I still love the fact that Warframe has all the space opera bullshit you could want, including absolutely fuckoff huge space battles, and it's still almost entirely constrained to a single solar system.
As much as I love the galaxy-spanning adventures you see in settings like 40k and whatnot, settings that do that sort of thing in a single star system do a great job of reminding the viewer just how much *space* is in space, y'know?
Space truly is massive... like explaining just how big Jupiter is compared to earth, and the same for saturn... Then explaining that at its furthest point from earth in it's orbit. There is enough space between the earth and the moon to fit every other planet in the solar system, side by side... with room to spare.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
That can't be right...
* Earth to moon is 384,400km
* Mercury - 2440
* Venus - 6052
* Mars - 3390
* Jupiter - 69911
* Saturn - 58232
* Uranus - 25362
* Neptune - 24622
Adds up to 190,009km (if I haven't fatfingered anything) - ~~so you could fit~~ *~~two~~* ~~of every other planet in there, and still throw a Pluto in there.~~ EDIT: nope, check replies for why I'm an idiot
Well, if you play Mario Party anything like I do, I probably did you a favour.
We all know that those pictures of the solar system aren't to scale, but the only way to have them be to scale would be to have all the planets be practically invisible! The only accurate distance scale image I found still had to amplify the size of planets x1000!
https://preview.redd.it/6zxrr48au2ad1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=24393c712db72d0244dc2ca182423dbee943179c
Like some people said, you can fit the entire story of the Star Wars trilogy into a single star system. If you think about it, the expanse series has a lot of places and all of them are inside the solar system.
Yeah it's wildly underestimated by GW writers. Just the amount of material around Jupiter or Saturn would be enough to build the entire Imperial navy dozens of times over
Honestly yeah - 99% of the interesting shit in Warframe happens completely offscreen, and we’re lucky if it gets anything more than a few cursory mentions in some obscure crafting material flavor texts.
Definition of "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle." I used to be really into that game, til I realized there's never really more than a 6-month plan regarding anything of substance, especially story. The game is still fun to come back to once in a while, but it's a damn shame that they hyped up the New War for years, only to release a quest that amounted to a few gameplay demos, a few cutscenes, and like 1 or two simple missions *after the entire war happened off-screen*. It really did look like they fapped around for two years and then made the quest in a matter of months.
I mean, two (three) of the factions are practically endless in number:
* The grineer are former clone slave labor, now a clone army being produced by the literal millions all the time.
* The sentients are self-replicating robots designed to terraform the Tau system, who said "fuck that" and went home to wage war on their creators.
* The >!Murmur!< are an >!eldritch and abominable!< army of >!faceless, uncaring void creatures!< that are spewing forth from >!a void crack in realspace in Albrecht Entrati's laboratory.!< They are potentially endless in nature, and unrelenting.
I am *Not* counting the Infested, the Corpus, or the Corrupted in this, as the Infested and Corrupted require members of the other factions to add to their numbers, and the Corpus are just normal people.
Without the Tenno culling their numbers, they could overrun the solar system quite fast.
The Corpus employ the use of a massive amount of cloned debt slave cultists and robotics (Although Granum’s faction leans less on the cloning and more on robotics)
There's nothing in the fluff that suggests the Corpus are using clones.
Robots like bursa, moa and ospreys, sure, but Prodman #163,412 was a real dude with a family that you mercilessly ground into a chunky meat smoothie on your last outing. You monster.
Parvos Granum during the current Jade Shadows event specifically says approximately that the Corposium used robotics instead of clones, and they will do so again under his leadership. This implies to me that Nef Anyo’s Board and Frohd Bek’s Board likely did use clones. We still absolutely kill loads of people though. Like that one time we slaughtered over 7 million Corpus in about 6 hours on V Prime.
There is a mention in one of the Cephalon fragments or a codex entry for the Corpus crewman, can't remember which, that says they are basically purpose grown. So while people like the solaris are just run of the mill citizens that are born relatively normally, probably, the crewmen we fight were purpose grown for their task. Not quite cloning, as I bet they do either gene modification or combining of 2 prime samples to make them, but still not naturally born people. Still more expensive than robotics, but better for ensuring the quality and loyalty of the average crewman than just taking them from the population.
>Warframe has all the space opera bullshit you could want
Unironically the best part of the setting. Rule of Cool over all things.
Whatever the devs think will be awesome - in it goes. Man portable laser cannons and swords ? Cool, do it. Antigrav surfboard ? Awesome, add it. Space battles ? Nice, add. Primitive regressed culture on planet literally eating the remnants of the living structures made by a fallen civilization ? Cool aesthetics, add.
I still think the Solaris are one of the coolest cyborg concepts I've ever seen. That they were presented alongside one of Warframe's [catchiest songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPTCq3LiZSE) certainly helps, but rugged, blue-collar cyborgs who've all replaced their heads with machinery is a really strong visual concept on its own.
My problem with it is you sell off your body parts and the first fucking part you sell off is your entire head and face?
Like cmon. Put those kidneys up to baro kiteer first.
That's one of the reasons I love The Expanse so much. Despite it being a Sci Fi setting, everything still takes place in Sol.
A spoilery addon thought to that
>!Even after they discover what the protomolecule was there for and they discover ring space/The Slow Zone, since every other system is directly connected to ring space it doesnt really feel too far away, keeping that sense of closeness somewhat. Truly the only times it didnt feel that way was when the science crew was studying the blackhole and other protomolecule planets in like.. book 8? and partially during the plot of book 4 dealing with the rogue settlement, and there only thanks to them being trapped planetside for a bit.!<
The Solar System is truly MASSIVE, If we get to the Oort Cloud we could live forever in The System because there is Just so much Matter there.
Warframe has Gascitys Mining the Outer Giants, entire Continents of Underwater facilitys in The Frozen Moons, huge Mining plataforns in The Asteroid Belts AND KEEP IN MIND ALL OF THAT IN AN ALREADY RESOURCE DEPRIVED SYSTEM
Pyramid ships might be able to trump a lot of W40k stuff. Just being able to say "no" to being hit by weapons is ridiculous. Destiny is generally on par with W40k, maybe better since using The Light or The Dark is less random and doesn't trigger Dæmonic incursions.
There is lots of scifi which is so bad at depicting scale that they make the entire Galaxy look like a couple of closely grouped villages, usually due to lazy writing. For example the newer Star Wars movies reserve so little time for the actual "travel" parts of space travel that flying to the other side of the Galaxy feels like driving two blocks down the road to grab a coffee.
In terms of scale I always think of the manga "Blame!" as a counterexample. It is set in an insanely huge spherical megastructure which has been continuously expanded by robots over millenia. It apparently takes up the entire volume of the Solar System.
The protagonist spends most of the story walking around in those fascinating vistas of structures that are hundreds of km large and it's implied it takes decades for him to get anywhere. At one point he gets into an elevator that keeps moving for an entire month. It's implied that the story takes place over the course of thousands of years.
There is another part where he comes across a gigantic, empty, spherical void in the megastructure with a diameter of 140,000 km, which interestingly is almost exactly the diameter of Jupiter. 🤔
Insert that copy pasta of that absurdly long Starwars fanon star destroyer that had the crew devolve into factional savages ala Lord of the Flies because it took several days to get from bow to stern.
EDIT: holy crap this exploded overnight. For those looking for the source/meme, the user quertythreeeight posted an imgur link below, you can also Google it "SDSD Freudian Nightmare"
Don’t regular imperial ships have hereditary clans of the propulsion/weapons/power/shields departments? And there’s outcast stowaways and the bigger ones basically have free cities of them? Same concept. But yeah, here’s some portion of a named chapter of 1,000 marines that matters for some reason.
Absolutely do. Even simple frigates and cruisers are defined as having thousands of people in them, with individual clans for individual guns, engines, etc... they also tend to have somewhere between one third and half the ship are unpopulated and nobody knows what's in those sections... cus they haven't been needed for anything for millenia.
But also how big things are really depends on the writer at the time.
Some Gaunt's Ghosts books perfectly describe it, especially when Mkoll wonders through the belly of the frigate so much that he >!uses the knowledge so good he wins the blood games versus three space marines at once!<
They do. Considering a normal Imperial Cruiser is over three kilometres long and a Battleship past the 5km mark. And they are thick, so it’s like you took downtown Manhattan and stacked multiple of it on top of each other and made them fly in space.
Where most larger ScyFi ships are pretty thin and often have lots of empty space, Imperial Ships are extremely dense and massive. So while not the longest, they are still ridiculously large in regards to internal volume that consists of thousands upon thousands of tight hallways and rooms.
And they are usually old. Most at least hundreds of years, with many past the 1000. And some are many millennia old. Many of these ships have existed longer than multiple consecutive past civilisations on earth and had dozens, hundreds or even thousands of generations come and go. A fact that many people don’t consider is that humanity not unlike the Tau has their own sub cast of space ship bound people, just not as official and defined . Because the majority of ship personnel never leaves, is born and dies on the ship living out their whole lives there.
So yeah, the larger ships have at times small civilisations on them, very much separate from the normal operations on it. And many a ship has seen literal internal wars between them. A 40K Battleship is basically a small spacefaring nation.
'Relentless' is a pretty good (I think, haven't read it in years) standalone novel that shows the hierarchy of the lower classes on a Navy vessel. I wouldn't have minded a whole series, but it's also nice for something in 40k to be a one-and-done.
Kinda sounds like that one episode of Doctor Who but it was that the ship was circling a black hole nose first so a minute at the front was years in the back.
