from france

i was wondering if the hull of a ship can be of any form. i just watch "elizabeth the golden age" and the look of the ships are amazing. what if a excentric rogue trader whith knowledge of ancient earth wish to build one like that?

will it be possible?

i thought that the sails could be use as gathering the solar energy for the plasma reactor and just decoration other time execpt combat of course.

it would have only port and starboard batteries and for landing just the neccessary gungutter walkyrie or arvus.

could it land on a surface ocean?

your thougth on that?

It's a cool idea.

There's been lots of debate on these forums about 1km plus scale warp-capable ships landing on a planet's surface, and the consensus seems to be that it can be done in certain rare circumstances, with the right ship, crew and specialist components. It should be a dangerous, near impossible task, but do-able. Space Marine battlebarges, for example, have been known to land on a world's surface - there's at least one example in the canon, when the Star Phatoms grounded their Battlebarge at the end of the Badab War.

Everyone's always been thinking about landing a ship on the rocky surface of a world, but you're right, we hadn't given much thought to landing a ship on a watery sea.

So why not have a series of components that allows this? It's a mad idea, but it's mad in cool way!

You'd need:

• a reshaped hull that makes the vessel more boat like, watertight and waterproof,
• some sort of buoyancy aid package to let the thing float. Suspensor based, perhaps?
• Sealed gunports, perhaps to let the ship fire, or to stop water getting in when the thing lands...
• A specialist bridge that allows the ship to function as a...er..ship
• Specialist dual-purpose sensor packages
• special weapons capable of being fired within an atmosphere

One is tempted to imagine that all of these things could have a severely detrimental impact on the void-handling abilities of the vessel. I know that doesn't actually make much sense (a ship shaped like a boat as opposed to a spaceship will work just as well as a normal spaceship does, one assumes) but for the purposes of game balance, it seems logical. So if I were writing up these components, I'd be assigning penalties to various void-handling characteristics, just to balance out their added utility.

As for the look of the ships, I'd always thought that the Star Galleon has a certain chunky Galleon like quality about it - which puts it in the same era you're talking about...

from france

thank i work on it tomorow. i also thought about "marines" barrack

well "the borg cubes" doesn't seem at any disavantages in star trek but i must admit i am not familiar with star trek

Also bare in mind some of the other difficulties - pressure differential in space - one atmosphere. Pressure differential when the airlocks on the underside of the ship are hundreds of meters below the surface - huge.

And saltwater is amazingly corrosive stuff - not good at all for metal and complicated machinery. Deep-sea engineering is much more difficult than vacuum engineering - it's just more difficult to do on-site work and repairs on the later.

But as far as components go, there's gravity sails, lux-nets, and I'm sure some demented tech-priest cold invent modified shield projectors that really would look and act like sails, when you're on the surface. Possibly the ship was designed, centuries ago, to make collecting tribute from primitive worlds easier - the current owner simply made it prettier, with all the extra windows and figureheads, to suit his personality.

Drhoz said:

True - I wonder if void shields would help with this? Nah, probably not. tropedoes & small craft pass through, so water should too. As for bouyancy, if the ship is fully sealed, the air within MIGHT be enough to keep it afloat. The ship is huge but would also have a huge amount of pressurized air inside, especially if it has large cargo holds. I admit that I am no physicist or shipwright, so I will let those more qualified than I chew on these thoughts. Of course, this is 40K so the science doesn't really have to work!

from france

i have a probleme with a simple question how can he enter atmosphere? if he can salt wtar shouldn't be a probleme.

does we know if all ocean ocean on or all planet who have water are salty?

i think the ship will aslso carry a lot of chimera for the troops aboard.

Well the answer to that is to use a hull with a lot of corrosion resistant material- ceramics of some sort would be good (and fairly heatproof, which helps with atmospheric (re-)entry), and if memory serves, Excess Void Armour is described as often such. Otherwise, a golden hull (Gilded Hull) would work fairly well, as gold is not particularly chemically active.

You'd probably need a separate set of engines to get it airborne again after landing, as I can't see massive rear-facing plasma jets being much help for that.

Alasseo said:

This should also take care of balancing, as extra engines (just take stats from current engine, but fluff it to be spefically for atmospheric entry/exit) take up space (and quite a lot of it), forcing you to not take other (more void-suited) options. House-rule that you ignore the "one of each component only" rule.

