability spam the point defense of enemy ships. To hit anything in space the ship will need computers to target the enemy ships.

The comparison was for some one making a some one making a comparison between the speed of carriers and battleships.

The only time a carrier (ie anything with a launch bay) works like RL is when u make planetary assault. To use most other ship weapons you wouls have to enter low orbit, while a carrier can sit in 10s of VUs out and let their small craft deal damage.

Your statement that a bigger ship and engine is faster however is totally false, if that was the case a raider hull would be the slowest of the warship classes and the battleship the fastest.

Also a fighter or a assault craft or a torpedo moves 10 VUs, a bomber 6 VUs - at least for an Imperial one from BFK. The logic is that these craft burn hotter but thus have less operational range. Size isn't everything.

Small craft in ship to ship combat are used in a pincer attack. A ship with launch bays is basically attack from where small craft are and not where the bay is. Additionally a launch bay can have up to 6 waves of squadrons. Bombing runs hurt - torpedo runs are very very bad news indeed.

That being said, Warhammer always totally ignores most of the inconvienient facts of physics. It is based on naval war specifically from the end of the age of sail and the beginning of the dreadnought era. Of course they convienently ignore the actual performance of the craft or weapons they emulate. Macro batteries represent cannon batteries while lances represent the big gun. At the same time they have added ramming (almost no one uses this as a tactic if they want to sail away from the battle since ancient times), torpedoes (these work more like guided missiles) and aircraft (which were only used about 60 years after the 1st ironclad). Everything from warships to tanks to soldiers obey this "idealized" concept - even if gameplay proves it wrong

Warhammer 40k is not Sci-Fi. Warhammer 40k is an amalgamation of every period in human history, plus a lot of inspiration from movies, other games and pop culture mixed in with a huge dose of fascism. Heresies such as science and logic obviously do not apply to the rules approved by the Emperor.

Humor aside, RL comparisons are for people to draw inspiration based on parallel thinking where i feel is the original source of inspiration - this is the house rule section, you can base your house rules based on anything you want - the RP police are not going to break down your front door and bring to RP jail.