If you want something sort of similar, maybe look at the movie Pandorum. It's a movie that sort of has a similar issue theme. Also being light on going over it as the movie reveals itself over time a little (mostly in the first 25m or so, and at the end).
Don't want to watch it? Quick rundown of my thought process.
Quick setup, its a sleeper ship sent from earth to the only known habitable planet, thanks to Earth dying. MC wakes up and finds somethings gone wrong (this is a 'horror' movie of course it has), and that >!pale, feral humanoids roam the halls of the ship!<. He does his best to get to the reactor to restart it since its malfunctioning. Over the course of the movie, they learn two major things: >!the humanoids arent what caused the problem - they are the sleepers who woke up, and who have been changed thanks to a drug pumped into their system during stasis to help them adapt to the new planet. They adapted to the ship instead, which begs the question: how long have they been awake?!< and >!They already made it to the planet, they just crash landed in the ocean thanks to the antagonist going mad with Pandorum when the message of Earths demise came through.!<
Reminds me of "The Ship Moves," a story where the ship is 1AU long and captained by an awoken emperor. I can find references to it, but the original site is gone.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-imperium-is-the-ship-the-ship-moves-vs-all-other-galactic-empires-and-powers.305458/
if you mean 1d4chan, there's a basically identical fork here: [https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/The\_ship\_moves](https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/The_ship_moves)
The one of the last episodes of the 12th doctor is where there on a very long ship that is designed for whole generations too live on and it's gets stuck in a black worm, so that further down you go the ship, slower time is. So hours on top deck, decades happen below.
So much cybermen reform at every age
The way I like to rationalise it is that most of the lore we read about warhammer is written from the Imperial POV, and I can easily believe that the administratum misplaces the occasional zero or three from its numbers from time to time.
“What do you mean by this comma!? It was a period when I placed it!!
Do you know the billions of lives you have condemned?!!
Oh look, it’s break time. Come on let’s have some recaf. I hear this is a new shipment.”
But the numbers of the Space battles are pretty "realistic" and more or less inspired by actual naval warfare.
The line ships are gigantic vessels that not only take immense resources to produce but also thousands of sailors.
In 40k Space scrap yards are essential (where the hulks found go back to the HH and even the Dark Age of Technology) to maintain the fleets.
The small numbers are for the big warships.
Threre is an entire armada of cargo haulers, escort ships, cruisers and whatever ship class they had lying around that they somehow fit into the command structure.
And even the small ones are insane in size - you could fit an entire chapter Space Marines and support staff into one, assuming they are light on vehicles.
I swear I've seen the same two comment over and over in different post.
The first comment talks about Imperium Frigates that could devastate a planet
The second comment talks about Germany approach to Shipbuilding, they refers Destroyer as Heavy Frigates.
I feel like the curious fact about the german navy has become a meme that started over in the noncredible sub, which has a considerable amount of overlap with grimdank.
Here we are, a Wild NCDer, This is wild ladies and gentlemen as we carefully approach this specimen. And now we utter the phrase of a friendly. *Inhales* VARK VARK VARK VARK
BLOODY AIR FORCE NERDS WHO CARES ABOUT PLANES ANYWAYS?! OH GIVE ME A DRONE BUT REMOVE THE "UNMANNED" PART THAT MAKES IT ACTUALLY COST EFFICIENT, I AM SURE THAT WILL IMPROVE THINGS! IF YOU WANT TO BE THAT NONCREDIBLE AT LEAST GO THE FULL WAY AND STRAP FLAK CANNONS TO A ZEPPELIN!
The Venn diagram of r/grimdank and r/NonCredibleDefense is an oval at best. If someone mentions the Imperium’s overgunned frigates the odds someone else remembers and mentions Germany’s 7200 ton frigates is very good.
Ok but the fomorians (the ships on the left) are absolutely massive as well. The smaller ships you see flying around them are approximately 4 kilometers long
I know no one asked, but the Speranza Ark Mechanicus was conservatively estimated to be 130km-150km and had fleet hangars and factories that could BUILD other ships.
Other sources claim it was the size of a continent.
It's launch destroyed the planet it was found on.
Oh it gets worse.
It was run by an AI from the "Dark age of Technology" which is reported to have universe spanning wars, including a war through time.
In the text the Speranza starred in >!It used a weapon that fired backwards through TIME to hit a target where it USED to be, the weapon was a miniature black hole cannon. The ships AI knew it had to use this weapon because the enemy ship had a psychic who could anticipate the future, and it calculated a kill shot despite her power.!<
Edit: >!I was wrong, it was two different weapons, a black hole cannon, which initially missed, the AI got angry, and rewound the shot using a time device to make it hit!<
It depends, different Primarchs need different things of their ships. The Khan has that thing most likely be 95% engines. Alpharius wants it just small enough so it could pose as a different type of vessel. Corvus also wants it smaller, but that's so the stealth tech works better and takes less energy.
And then there's people like Dorn who look at the potential of a giant wall in space and go like "not enough".
Actually Alpharius' 2 Glorina class ships weren't smaller than normal, he had a much crazier plan for them. Glorina classes all follow the same rough layout, customized to the Primarchs liking but with the same basic construction. He disliked the idea that an enemy might be familiar with the layout of his ship (just in case he gets boarded) so he had the insides of the ships completely gutted and re-arranged (possibly multiple times?) So that they would be utterly incomprehensible to even those who are familiar with Glorina class ships.
A complete madhouse fun maze in there designed to baffle boarding actions. Probably has a million dead-ends and trap doors and fake walls just to mess with people.
>And even the small ones are insane in size - you could fit an entire chapter Space Marines and support staff into one, assuming they are light on vehicles.
It's brought up in at least one novel that a warship Captain has more armed men at his direct command than pretty much anyone else in the Imperium.
During the battle of Trafalgar, the biggest see battle during the Coalition wars both sides had only around 30 line ships.
Regarding space battles, the numbers in 40k make much more sense than those derpy "1000000 ships on each side" sci-fi scenarios.
Sadly if you read the BFG material that outlines this source that number includes escorts. Though, in saying that, 50-75 ships is the average for segmentum defence fleets.
Grineer are literally a people of industry. As in they are themselves industrial products made for scale and quantity.
Imperial tech is the same at the small scale, but at the largest/more complicate scale it's absurdly artisanal. They can barely make their biggest vessels anymore, certainly not serially. The Indomitus Crusade has only partially reversed that trend, and it's not clear it can be sustained without the unique genius of Cawl.
Ngl I’d genuinely be tempted to play a Warframe miniature wargame if DE decided to make one for shits and giggles - could honestly be kinda fun painting your own little custom regiment of Corpus corporate marines or whatever.
There was a guy about 8 years ago that made a pretty comprehensive TTRPG in the Warframe setting, sans warframes.
[Here's the post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/s/bwyntVE3st) The rules are fleshed out (The rulebook is 500 pages) and it's pretty in depth with its own lore, released before many of the quests that would flesh out Warframe's canon lore. An interesting read to say the least.
It doesn't help that readers don't either.
8 million cubic light years is *vast*, but it's also a cube 200 ly on a side. The Milky Way is around 8 *trillion* cubic light years, so that 8 million cubic light year box? 1 *millionth* of the galaxy. If you can travel 100 ly in a few weeks, or even a couple months, that's a *lot* of ships for that volume. And you'll have *hundreds of thousands* of fleets the same size.
Of course. Most people don't. I know just enough that I can laugh at obvious silly numbers like this episode of Star Trek where the Romulans tried to take over a planet with 2000 soldiers.
I mean, given that ST often has colonies get evacuated by a ship that can house \~1000 crew, those colonies are, at most, a few hundred people. So 2000 soldiers could 100% take a Star Trek colony.
Oh it gets better, the Romulans were transporting those soldiers to Vulkan from the Neutral Zone at a speed between Warp 1-2, so it would take them decades to actually get there.
> All I know is that everyone is bad at numbers because sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.
7200 Green Lanterns are suppose to patrol the entire universe. Using 100 billion galaxies as a safe lower limit for number of galaxies that puts 13 million galaxies per Green Lantern.
The warthog railgun in halo purportedly launches its projectiles at speeds much higher then its escape velocity on earth. It launches its projectile so fast it could be shot at sea level and hit a plane at cruising height in less then a second without leading the shot. If we take this at face value, we must also accept that the UNSC are incredibly stupid, because they had access to rail guns that powerful, but still gave their super soldiers 7.62 rifles
they did use the railguns. The only weapons they had that worked against Covenant ships were MAC cannons, which were just giant railguns. They just budget cut and didn't outfit rank and file soldiers with these weapons as they didn't have the funding for it. After all, it's better to invest in installing more railguns on ships and shoot the covenant in space than allowing them to land and trying to fight them on the ground while they have air and space superiority
I think making the fleets too numerous would actually detract from the drama of these massive warships. Almost like it becomes more of a statistic. Especially in 40k, we like the idea of these Warships being huge and ancient. They are just like characters really, and all have sick names and crews of thousands or tens of thousands.
I do like the opposite happening in other settings, like in the 3 body problem. Space opera settings really sleep on the power of actual science.
Who would win?
* 1000 stellar class warships
* >!1 pretty little teardrop!<
"nice solar system, I bet it would look better in 2d"
Also most imperial battlefleet are comically huge. Battlefleet gothic for example contained like a thousand battleships and nearly a million escorts, we just hear about the big ships.
Also imperial escort ships would be stupid huge grand cruisers in any other setting.
