I'm going to preface this by saying I know that 40k Novels are Canon only to themselves and that crew population has been discussed to death, but I thought that this particular example needed to be brought to the attention of the masses. I recently bought the Ravenor Omnibus and while reading through it, something made me raise my eyebrows.

Page 182 reads:

"The Allure had a crew of seventy-eight, thirty more than the Hinterlight ....."

The Allure is a rogue trader vessel. The Hinterlight is also a rogue trader vessel. Neither are small vessels. While it never specifies the class of hull of either ship, the Allure is labeled a medium-sized sprint trader. Am I wrong in thinking that reducing a vessel's population by somewhere around 99% is a bit of an oversight? And it wasn't just one. He cut the Hinterlight to a paltry 48 crew population. This really floored me.

And at another point in the book he remarked how his 30 year professional relationship with this rogue trader had been strained 6 years back when the ship had come under attack and lost 60% of its crew. Thats only around 30 people. Hell, that sounds like a good number to me.

P.S. I LOVE the works of Dan Abnett and am in no way shape or form bashing his work, but merely pointing out this one flaw.

Maybe he measures in thousands?

Just an idea. 40k bashes itself with the cruiser crew numbers ^^.

One way to work around Abnett's crew numbers for at least one of the ships in the Eisenhorn series is that the crew were entirely servitorised, an option you actually do have as a RT player within the system. (Into the Storm, I think.)

Plus, most of the ships featured in his Eisenhorn/Ravenor books are transports,which always have lower crew numbers, as they're not required to serve the guns or expected to incur casualties.

But yes, you've got to accept there is a discrepancy between Abnett's crew sizes and those of RT. Personally, I think Abnett has drastically underestimated crew sizes. I would favour the information in RT over his interpretation of crew sizes...much as I love Abnett's work.

Personally I like Abnetts Books (at least those I read already) but his Rogue Traders are far, far apart from those of the RPG. Not only crew numbers, look at the armaments of their ships or their wealth and influence. They might be better up than the average citizen but they are far from the power even a starting Rogue Trader- Party has.

So Abnetts a very good source for Dark Heresy (I like much of his stuff better than the actual RPG-Fluff), but not for RT (or at least not where the RTs themselves are concerned. The Trade-Station in Ravenor for example is something worth stealing)

There was always a discrepancy between BFG and RT in crew numbers, so Dan Abnett is not unusual in having contradictory canon. Also (I not sure on this though) for a number of years in the early noughties Rogue Traders were being refered to a mere shady merchants rather than the Conquerer/explorer/Privateers/Peers of the Imperium they were originally in Rogue Trader (1987) and are now in RT Rpg. As for the numbers and the tech In Dan Abnetverse of 40K anti-grav cars are two a dozen, despite it being technology that is jealosly guarded.

I woundn't fret over it.

Crew of servitors.