Hola folks

I'm setting up a new RT game for some friends and I'm just getting settled in as a GM - brand new, not much experience and that. And I've come into a little spot of bother.

My players have decided upon a Dauntless Class Light Cruiser and they're kitting it out according to their ship points and space available and so forth. That's all good. The problem comes in that my players (and I to a certain degree) are a bit fussy about having things be, for lack of a better word, realistic. As much as they can be in a Science Fiction environment, swooping through the void and fighting the alien menace.

And my point (getting there!) is that I'd like an idea of the basic layout of a Dauntless cruiser. Ideally a deck schematic would be awesome. But failing that just somethign that vaguely points out key structures - where the bridge usually is, where the crew live, the flight decks that sort of thing. Hell, even a good quality high res of the outside would be nice at this point.

But yeah, anyway. Obviously if I can't find one I'll have to make it up, but it would be nice if there was something I could use as a guide.

Other than engines are at the back, and the bridge is on the top - that's pretty much it.

Here's a better-resolution image of the Dauntless: http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs51/f/2009/274/6/7/Dauntless_Light_Cruiser_by_The_First_Magelord.png

As far as anything like a proper deckplan goes, you're pretty boned.

Here's the Battlefleet Gothic models of the Dauntless that GW produces:

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat490024a&prodId=prod1101835

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat490024a&prodId=prod1101837

The first has a prow lance while the second has torpedoes.

I figured a full deck plan was out of the question. It was nice to hope that some engineeringly-minded fellow geek had even brewed their own deck plan, but I didn't entertain much hope of that.

Thanks for the higher-res of the Dauntless, Errant - that actually does help a whole lot. Obviously I'm going to have to make a whole bunch up, but just having a good image of the exterior helps in terms of getting my head around the layout.

The problem is that my players are realism junkies, as much as you can be in a 40k setting And I've got terrible spatial awareness (Living up to those female stereotypes, donchaknow!), so I need as much layout info as I can so I can keep everything straight while they're trying to steal the boat and scarper with it

Millandson - I figured that much out on my ownsome. Also you point the pointy bit at the enemies and pewpew until they go boom

Nerdynick - my boys are playing funny buggers with the prow armament. Apparently we've taken off the lance and haven't installed torpedoes. I think.

Argh! I am a forum fail.

Xanthia said:

No worries, happens to us all!

Xanthia said:

See, they have all they need to know then!

An actual 40k quote: "The prow is armoured because the stern never faces the enemy."

Perhaps you can express the unorthodox nature of the grim-darkness of 40k. There is no such thing as "floor plans", because your ship, likely being thousands years old is a complicated maze of sealed off, rebuilt, quarantineed, refurbished, reinforced, bulk-welded conflagration of sub-areas and isolated regions - perhaps originally the ship had a conventional layout - but that is no longer the case. The crew, having been born, raised and likely to die there - all know their sections - but it makes little sense - amd since there is no particular reason for any single one person to know the entire ship, no one does. Certainly some crew likely have a job of traversing the considerable maze of your ship - buit that's their entire vocation - and they learned it from their parents.

I'd also consider that certain regions are isolated - such as the guns and munitions, and that engine related areas are typically under the perview of the AdMech - sometimes exclusively. You can adventure in your ship, certainly.

I provide rough schematics of the vessels my group uses in the following form:

The DAUNTLESS Class, Silverfish, is represented thus:

I just made them in PAINT.

Effective interior work there. It can be blue printed on a whole other type of ships with perhaps only remaining some rooms to fit the ship lore.

The Dauntless does not have prow armour in Battlefleet Gothic.

Thanks for that bobh! That helps a whole lot just to get my head around loose ideas of where things could fit, and also confirms a few ideas about where I thought certain things should or would be.

I'm glad it can help.

To keep players on their toes remember you can move some things around (engines at the back is always a good idea ) on different ships. It also makes a handy hand out if you get together for a table session as you can show them the layout with blacked out sections if they are on a enemy ship during a boarding, or a derelict.

Citizen Philip said:

If I had a dime for every adventure hook I'd written that started off with, "A routine maintenance crew has stumbled upon a completely unknown section of the ship that doesn't seem to appear on any of your woefully outdated ship schematics"...

My players frequently ask how everything on their ship is connected, mostly for the purposes of getting from where they are to where action may be happening. After explaining that you can never have a 100% accurate and timeless map of something the size of manhattan, I just ruled that it takes 2d10 minutes to get from one component to another

This reminded me of the old dark heresy resource site with a few blueprints like:
www.malleus.dk/Ordo/Rudderow.aspx

This might be useful.