>>!one pretty little teardrop!<
YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW GOOD LUO JI WAS
https://preview.redd.it/k1jnwj2k71ad1.jpeg?width=508&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5ae97c0b302cd57a7497c6aaf0df24fe05421fa2
Actually it’s kinda funny now that I think about. The Imperium is what happens when “basic research” stops lol. Everything is just utilization of existing theory 🤭 except warp based technology that is
They’re flying space stations more than space ships. These things can withstand the internal fire from BOLTERS and psychic explosions like it was Tuesday.
The Imperium of Man in fact, does not have the resources of the entire galaxy and that "8 million cubic light years" of space has large chunks which are unexplored, lost to warp storms or left alone for reasons you wish is just because they are not worthwhile. Almost all books about space travel or naval combat in 40k make it clear that the Imperium is thinly spread across the galaxy and even then, the Imperial Navy is always low on numbers to properly control it.
There are a lot of cases of 40k authors not understanding scale but this ain't it. As a matter of fact, Battlefleet Gothic might be one of the better scaled portions of the universe.
I mean, 8 million cubic lightyears is literally 200 lightyears on a side. That's *tiny* for our galaxy. It's 100,000 light years wide. The galaxy is like 8 *trillion* cubic light years. 8 million light years is literally *one millionth* of the galaxy.
That implies, if we maintain that average, *tens of millions* of ships in the Imperium of Man.
I mean. It's not that unreasonable, all things considered. Within 100 ly of the Earth, there are like 1000+ stars. What, a few dozen are habitable within this framework? And you think that they'd make *more* ships than this?
Why?
Say, for the sake of argument, within your hypothetical sub sector, mean travel time is 1 day per light year of travel, which is quite slow for the galaxy in 40k--Guilliman made thousands per day through a warp storm holding him back in 30k. That means that any system is \~3 months away from a centrally located fleet.
Your orbital defenses, PDF, and other local defenses only really need to hold out for 100 days or so before help arrives. That's pretty good.
But! We've got \~60 capital ships, plus maybe 200 escorts. We can split *those* up into patrols of like 5 capital and 10 escorts, and have, say, 10 of them roaming around between stations, and the remainder as reserve. That would mean that, in practical terms, you could have 15 warships within a system within a couple weeks, and another 30+ within a couple months, and more constantly coming in as needed. Given the number of systems you said were present, at any given time, more than *half* would have a fleet on station, or en route, at any given moment.
Compare to the *real world* right now. The US has *five* carrier groups across the entire ocean. Five! Right now, moving about. That's to cover the entire planet. That's an *absurdly large* number, by the way. And they can respond to any crisis in the *world* within a few days for one, a couple weeks will bring another. We can bring more as necessary. And there are hundreds of ports we stop at.
A million cubic light years is a lot smaller than you think.
>That implies, if we maintain that average, tens of millions of ships in the Imperium of Man.
No it doesn't.
Even the Gothic sector with 84 worlds have "hundreds" of warships. That comes to around ~six million warships in the mid end.
If we take the BFG's 50-75 warships per sector, then we get around ~744,000 warships.
This is also backed by the fact that each sector is a 200ly cube and the imperium has eight million cubic light years, it comes out to ~2.5 million warships assuming that all of that space is controlled by the IOM and it does not have any inaccessible zones.
The Galaxy is big but most of the outer rim is empty space. It's also repeatedly stated that the Imperium has several inaccessible zones and is very porous.
neither, it is whatever bests aids the storytelling.
but personally I’d prefer the left to the right, the appeal for me specifically is the idea that 40k is so massive a scale that there should be no named characters or noteworthy individuals except mythological entities and god-like beings. that’s not what is now, but I still like it conceptually and am glad the people who do enjoy it get what they want.
Reminds me of a bit at the end of the first Culture book talking about the scale of the war you glimpse in it.
>**Statistics**
>Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) – 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals – 14,334; planets and major moons – 53; Rings – 1; Spheres – 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) – 6.
>**Historical perspective**
>A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder civilisations rate the Idiran–Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.
Small numbers are actually fine. Modern navies use few capital ships cause they expensive as hell. Return of investment is quite questionable. If we remember navies of ww1. They were trying to keep it docked in shipyards, because they built as many as they could and loss even of 1 ship was near catastrophe.
You know that we talk about a Galaxy spanning empire?
In total the Imperium has in total around 250.000 war ships, bigger than 1km.
Now we take a look on the empire from star wars. By translating the size from wh40k to star wars ships (power to universe ratio), we see that the empire had 25.000 Star destroyer alone and around a millions of corvets and destroyers.
While the Imperium has around 54 war ships per sector, the empire has 1.600 smaller warships (corvets, carriers and destroyers) and 24 Star destroyers, on avarage, per sector, wich are simular sized to the sectors of the Imperium.
While you have a point with modern navis are much smaller due to expence, we also have to consider that sectors in warhammer consist of 7 million cubic light years. Thus a sector navy of the size of the Us Navy (minus smaller boats) would be reasonable, like around 105 ships plus fighters. Considering that, a "smaller" navy by warhammer standarts should be realisticly around 105 ships, to prevent a lot of invasions
GW simply cant comprehend numbers. In space at least. On ground they usaly write down pretty high numbers, wich make sence also in the setting itself. The Imperium should had at least be given twice of what they have now to make sence.
Well, but what could be said in the end is that, due to the technological "tradionalism", the Imperium simply cant crank out cheaper, less survivable war ships like the empire did in star wars.
Thats my opinion at least.
Do we have a rock solid number on the size of the Imperial Navy? One of WH40K's strongest world building factors (imho) is that there is a degree of uncertainty with numbers. Like the chief admiral of the imperial navy doesn't know exactly, he could probably find out and get a relatively high precision estimate, but that would take a couple of terran years at least
No. Neither for the Galactic Empire. At least, we didn't. Both have attestations of sizes that range from ridiculously tiny to absurdly large in different sources. Locking down something that makes sense is a nightmare. I did a deep dive years ago, compiled a bunch of numbers, and figured the midway point of each seemed pretty reasonable and used those. Couldn't for the life of me tell you what I found that to be at the time though.
The Imperium has never been in full strength and controlling the entire galaxy in the 41st, if you think the entire navy is understrength and only stationed in key areas of a sector, the number is more believable. The Empire in Star Wars were at the peak of its strength at the start of the rebellion, firmly in control of 99% of the Galaxy.
Galactic Empire never controlled 99% of the Galaxy, no empire of state ever did. Galactic Empire was controlling previously Republic space and expanded a bit from it, which is around 30-40% of the Galaxy. There were, naturally, many other galactic states, most notably Hutt Space, although they did tend to play along to a degree depending on the power of the state - it may be too costly and risky for Palpatine to start a war with such state, as it would be likely that these states band together against the Empire, but if they outright resisted and defy it, Palpatine absolutely would do it. There are also massive Unknown regions and satellite galaxies and star cluster. It should be noted, however, that SW Galaxy is much bigger than Milky Way.
It’s much about how the universe works.
40k has FTL yes, but even then it can take a long ass time to travel.
I’ve been finally reading the Eisenhorn trilogy, and they make travels wishing the sector that take up to 30 something weeks.
And also warp travel can be traced/tracked. You can calculate when and where ships will end up (save a warp storm and if you are away of the great rift now)
So having a small number of capital ships spread out with a lot of support makes total sense.
Also the scale, those ships are some of the largest ones around. They mostly deal with ships quite smaller.
When it’s something like an Craftworld of a hive fleet. They do their best to get the most amount of ships to converge.
Besides, one of those can carry a planet cracker by themselves. Although Exterminatus are mostly done with several small ships, there are instances of single ship ones.
It also makes sense in the way of: most of these ships are ancient, making new ones might ass well take centuries, which is an appropriate time frame. Even in 40k they are rare.
given the nature of warhammer universe, it would probably be foolish to invest large amount of resources into battle ships and focus on static defence lines.
unpredictability in the warp means reinforcements when needed are unreliable but static defence are always available.
while massive amounts of warships would prob be not a good idea, a massive civil fleet of resources and materials transport is definitely a good idea. same reason as before, resources are mandatory but unreliability in the warp means u have to assume some will not get thru and u will need to stock pile.
while u could argue that having a massive fleet solves fhe unreliability issue, you also need people to be om the ships and supply with resources that draw away from a civil population that produces it.
its similar to the idea of modern warfare. if u need to hold a point, but reinforcements are not likely to arrive on time, u bolster the static defence lines
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Navis_Imperialis#Imperial_Navy_Organisation
> The Imperium is divided into five fleet zones known as the Segmentae Majoris. Every starship of the Imperial Navy is assigned to one of these Segmentae, and falls under the command of the respective Lord High Admiral
>Each Segmentum is divided into sectors, regions of space that are generally cube-shaped and contain 8 million cubic light years of space. These Sectors contain multiple sub-sectors, collections of star systems no more than 20 light years in radius. The Imperial Navy starships of each Segmentum are divided amongst the sectors into further groups called Battlefleets.
>Each Sector Battlefleet is assigned a number of Cruisers and Battleships, usually between 50 and 75 vessels. Each Sector Battlefleet is also assigned multiple squadrons of Escort starships, and is also in command of a large number of transports, messenger craft, orbital defences, space platforms and system patrol vessels.
So FYI a single fleet has ~60 large ships (and hundreds/thousands of escorts), but there are dozens or hundreds of fleets. The Imperial Navy is enormous.
If you look at the Battlefleet Gothic source of the 50 - 75 number rather than just looking at the fandom wiki, it includes the smaller warships, not just the big ones. Though "long-range patrol craft" isn't included in the number, but those aren't frigates and destroyers.