In general I think a ship like this should be possible, considering they introduced complete temples able to drop through the atmosphere onto a planets surface in Hostile Acquisitions... And if you can have a configurable prow, then other parts (retractable sails, or changeable hull-covering to allow a water-repellant layer) could also be dynamic in my opinion.

In fact the water doesn't necessarily have to be a big issue. Yes seawater is nasty, but even in our current age there are coatings and stuff to help with that. What makes it extra difficult is the fact that the bits under water are hard to access/clean (my grandfather had a boat, every winter it would get taken out of the water and we'd spend a day cleaning it). This is actually simpler in a spaceship, after take-off spend a few days in orbit, have a dedicated cleaner shuttle go around the ship and you're good to go. And there is also the repulsor shield to consider, tuned to brush aside space debris (Into the Storm), I bet a rightly tuned shield could be made to repel water.

It all sounds a bit like spelljammer btw: www.marketwallpapers.com/wallpapers/13/wallpaper-80313.jpg

Hmm, I'm suddenly reminded of all the ecological problems that have arisen because of ships that used seawater as ballast, and then sailed off to introduce comb jellies, or zebra mussels, or other pestilential species, somewhere where they shouldn't go.

I pity the crew members that have to check the ballast tanks after each departure, to make sure there aren't any Despair Squid eggs glued to the tank walls...

from france

Yes space jammers good idea didn’t thought about because I never played it.

For the ship itself if it must base for looks on a 16 century ship I assume that it is either a lost relic of the age of technology or the age of strife or the great crusade or it’s a unique construction. I think also that the keyword should be flexibility.

So in any case the purpose of the original owner warrants of trade must be important.

I choose a commercial endeavor. The main purpose of the ships is to go to sea world or a least planet with sizeable sea mass in the expanse and deliver the goods in other similar planet in the expanse or the imperium.

So I need to choose a hull ship. For the moment the candidates are:

Conquest star galleon.( p23/24 of battlefleet koronus) space 56, defiant light cruser, yes a exeption to the no warship ( p 26 battlefleet koronus) space 55, the carrack class transport (p 29 of battle fleet koronus ) space 38, the goliath class factory (p 29/30 of battlefleet koronus), space 40 the jericho class pilgrim (p 194 of rogue trader) space 45 and vagabond class merchant (p194 of rogue trader) space 40.
The other ships aren’t appropriate I think.
The conquest star seem excellent. So l chose it but if you prefer another ship tell me..

I think we should start things by separate the ship time/ space and functions.

I see for the movement. 4 basics points.
1) Travelling in warp
2) Traveling in space
3) Entering/departing atmosphere
4) 4 navigating water.

Other important point are

a)Endeavor: commercial. So no warship.
b)Being able to defend itself.
c)Have a certain number of unique components.
d) Being lavishly impressive good looking

next post i detailed i am working.

Drhoz said:

I very much disagree with this. While brine is annoyingly corrosive, that can be dealt with by using expensive corrosion resistant alloys. It just costs more. Crushing pressures are easier to design for than tensile forces, especially with ceramics and IoM generally uses ceramite or cerametal composite armour plates.

Saltwater doesn't cause vacuum welding, ruin almost every form of lubrication known to man or cause headaches for designers due to the need for relatively precise heat-transfer modeling (when heat is transferred by conduction alone, thermal buildup and deformation / stresses by heat expansion can be surprisingly bad). And at last, when engineering for space, minimizing weight is crucial. Every gram costs in fuel & fuel needed to lift the fuel itself ... Issues in deep-sea engineering are mostly limited to high pressures, near-zero temperature, corrosion and sometimes gas dissolution or klathrate formation.

Now, the Imperium has gravity plates and antigrav systems, which make floatation much easier to solve, so landing crafts, especially archeotech crafts should be quite plausible. Also, iirc some launch bays use force-fields to hold the air in, so field-based leak prevention should be quite doable.

In a setting as reliant on the Rule of Cool, as 40k, it would be a shame not to have chain-cutlass-wielding Chaos Space Pirates launch their craft from the sea with a heavy-metal soundtrack.

H2SO4 said:

I bow to your superior knowledge of the art