> Each battlefleet normally consists of between 50 and 75 warships of varying size, although in some sectors this will be more or less, depending on the importance of the sector and the number of enemies it must contend with. As well as these destroyers, frigates, cruisers and battleships, a battlefleet also has access to countless smaller vessels such as transports, shuttles, messenger craft and long-range patrol craft.
At first I thought you were referring to the idea that the entire fleet of 50-75 ships' volume covered a 7 million cubic lightyear area of space and I thought "Yeah that sounds right for Games Workshop's measurement criteria."
Surely, it's 50-75 *battleships*. Look at a real fleets battle groups. They'll have a carrier (or battleships when those were still useful) and it's got some 10 or 20 other ships protecting it.
Then you also have task forces which could be for simple patrols. There's some pirates raiding a moon somewhere. You don't need a battle group for that. A frigate can deal with that shit.
Finally, because space is *so* huge and FTL exists, blockades are impossible. You can't possibly cover the area needed, and if you could, the enemy can just warp-jump past you. This means strategic points such as planets, moons, space stations and other places that is relatively stationary are what you'll focus on defending which is *a lot* less area to cover than the vast space between those poins.
Then there is the halo universe which has a terminal in halo 2 that describes a battle between 2 ai (one corrupted and one not) utilizing the fleet of a type 3 (maybe 4?) civilization called the forerunners. The scale described is beyond comprehension and gets even more wild when all the organic crew of said ai fleets are killed by a galactic super weapon as the ai stop limiting their actions due to the physical strain it would have had on the crew. Pretty much how I imagine dark age of technology humanity though probably even beyond that.
Mendicant and Offensive Bias are who you're talking about
The battle itself is the Battle of the Maginot Sphere, the last battle of the Forerunner-Flood War, where Offensive was delaying the combined AI-Flood fleet so the Halos could be activated and wipe out all life in the galaxy to starve the Flood
the imperium is far too big to be out or even low on resources
the only caveat i can see is that FTL travel is a fuckfest but individual systems should have enough stuff in em to make a couple hundred gloriana class ships
In Halo lore, the Forerunners are described as waging wars with fleets made of millions of ships. Some "minor" space battles only see standoffs between thousands of ships. But that's only logical when your specie has a galaxy-sized empire with a solid industrial base.
Not to go full 20 Emperors and 200 Primarchs, but ground related stuff still tends to be too small. IIRC, at least one of the major conflicts on Armageddon (the poster child for constant and brutal warfare) had fewer casualties than a single front of WW1.
Let's look at it using modern industrial scale. Global automotive production is about 10 million vehicles annually. Average weight of a car is 4094 lb. So every year about 40,000 million pounds of automobiles are manufactured. If the global automotive industry was dedicated to making battleships we could produce 20 million tons annually. The estimated size of a 40k battleship is 9.5 billion tons. So 9.5 / 0.02 = 475 years. Obviously a forge world would have more industrial potential than our current society, but forge worlds also produce other equipment and have inefficiencies of their own so it wouldn't be too much greater. So if we double the production an earth sized forge world would make a battleships every 237.5 years.So even if there are 100 forge worlds making battleships, that's only one new ship every 2 years.
id imagine ud also lose production time to repairing and maintaining previously built ships, defending urself from constant attack from heretics and xenos and civilian uprisings, having to track down someone who understands a 10 000+ year old piece of equipment enough to repair it properly.
It's because we all know the British can't do math
Plus I don't know how big those ships are but if the solar system has a couple of earth-like planets it's theoretically possible provided their willing to literally gut the Earth's core or the equivalent
40K does have lots of number issues but for fleet sizes I think it's actually pretty reasonable because ships are massively expensive to upkeep and maintain especially with how far technology has fallen they aren't gonna pump out ships
Yeah 40k is weird af with its numbers. You have the imperium throwing a ton of resources that they literally cannot replenish at some battles and then like three spacehulks at a planetary uprising
The Imperium probably has 10000s of frigates, escorts, destroyers etc, not to mention the monitors that defend most systems
And as we saw in Rogue Trader, a sword class frigate can be more than enough to fuck shit up in many cases. Granted, that particular Sword Class was up-gunned and up armored like crazy
Don't forget the Imperiums R&D is soo good that sometimes it takes several decades if not hundreds of years to build a larger vessel.
Compare that to a single dry dock on Kuat shitting out an Imperial Star Destroyer every few months - and the yave thousands of dockyards.
Unrelated topic but something occurred to me on my last re-read of Fall of Reach:
At one point in the novel it is described how "leftover" plasma torpedoes enter a cloud of used-to-be ships and disappates into the cloud of metal.
This happens 20-years into the war, so it has ***certainly*** been witnessed before.
And apparently not one single person has ever heard of interceptor missiles, and just packed tons of shrapnel into warhead to form those clouds on demand.
The UNSC did not lose because of a tech disadvantage. They lost because of alarming incompetance.
Warhammer ships are huge tho, they are kilometers long. If an old battleship like Yamato has a complement of more than 3,000, with a length of 263 meters. I can see how the numbers can go down.
Unless you're a significant member of Adeptus Administratum, Navis Imperialis or Adeptus Mechanicus you have no idea of, how many spaceships the Imperium of Mankind possess.
Maybe 50-75 is the correct number within a single system. But considering the vast galaxy, endless transports, exploration fleets, reclamator fleets etc., while being an increasingly scarce resource, the Imperium probably have millions of spaceships.
These numbers are for the cruisers and battleships in a sector fleet. It doesn't really count the escorts or the logistic ships. [The source](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Navis_Imperialis#:~:text=Imperial%20Battlefeets,-An%20Imperial%20Battlefleet&text=Each%20Sector%20Battlefleet%20is%20assigned,between%2050%20and%2075%20vessels.) I think op pulled this from.
That might be among the most sensible number in 40k. For starters, 8M cubic light years comes down to a cube 2k light years on each side (for context the milky way is about 7.85 TRILLION cubic light years in volume) so the Imperium (a million worlds) would only have a couple of inhabited planets per sector, and still it has 80 battleships that dwarf a SW star destroyer with thousands more smaller vessels which are still kilometers long
I don't remember when I read it, but someone put forward a nice "rule" for numbers in warhammer. When talking about physical sizes, subtract two 0s, when talking about numerical sizes, add two 0s, and I think that works very well
I still love the fact that Warframe has all the space opera bullshit you could want, including absolutely fuckoff huge space battles, and it's still almost entirely constrained to a single solar system. As much as I love the galaxy-spanning adventures you see in settings like 40k and whatnot, settings that do that sort of thing in a single star system do a great job of reminding the viewer just how much *space* is in space, y'know?
Space truly is massive... like explaining just how big Jupiter is compared to earth, and the same for saturn... Then explaining that at its furthest point from earth in it's orbit. There is enough space between the earth and the moon to fit every other planet in the solar system, side by side... with room to spare.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
I was waiting for a Hitchhiker's reference
Reminds me of the first few pages of Dark Imperium. How the human mind is not made to comprehend how large the galaxy actually is
TIL
That can't be right... * Earth to moon is 384,400km * Mercury - 2440 * Venus - 6052 * Mars - 3390 * Jupiter - 69911 * Saturn - 58232 * Uranus - 25362 * Neptune - 24622 Adds up to 190,009km (if I haven't fatfingered anything) - ~~so you could fit~~ *~~two~~* ~~of every other planet in there, and still throw a Pluto in there.~~ EDIT: nope, check replies for why I'm an idiot
I missed a whole turn in Mario Party processing this comment.
Well, if you play Mario Party anything like I do, I probably did you a favour. We all know that those pictures of the solar system aren't to scale, but the only way to have them be to scale would be to have all the planets be practically invisible! The only accurate distance scale image I found still had to amplify the size of planets x1000! https://preview.redd.it/6zxrr48au2ad1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=24393c712db72d0244dc2ca182423dbee943179c
Confirming I indeed lost at Mario Party
Psssst, you used the radius of the planets, not the diameter.
Feth!
Tanith first and only?
Those are the radii of the planets, not the diameters. The actual sum is 380,018 km, which fits almost perfectly.
Damn you right, I googled "solar system planet diameters" and clicked the Nasa link, but didn't check the actual scales
Like some people said, you can fit the entire story of the Star Wars trilogy into a single star system. If you think about it, the expanse series has a lot of places and all of them are inside the solar system.
Yeah it's wildly underestimated by GW writers. Just the amount of material around Jupiter or Saturn would be enough to build the entire Imperial navy dozens of times over
Even then it still frankly wastes so much of its space and population lol
Honestly yeah - 99% of the interesting shit in Warframe happens completely offscreen, and we’re lucky if it gets anything more than a few cursory mentions in some obscure crafting material flavor texts.
Definition of "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle." I used to be really into that game, til I realized there's never really more than a 6-month plan regarding anything of substance, especially story. The game is still fun to come back to once in a while, but it's a damn shame that they hyped up the New War for years, only to release a quest that amounted to a few gameplay demos, a few cutscenes, and like 1 or two simple missions *after the entire war happened off-screen*. It really did look like they fapped around for two years and then made the quest in a matter of months.
I mean, two (three) of the factions are practically endless in number: * The grineer are former clone slave labor, now a clone army being produced by the literal millions all the time. * The sentients are self-replicating robots designed to terraform the Tau system, who said "fuck that" and went home to wage war on their creators. * The >!Murmur!< are an >!eldritch and abominable!< army of >!faceless, uncaring void creatures!< that are spewing forth from >!a void crack in realspace in Albrecht Entrati's laboratory.!< They are potentially endless in nature, and unrelenting. I am *Not* counting the Infested, the Corpus, or the Corrupted in this, as the Infested and Corrupted require members of the other factions to add to their numbers, and the Corpus are just normal people. Without the Tenno culling their numbers, they could overrun the solar system quite fast.
The Corpus employ the use of a massive amount of cloned debt slave cultists and robotics (Although Granum’s faction leans less on the cloning and more on robotics)
There's nothing in the fluff that suggests the Corpus are using clones. Robots like bursa, moa and ospreys, sure, but Prodman #163,412 was a real dude with a family that you mercilessly ground into a chunky meat smoothie on your last outing. You monster.
Parvos Granum during the current Jade Shadows event specifically says approximately that the Corposium used robotics instead of clones, and they will do so again under his leadership. This implies to me that Nef Anyo’s Board and Frohd Bek’s Board likely did use clones. We still absolutely kill loads of people though. Like that one time we slaughtered over 7 million Corpus in about 6 hours on V Prime.
There is a mention in one of the Cephalon fragments or a codex entry for the Corpus crewman, can't remember which, that says they are basically purpose grown. So while people like the solaris are just run of the mill citizens that are born relatively normally, probably, the crewmen we fight were purpose grown for their task. Not quite cloning, as I bet they do either gene modification or combining of 2 prime samples to make them, but still not naturally born people. Still more expensive than robotics, but better for ensuring the quality and loyalty of the average crewman than just taking them from the population.
>Warframe has all the space opera bullshit you could want Unironically the best part of the setting. Rule of Cool over all things. Whatever the devs think will be awesome - in it goes. Man portable laser cannons and swords ? Cool, do it. Antigrav surfboard ? Awesome, add it. Space battles ? Nice, add. Primitive regressed culture on planet literally eating the remnants of the living structures made by a fallen civilization ? Cool aesthetics, add.
I still think the Solaris are one of the coolest cyborg concepts I've ever seen. That they were presented alongside one of Warframe's [catchiest songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPTCq3LiZSE) certainly helps, but rugged, blue-collar cyborgs who've all replaced their heads with machinery is a really strong visual concept on its own.
My problem with it is you sell off your body parts and the first fucking part you sell off is your entire head and face? Like cmon. Put those kidneys up to baro kiteer first.
Spoilers, if playing Warframe do not click: >!They still have their heads, but keep them in their chest compartments.!<
>!The Solaris children are also decapitated, with their necks replaced by flimsy pieces of metal.!<
Correct, this is a HUGE spoiler if you're not max rank with the Fortuna people yet. Do not click, this is not a drill.
I've never thought about this before, but now I'm so impressed.
That's one of the reasons I love The Expanse so much. Despite it being a Sci Fi setting, everything still takes place in Sol. A spoilery addon thought to that >!Even after they discover what the protomolecule was there for and they discover ring space/The Slow Zone, since every other system is directly connected to ring space it doesnt really feel too far away, keeping that sense of closeness somewhat. Truly the only times it didnt feel that way was when the science crew was studying the blackhole and other protomolecule planets in like.. book 8? and partially during the plot of book 4 dealing with the rogue settlement, and there only thanks to them being trapped planetside for a bit.!<
The Rogue Trader game does a fantastic job of showing both. Act 1 is in one system then they open warp travel to you
The Solar System is truly MASSIVE, If we get to the Oort Cloud we could live forever in The System because there is Just so much Matter there. Warframe has Gascitys Mining the Outer Giants, entire Continents of Underwater facilitys in The Frozen Moons, huge Mining plataforns in The Asteroid Belts AND KEEP IN MIND ALL OF THAT IN AN ALREADY RESOURCE DEPRIVED SYSTEM
Same vein as Destiny I’d say. And yet somehow both Warframe and Destiny have got shit that would trump the Imperium of Man. There, I said it.
Pyramid ships might be able to trump a lot of W40k stuff. Just being able to say "no" to being hit by weapons is ridiculous. Destiny is generally on par with W40k, maybe better since using The Light or The Dark is less random and doesn't trigger Dæmonic incursions.
There is lots of scifi which is so bad at depicting scale that they make the entire Galaxy look like a couple of closely grouped villages, usually due to lazy writing. For example the newer Star Wars movies reserve so little time for the actual "travel" parts of space travel that flying to the other side of the Galaxy feels like driving two blocks down the road to grab a coffee. In terms of scale I always think of the manga "Blame!" as a counterexample. It is set in an insanely huge spherical megastructure which has been continuously expanded by robots over millenia. It apparently takes up the entire volume of the Solar System. The protagonist spends most of the story walking around in those fascinating vistas of structures that are hundreds of km large and it's implied it takes decades for him to get anywhere. At one point he gets into an elevator that keeps moving for an entire month. It's implied that the story takes place over the course of thousands of years. There is another part where he comes across a gigantic, empty, spherical void in the megastructure with a diameter of 140,000 km, which interestingly is almost exactly the diameter of Jupiter. 🤔
I created a 50KM long ship with millions of soldiers inside and I realized that ship holds more people than some wars in 40K
Insert that copy pasta of that absurdly long Starwars fanon star destroyer that had the crew devolve into factional savages ala Lord of the Flies because it took several days to get from bow to stern. EDIT: holy crap this exploded overnight. For those looking for the source/meme, the user quertythreeeight posted an imgur link below, you can also Google it "SDSD Freudian Nightmare"
Don’t regular imperial ships have hereditary clans of the propulsion/weapons/power/shields departments? And there’s outcast stowaways and the bigger ones basically have free cities of them? Same concept. But yeah, here’s some portion of a named chapter of 1,000 marines that matters for some reason.
Absolutely do. Even simple frigates and cruisers are defined as having thousands of people in them, with individual clans for individual guns, engines, etc... they also tend to have somewhere between one third and half the ship are unpopulated and nobody knows what's in those sections... cus they haven't been needed for anything for millenia. But also how big things are really depends on the writer at the time.
Some Gaunt's Ghosts books perfectly describe it, especially when Mkoll wonders through the belly of the frigate so much that he >!uses the knowledge so good he wins the blood games versus three space marines at once!<
They do. Considering a normal Imperial Cruiser is over three kilometres long and a Battleship past the 5km mark. And they are thick, so it’s like you took downtown Manhattan and stacked multiple of it on top of each other and made them fly in space. Where most larger ScyFi ships are pretty thin and often have lots of empty space, Imperial Ships are extremely dense and massive. So while not the longest, they are still ridiculously large in regards to internal volume that consists of thousands upon thousands of tight hallways and rooms. And they are usually old. Most at least hundreds of years, with many past the 1000. And some are many millennia old. Many of these ships have existed longer than multiple consecutive past civilisations on earth and had dozens, hundreds or even thousands of generations come and go. A fact that many people don’t consider is that humanity not unlike the Tau has their own sub cast of space ship bound people, just not as official and defined . Because the majority of ship personnel never leaves, is born and dies on the ship living out their whole lives there. So yeah, the larger ships have at times small civilisations on them, very much separate from the normal operations on it. And many a ship has seen literal internal wars between them. A 40K Battleship is basically a small spacefaring nation.
'Relentless' is a pretty good (I think, haven't read it in years) standalone novel that shows the hierarchy of the lower classes on a Navy vessel. I wouldn't have minded a whole series, but it's also nice for something in 40k to be a one-and-done.
[SDSD Freudian Nightmare!](https://i.imgur.com/7peN2zs.jpeg)
I hate the web version of imgur event more than the reddit one…
I had not seen this and it is magnificent
That was a fun read
that actually sounds like a banger book idea
"We break for nobody"
Kinda sounds like that one episode of Doctor Who but it was that the ship was circling a black hole nose first so a minute at the front was years in the back.
No one tell those guys about the obscure, little known Star Wars lore about a moon sized battlestation.
If you want something sort of similar, maybe look at the movie Pandorum. It's a movie that sort of has a similar issue theme. Also being light on going over it as the movie reveals itself over time a little (mostly in the first 25m or so, and at the end). Don't want to watch it? Quick rundown of my thought process. Quick setup, its a sleeper ship sent from earth to the only known habitable planet, thanks to Earth dying. MC wakes up and finds somethings gone wrong (this is a 'horror' movie of course it has), and that >!pale, feral humanoids roam the halls of the ship!<. He does his best to get to the reactor to restart it since its malfunctioning. Over the course of the movie, they learn two major things: >!the humanoids arent what caused the problem - they are the sleepers who woke up, and who have been changed thanks to a drug pumped into their system during stasis to help them adapt to the new planet. They adapted to the ship instead, which begs the question: how long have they been awake?!< and >!They already made it to the planet, they just crash landed in the ocean thanks to the antagonist going mad with Pandorum when the message of Earths demise came through.!<
I just want to ask how long is it? (I fear)
250 km, someone posted it below "SDSD Freudian Nightmare"
Reminds me of "The Ship Moves," a story where the ship is 1AU long and captained by an awoken emperor. I can find references to it, but the original site is gone. https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-imperium-is-the-ship-the-ship-moves-vs-all-other-galactic-empires-and-powers.305458/
if you mean 1d4chan, there's a basically identical fork here: [https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/The\_ship\_moves](https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/The_ship_moves)
I was looking for any coherent site, similar to 1d4chan. I love you my guy! Thanks for enlightening me!
Yeah it's basically the modern iteration of it but without some of the more questionable content.
That's the one, thank you.
The one of the last episodes of the 12th doctor is where there on a very long ship that is designed for whole generations too live on and it's gets stuck in a black worm, so that further down you go the ship, slower time is. So hours on top deck, decades happen below. So much cybermen reform at every age
*sips* they don't make fannon like they used to
Just don't try and keep track of numbers in 40k. Accept the scale for the individual story because you will go mad otherwise.
The way I like to rationalise it is that most of the lore we read about warhammer is written from the Imperial POV, and I can easily believe that the administratum misplaces the occasional zero or three from its numbers from time to time.
Once misplaced, a system that was a home to billions of citizens due to a rounding error.
“What do you mean by this comma!? It was a period when I placed it!! Do you know the billions of lives you have condemned?!! Oh look, it’s break time. Come on let’s have some recaf. I hear this is a new shipment.”
So that's how the guardsman planet was created.
But the numbers of the Space battles are pretty "realistic" and more or less inspired by actual naval warfare. The line ships are gigantic vessels that not only take immense resources to produce but also thousands of sailors. In 40k Space scrap yards are essential (where the hulks found go back to the HH and even the Dark Age of Technology) to maintain the fleets.
But the ship numbers are incredibly inconsistent across stories is my point.
The small numbers are for the big warships. Threre is an entire armada of cargo haulers, escort ships, cruisers and whatever ship class they had lying around that they somehow fit into the command structure. And even the small ones are insane in size - you could fit an entire chapter Space Marines and support staff into one, assuming they are light on vehicles.
And frigates. The Imperium positively shits frigates that can devastate a planet like ours all by itself.
Ah I see the German approach to shipbuilding. What? Destroyers? We don't do these. Here have another "Heavy Frigate".
I swear I've seen the same two comment over and over in different post. The first comment talks about Imperium Frigates that could devastate a planet The second comment talks about Germany approach to Shipbuilding, they refers Destroyer as Heavy Frigates.
I feel like the curious fact about the german navy has become a meme that started over in the noncredible sub, which has a considerable amount of overlap with grimdank.
Here we are, a Wild NCDer, This is wild ladies and gentlemen as we carefully approach this specimen. And now we utter the phrase of a friendly. *Inhales* VARK VARK VARK VARK
BLOODY AIR FORCE NERDS WHO CARES ABOUT PLANES ANYWAYS?! OH GIVE ME A DRONE BUT REMOVE THE "UNMANNED" PART THAT MAKES IT ACTUALLY COST EFFICIENT, I AM SURE THAT WILL IMPROVE THINGS! IF YOU WANT TO BE THAT NONCREDIBLE AT LEAST GO THE FULL WAY AND STRAP FLAK CANNONS TO A ZEPPELIN!
Oh Zog we disturb it and is on a warpath. Well ladies and gentlemen strap in *Racks shoota* Things are about to get waaagh
NCD never leaks, it's a hole in the sub created by hornyposters trying to copulate with military equipment
So... AdMech?
Uhhh
The Venn diagram of r/grimdank and r/NonCredibleDefense is an oval at best. If someone mentions the Imperium’s overgunned frigates the odds someone else remembers and mentions Germany’s 7200 ton frigates is very good.
The whole discussion is moot. Frigates and destroyers I mean. There are legitimate naval history reasons to call a large ship of the line a frigate.
Until 1975, in the US Navy, frigates were bigger than destroyers.
doesn't it just make you think about the Roman Empire
Lol germans romans and the imperium all in one thread. Im gonna cry my fascist heart out
Ok but the fomorians (the ships on the left) are absolutely massive as well. The smaller ships you see flying around them are approximately 4 kilometers long
40k cruisers sit at around 5-12km long btw
In all the materials I have read this is usually inaccurate. That's the size reserved for the battleships.
5 km for cruiser, 8km grand cruiser, 11km battleship. The Gloriana battleships made for the primarchs were 14km.
Wait Glorianas are only 14? I remembered them being around 20+
Glorianas are highly customizable and vary in size. They do range from 14 to 20 km long.
Each Gloriana is unique, and range in size from 14k to 24k.
I know no one asked, but the Speranza Ark Mechanicus was conservatively estimated to be 130km-150km and had fleet hangars and factories that could BUILD other ships. Other sources claim it was the size of a continent. It's launch destroyed the planet it was found on.
Hot damn
Oh it gets worse. It was run by an AI from the "Dark age of Technology" which is reported to have universe spanning wars, including a war through time. In the text the Speranza starred in >!It used a weapon that fired backwards through TIME to hit a target where it USED to be, the weapon was a miniature black hole cannon. The ships AI knew it had to use this weapon because the enemy ship had a psychic who could anticipate the future, and it calculated a kill shot despite her power.!< Edit: >!I was wrong, it was two different weapons, a black hole cannon, which initially missed, the AI got angry, and rewound the shot using a time device to make it hit!<
It depends, different Primarchs need different things of their ships. The Khan has that thing most likely be 95% engines. Alpharius wants it just small enough so it could pose as a different type of vessel. Corvus also wants it smaller, but that's so the stealth tech works better and takes less energy. And then there's people like Dorn who look at the potential of a giant wall in space and go like "not enough".
Actually Alpharius' 2 Glorina class ships weren't smaller than normal, he had a much crazier plan for them. Glorina classes all follow the same rough layout, customized to the Primarchs liking but with the same basic construction. He disliked the idea that an enemy might be familiar with the layout of his ship (just in case he gets boarded) so he had the insides of the ships completely gutted and re-arranged (possibly multiple times?) So that they would be utterly incomprehensible to even those who are familiar with Glorina class ships. A complete madhouse fun maze in there designed to baffle boarding actions. Probably has a million dead-ends and trap doors and fake walls just to mess with people.
The Dictotor class is 5.1km
They add zeroes just because they feel so so it doesn't really matter.
And just for reference for anyone wondering. A frigate in 40k is roughly the same size as an Imperial Class SD in Star Wars
>And even the small ones are insane in size - you could fit an entire chapter Space Marines and support staff into one, assuming they are light on vehicles. It's brought up in at least one novel that a warship Captain has more armed men at his direct command than pretty much anyone else in the Imperium.
During the battle of Trafalgar, the biggest see battle during the Coalition wars both sides had only around 30 line ships. Regarding space battles, the numbers in 40k make much more sense than those derpy "1000000 ships on each side" sci-fi scenarios.
Sadly if you read the BFG material that outlines this source that number includes escorts. Though, in saying that, 50-75 ships is the average for segmentum defence fleets.
Grineer are literally a people of industry. As in they are themselves industrial products made for scale and quantity. Imperial tech is the same at the small scale, but at the largest/more complicate scale it's absurdly artisanal. They can barely make their biggest vessels anymore, certainly not serially. The Indomitus Crusade has only partially reversed that trend, and it's not clear it can be sustained without the unique genius of Cawl.
I want to paint a Grineer Firbolg :(
Ngl I’d genuinely be tempted to play a Warframe miniature wargame if DE decided to make one for shits and giggles - could honestly be kinda fun painting your own little custom regiment of Corpus corporate marines or whatever.
a whole corpus faction led by none other than John Prodman. Sounds fun.
\*1000p game\* \*Puts 1 Gauss on warframe side\* \*200 Grineer on opfor side\* \*Gauss goes first, staggered movement range of 1 meter, kills anything near path\* \*Game ends turn 1, GG\*
There was a guy about 8 years ago that made a pretty comprehensive TTRPG in the Warframe setting, sans warframes. [Here's the post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/s/bwyntVE3st) The rules are fleshed out (The rulebook is 500 pages) and it's pretty in depth with its own lore, released before many of the quests that would flesh out Warframe's canon lore. An interesting read to say the least.
All I know is that everyone is bad at numbers because sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.
It doesn't help that readers don't either. 8 million cubic light years is *vast*, but it's also a cube 200 ly on a side. The Milky Way is around 8 *trillion* cubic light years, so that 8 million cubic light year box? 1 *millionth* of the galaxy. If you can travel 100 ly in a few weeks, or even a couple months, that's a *lot* of ships for that volume. And you'll have *hundreds of thousands* of fleets the same size.
Of course. Most people don't. I know just enough that I can laugh at obvious silly numbers like this episode of Star Trek where the Romulans tried to take over a planet with 2000 soldiers.
I mean, given that ST often has colonies get evacuated by a ship that can house \~1000 crew, those colonies are, at most, a few hundred people. So 2000 soldiers could 100% take a Star Trek colony.
Point taken, however, I am pretty sure it was Vulcan, not a colony.
Well, that's also extremely ridiculous for all sorts of reasons.
Oh it gets better, the Romulans were transporting those soldiers to Vulkan from the Neutral Zone at a speed between Warp 1-2, so it would take them decades to actually get there.
> All I know is that everyone is bad at numbers because sci-fi writers have no sense of scale. 7200 Green Lanterns are suppose to patrol the entire universe. Using 100 billion galaxies as a safe lower limit for number of galaxies that puts 13 million galaxies per Green Lantern.
The defense rests.
The warthog railgun in halo purportedly launches its projectiles at speeds much higher then its escape velocity on earth. It launches its projectile so fast it could be shot at sea level and hit a plane at cruising height in less then a second without leading the shot. If we take this at face value, we must also accept that the UNSC are incredibly stupid, because they had access to rail guns that powerful, but still gave their super soldiers 7.62 rifles
They cut funding for super soldiers super weapons so they could have a soda machine in the break room that has 15 different flavors
Listen man I need my cherry Dr Pepper after reading yet another planet has been glassed
They make cherry dr pepper?
Yes. It's very tasty
they did use the railguns. The only weapons they had that worked against Covenant ships were MAC cannons, which were just giant railguns. They just budget cut and didn't outfit rank and file soldiers with these weapons as they didn't have the funding for it. After all, it's better to invest in installing more railguns on ships and shoot the covenant in space than allowing them to land and trying to fight them on the ground while they have air and space superiority
"I hate the antichrist I hate the antichrist" "we have you surrounded, get out here and adopt 7.62!"
Deploying a couple million guardsmen to conquer planets. (There were about 3 million at stalingrad alone)
They say over 4 also. That's a great point
What is the one on the left from?
Fomorian from Warframe
I think I've farmed enough resources to build my own Fomorian fleet
I think making the fleets too numerous would actually detract from the drama of these massive warships. Almost like it becomes more of a statistic. Especially in 40k, we like the idea of these Warships being huge and ancient. They are just like characters really, and all have sick names and crews of thousands or tens of thousands. I do like the opposite happening in other settings, like in the 3 body problem. Space opera settings really sleep on the power of actual science. Who would win? * 1000 stellar class warships * >!1 pretty little teardrop!<
"nice solar system, I bet it would look better in 2d" Also most imperial battlefleet are comically huge. Battlefleet gothic for example contained like a thousand battleships and nearly a million escorts, we just hear about the big ships. Also imperial escort ships would be stupid huge grand cruisers in any other setting.
Bigger is cooler cause that’s the fantasy we’re buying. Arcs of Omen, space hulks, entire societies emerging on a void ship ☺️
>>!one pretty little teardrop!< YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW GOOD LUO JI WAS https://preview.redd.it/k1jnwj2k71ad1.jpeg?width=508&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5ae97c0b302cd57a7497c6aaf0df24fe05421fa2
Actually it’s kinda funny now that I think about. The Imperium is what happens when “basic research” stops lol. Everything is just utilization of existing theory 🤭 except warp based technology that is
The funny thing is Imperial ships are for absolutely no reason just busted durable, they are built different Goddamn
They’re flying space stations more than space ships. These things can withstand the internal fire from BOLTERS and psychic explosions like it was Tuesday.
The Imperium of Man in fact, does not have the resources of the entire galaxy and that "8 million cubic light years" of space has large chunks which are unexplored, lost to warp storms or left alone for reasons you wish is just because they are not worthwhile. Almost all books about space travel or naval combat in 40k make it clear that the Imperium is thinly spread across the galaxy and even then, the Imperial Navy is always low on numbers to properly control it. There are a lot of cases of 40k authors not understanding scale but this ain't it. As a matter of fact, Battlefleet Gothic might be one of the better scaled portions of the universe.
I mean, 8 million cubic lightyears is literally 200 lightyears on a side. That's *tiny* for our galaxy. It's 100,000 light years wide. The galaxy is like 8 *trillion* cubic light years. 8 million light years is literally *one millionth* of the galaxy. That implies, if we maintain that average, *tens of millions* of ships in the Imperium of Man. I mean. It's not that unreasonable, all things considered. Within 100 ly of the Earth, there are like 1000+ stars. What, a few dozen are habitable within this framework? And you think that they'd make *more* ships than this? Why? Say, for the sake of argument, within your hypothetical sub sector, mean travel time is 1 day per light year of travel, which is quite slow for the galaxy in 40k--Guilliman made thousands per day through a warp storm holding him back in 30k. That means that any system is \~3 months away from a centrally located fleet. Your orbital defenses, PDF, and other local defenses only really need to hold out for 100 days or so before help arrives. That's pretty good. But! We've got \~60 capital ships, plus maybe 200 escorts. We can split *those* up into patrols of like 5 capital and 10 escorts, and have, say, 10 of them roaming around between stations, and the remainder as reserve. That would mean that, in practical terms, you could have 15 warships within a system within a couple weeks, and another 30+ within a couple months, and more constantly coming in as needed. Given the number of systems you said were present, at any given time, more than *half* would have a fleet on station, or en route, at any given moment. Compare to the *real world* right now. The US has *five* carrier groups across the entire ocean. Five! Right now, moving about. That's to cover the entire planet. That's an *absurdly large* number, by the way. And they can respond to any crisis in the *world* within a few days for one, a couple weeks will bring another. We can bring more as necessary. And there are hundreds of ports we stop at. A million cubic light years is a lot smaller than you think.
>A million cubic light years is a lot smaller than you think So I can travel by car instead of taking a plane?
Hey, when you use Hell as a shortcut, why not use a motorcycle instead?
If Magnus didn’t do nothing wrong, the Imperium could have. The Webway can be traversed on foot if need be.
>That implies, if we maintain that average, tens of millions of ships in the Imperium of Man. No it doesn't. Even the Gothic sector with 84 worlds have "hundreds" of warships. That comes to around ~six million warships in the mid end. If we take the BFG's 50-75 warships per sector, then we get around ~744,000 warships. This is also backed by the fact that each sector is a 200ly cube and the imperium has eight million cubic light years, it comes out to ~2.5 million warships assuming that all of that space is controlled by the IOM and it does not have any inaccessible zones. The Galaxy is big but most of the outer rim is empty space. It's also repeatedly stated that the Imperium has several inaccessible zones and is very porous.
neither, it is whatever bests aids the storytelling. but personally I’d prefer the left to the right, the appeal for me specifically is the idea that 40k is so massive a scale that there should be no named characters or noteworthy individuals except mythological entities and god-like beings. that’s not what is now, but I still like it conceptually and am glad the people who do enjoy it get what they want.
Reminds me of a bit at the end of the first Culture book talking about the scale of the war you glimpse in it. >**Statistics** >Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) – 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals – 14,334; planets and major moons – 53; Rings – 1; Spheres – 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) – 6. >**Historical perspective** >A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder civilisations rate the Idiran–Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.
Small numbers are actually fine. Modern navies use few capital ships cause they expensive as hell. Return of investment is quite questionable. If we remember navies of ww1. They were trying to keep it docked in shipyards, because they built as many as they could and loss even of 1 ship was near catastrophe.
You know that we talk about a Galaxy spanning empire? In total the Imperium has in total around 250.000 war ships, bigger than 1km. Now we take a look on the empire from star wars. By translating the size from wh40k to star wars ships (power to universe ratio), we see that the empire had 25.000 Star destroyer alone and around a millions of corvets and destroyers. While the Imperium has around 54 war ships per sector, the empire has 1.600 smaller warships (corvets, carriers and destroyers) and 24 Star destroyers, on avarage, per sector, wich are simular sized to the sectors of the Imperium. While you have a point with modern navis are much smaller due to expence, we also have to consider that sectors in warhammer consist of 7 million cubic light years. Thus a sector navy of the size of the Us Navy (minus smaller boats) would be reasonable, like around 105 ships plus fighters. Considering that, a "smaller" navy by warhammer standarts should be realisticly around 105 ships, to prevent a lot of invasions GW simply cant comprehend numbers. In space at least. On ground they usaly write down pretty high numbers, wich make sence also in the setting itself. The Imperium should had at least be given twice of what they have now to make sence. Well, but what could be said in the end is that, due to the technological "tradionalism", the Imperium simply cant crank out cheaper, less survivable war ships like the empire did in star wars. Thats my opinion at least.
Do we have a rock solid number on the size of the Imperial Navy? One of WH40K's strongest world building factors (imho) is that there is a degree of uncertainty with numbers. Like the chief admiral of the imperial navy doesn't know exactly, he could probably find out and get a relatively high precision estimate, but that would take a couple of terran years at least
No. Neither for the Galactic Empire. At least, we didn't. Both have attestations of sizes that range from ridiculously tiny to absurdly large in different sources. Locking down something that makes sense is a nightmare. I did a deep dive years ago, compiled a bunch of numbers, and figured the midway point of each seemed pretty reasonable and used those. Couldn't for the life of me tell you what I found that to be at the time though.
The Imperium has never been in full strength and controlling the entire galaxy in the 41st, if you think the entire navy is understrength and only stationed in key areas of a sector, the number is more believable. The Empire in Star Wars were at the peak of its strength at the start of the rebellion, firmly in control of 99% of the Galaxy.
"firmly"
"Firmly grasp it."
Galactic Empire never controlled 99% of the Galaxy, no empire of state ever did. Galactic Empire was controlling previously Republic space and expanded a bit from it, which is around 30-40% of the Galaxy. There were, naturally, many other galactic states, most notably Hutt Space, although they did tend to play along to a degree depending on the power of the state - it may be too costly and risky for Palpatine to start a war with such state, as it would be likely that these states band together against the Empire, but if they outright resisted and defy it, Palpatine absolutely would do it. There are also massive Unknown regions and satellite galaxies and star cluster. It should be noted, however, that SW Galaxy is much bigger than Milky Way.
99%? The empire controlled 50% at its peek. Half the galaxy was litteraly known as the "un known region"
Small numbers are not fine when you're trying to conquer and hold territory.
It’s much about how the universe works. 40k has FTL yes, but even then it can take a long ass time to travel. I’ve been finally reading the Eisenhorn trilogy, and they make travels wishing the sector that take up to 30 something weeks. And also warp travel can be traced/tracked. You can calculate when and where ships will end up (save a warp storm and if you are away of the great rift now) So having a small number of capital ships spread out with a lot of support makes total sense. Also the scale, those ships are some of the largest ones around. They mostly deal with ships quite smaller. When it’s something like an Craftworld of a hive fleet. They do their best to get the most amount of ships to converge. Besides, one of those can carry a planet cracker by themselves. Although Exterminatus are mostly done with several small ships, there are instances of single ship ones. It also makes sense in the way of: most of these ships are ancient, making new ones might ass well take centuries, which is an appropriate time frame. Even in 40k they are rare.
given the nature of warhammer universe, it would probably be foolish to invest large amount of resources into battle ships and focus on static defence lines. unpredictability in the warp means reinforcements when needed are unreliable but static defence are always available. while massive amounts of warships would prob be not a good idea, a massive civil fleet of resources and materials transport is definitely a good idea. same reason as before, resources are mandatory but unreliability in the warp means u have to assume some will not get thru and u will need to stock pile. while u could argue that having a massive fleet solves fhe unreliability issue, you also need people to be om the ships and supply with resources that draw away from a civil population that produces it. its similar to the idea of modern warfare. if u need to hold a point, but reinforcements are not likely to arrive on time, u bolster the static defence lines
Warhammer is so hilariously inconsistent with numbers.
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Navis_Imperialis#Imperial_Navy_Organisation > The Imperium is divided into five fleet zones known as the Segmentae Majoris. Every starship of the Imperial Navy is assigned to one of these Segmentae, and falls under the command of the respective Lord High Admiral >Each Segmentum is divided into sectors, regions of space that are generally cube-shaped and contain 8 million cubic light years of space. These Sectors contain multiple sub-sectors, collections of star systems no more than 20 light years in radius. The Imperial Navy starships of each Segmentum are divided amongst the sectors into further groups called Battlefleets. >Each Sector Battlefleet is assigned a number of Cruisers and Battleships, usually between 50 and 75 vessels. Each Sector Battlefleet is also assigned multiple squadrons of Escort starships, and is also in command of a large number of transports, messenger craft, orbital defences, space platforms and system patrol vessels. So FYI a single fleet has ~60 large ships (and hundreds/thousands of escorts), but there are dozens or hundreds of fleets. The Imperial Navy is enormous.
If you look at the Battlefleet Gothic source of the 50 - 75 number rather than just looking at the fandom wiki, it includes the smaller warships, not just the big ones. Though "long-range patrol craft" isn't included in the number, but those aren't frigates and destroyers. > Each battlefleet normally consists of between 50 and 75 warships of varying size, although in some sectors this will be more or less, depending on the importance of the sector and the number of enemies it must contend with. As well as these destroyers, frigates, cruisers and battleships, a battlefleet also has access to countless smaller vessels such as transports, shuttles, messenger craft and long-range patrol craft.
At first I thought you were referring to the idea that the entire fleet of 50-75 ships' volume covered a 7 million cubic lightyear area of space and I thought "Yeah that sounds right for Games Workshop's measurement criteria."
Surely, it's 50-75 *battleships*. Look at a real fleets battle groups. They'll have a carrier (or battleships when those were still useful) and it's got some 10 or 20 other ships protecting it. Then you also have task forces which could be for simple patrols. There's some pirates raiding a moon somewhere. You don't need a battle group for that. A frigate can deal with that shit. Finally, because space is *so* huge and FTL exists, blockades are impossible. You can't possibly cover the area needed, and if you could, the enemy can just warp-jump past you. This means strategic points such as planets, moons, space stations and other places that is relatively stationary are what you'll focus on defending which is *a lot* less area to cover than the vast space between those poins.
Then there is the halo universe which has a terminal in halo 2 that describes a battle between 2 ai (one corrupted and one not) utilizing the fleet of a type 3 (maybe 4?) civilization called the forerunners. The scale described is beyond comprehension and gets even more wild when all the organic crew of said ai fleets are killed by a galactic super weapon as the ai stop limiting their actions due to the physical strain it would have had on the crew. Pretty much how I imagine dark age of technology humanity though probably even beyond that.
Mendicant and Offensive Bias are who you're talking about The battle itself is the Battle of the Maginot Sphere, the last battle of the Forerunner-Flood War, where Offensive was delaying the combined AI-Flood fleet so the Halos could be activated and wipe out all life in the galaxy to starve the Flood
Yes, was just trying to describe it in more laymens terms for people who aren’t familiar with the story
the imperium is far too big to be out or even low on resources the only caveat i can see is that FTL travel is a fuckfest but individual systems should have enough stuff in em to make a couple hundred gloriana class ships
In Halo lore, the Forerunners are described as waging wars with fleets made of millions of ships. Some "minor" space battles only see standoffs between thousands of ships. But that's only logical when your specie has a galaxy-sized empire with a solid industrial base.
Head canon is add 2 zeros to every number provided in 40k
Good old Warhammer 4,000,000 :)
2000 primarchs, with 200 of them having been unwritten from history... :P
Add 2 zeros to everything space related, remove a zero from ground related stuff and add on calibers the number 20.
Not to go full 20 Emperors and 200 Primarchs, but ground related stuff still tends to be too small. IIRC, at least one of the major conflicts on Armageddon (the poster child for constant and brutal warfare) had fewer casualties than a single front of WW1.
Let's look at it using modern industrial scale. Global automotive production is about 10 million vehicles annually. Average weight of a car is 4094 lb. So every year about 40,000 million pounds of automobiles are manufactured. If the global automotive industry was dedicated to making battleships we could produce 20 million tons annually. The estimated size of a 40k battleship is 9.5 billion tons. So 9.5 / 0.02 = 475 years. Obviously a forge world would have more industrial potential than our current society, but forge worlds also produce other equipment and have inefficiencies of their own so it wouldn't be too much greater. So if we double the production an earth sized forge world would make a battleships every 237.5 years.So even if there are 100 forge worlds making battleships, that's only one new ship every 2 years.
id imagine ud also lose production time to repairing and maintaining previously built ships, defending urself from constant attack from heretics and xenos and civilian uprisings, having to track down someone who understands a 10 000+ year old piece of equipment enough to repair it properly.
Exactly why Forge Worlds are backed up with centuries long backlog of orders/shipments.
It's because we all know the British can't do math Plus I don't know how big those ships are but if the solar system has a couple of earth-like planets it's theoretically possible provided their willing to literally gut the Earth's core or the equivalent
The gas giants and the star is right there, you know. The rocky planets are literally a rounding error compared to them.
That's so true I was microbraining it thinking in raw Iron but you can find so much of that on gas gaints
Scale, warhammer biggest enemy
games workshop when logistics:
40K does have lots of number issues but for fleet sizes I think it's actually pretty reasonable because ships are massively expensive to upkeep and maintain especially with how far technology has fallen they aren't gonna pump out ships
Welcome to Warhammer 540k where the numbers dont make sense and we ignore the lore as it suits us
Yeah 40k is weird af with its numbers. You have the imperium throwing a ton of resources that they literally cannot replenish at some battles and then like three spacehulks at a planetary uprising
The Imperium probably has 10000s of frigates, escorts, destroyers etc, not to mention the monitors that defend most systems And as we saw in Rogue Trader, a sword class frigate can be more than enough to fuck shit up in many cases. Granted, that particular Sword Class was up-gunned and up armored like crazy
Never take anything that is related to powerscaling from games. ESPECIALLY from protagonists, they get x999 power buff from plot armor xD
Don't forget the Imperiums R&D is soo good that sometimes it takes several decades if not hundreds of years to build a larger vessel. Compare that to a single dry dock on Kuat shitting out an Imperial Star Destroyer every few months - and the yave thousands of dockyards.
Is that a balor fomorian?
Yes
Unrelated topic but something occurred to me on my last re-read of Fall of Reach: At one point in the novel it is described how "leftover" plasma torpedoes enter a cloud of used-to-be ships and disappates into the cloud of metal. This happens 20-years into the war, so it has ***certainly*** been witnessed before. And apparently not one single person has ever heard of interceptor missiles, and just packed tons of shrapnel into warhead to form those clouds on demand. The UNSC did not lose because of a tech disadvantage. They lost because of alarming incompetance.
Warhammer ships are huge tho, they are kilometers long. If an old battleship like Yamato has a complement of more than 3,000, with a length of 263 meters. I can see how the numbers can go down.
GW is horrific with numbers, just across the board
Unless you're a significant member of Adeptus Administratum, Navis Imperialis or Adeptus Mechanicus you have no idea of, how many spaceships the Imperium of Mankind possess. Maybe 50-75 is the correct number within a single system. But considering the vast galaxy, endless transports, exploration fleets, reclamator fleets etc., while being an increasingly scarce resource, the Imperium probably have millions of spaceships.
These numbers are for the cruisers and battleships in a sector fleet. It doesn't really count the escorts or the logistic ships. [The source](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Navis_Imperialis#:~:text=Imperial%20Battlefeets,-An%20Imperial%20Battlefleet&text=Each%20Sector%20Battlefleet%20is%20assigned,between%2050%20and%2075%20vessels.) I think op pulled this from.
That might be among the most sensible number in 40k. For starters, 8M cubic light years comes down to a cube 2k light years on each side (for context the milky way is about 7.85 TRILLION cubic light years in volume) so the Imperium (a million worlds) would only have a couple of inhabited planets per sector, and still it has 80 battleships that dwarf a SW star destroyer with thousands more smaller vessels which are still kilometers long
I don't remember when I read it, but someone put forward a nice "rule" for numbers in warhammer. When talking about physical sizes, subtract two 0s, when talking about numerical sizes, add two 0s, and I think that works very well
Writers have no fricking sense of scale.
Where do they get that much red paint... wait nvm.
How many sectors does imperium have