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Battleship size and sources canon novel.


Whitelion

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Hi everyone, I have seen that in novels Battleships vary in size, personally I like it, nothing prevents you from building larger or smaller variations of the same ship class, after all it is the role and performance that classifies the class of ship, and not the size. In fact I don't understand why many credit battleships at 9 km, when there is canon material that provides different sizes.

That said, some people told me about novels in which battleships of 10-12-16 and 20 km are mentioned, do you know the name of the works and the author?

 

The same goes for the Titans, I would like to find material taken from the novels about the greatest titans, the emperor, the warlord, the apocalypse and the Castigator. Do you remember the name of some novel in which they are treated?

Thank you in advance ;)

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While I don't think it includes Battleships, the Rogue Trader RPG source book Battlefleet Koronus included the size of various ship classes. IIRC they cite Cruiser hulls at around 5km long, battlecruisers at around 5.5km, and Grand Cruisers at 7-7.5km. So 9km for a Battleship might have come about by scaling up from those numbers.

 

For a novel that includes ship sizes, Know No Fear includes a few from the XIII Legion fleet, but being HH they don't fully line up to the known 'Battlefleet Gothic' ships classes of m41.

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Despite STC templates governing the vast majority of hull types and configurations in the Imperium, we're still looking at localized additions, innovations in rare cases, or simple availability of manpower and materiel resources that could impact the length of a battleship. Perhaps forgeworld X makes larger ramming prows than forgeworld Y, etc etc. IIRC HH3: Extermination mentions a general length of 8-12 km for Battleships, and then from other sources (Know no Fear for Macragge's Honour, Battle for the Abyss/Betrayer for the Abyss class vessels, and so on) we can say 15-20+ for Legion King-ships/Glorianas.

Edited by Apothecary Vaddon
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Ok thanks, the Gloriana and Abyss classes are my passion, maybe they are the ships on which I know more information, the Macragge Honor I read that is 26 km long, the Abyss class is even as long as a continent.

 

In the post I was referring to battleship type Retribution, Emperor, Nemesis etc.

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Battlefleet Gothic would indeed be the best source of information.

 

BFG had fighter models, many of which had or have models in 40k (some of the 40k models had real world measurements given in (early) forge world publications).

One could put the size of the fighter models in relation to the ship models - if it weren't for one problem: even though they come as multiple fighters to one base, fighter models in BFG had a slightly larger scale than the ships.

 

Now the fighter bays on the ship models on the other hand - if you know the size of a fighter, you know how large the door to a bay needs to be to let a fighter through and could estimate the size of the ship based on that.,

 

 

edit:

I just remembered that the 'specialist games' of GW were released for free back in the day when that section of the company was shut down - you may be lucky and find a pdf of the BFG rules floating around online.

Edited by Exilyth
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Fighter bases had three to five models - with one hangar section emitting a flight and such craft usually starting in parallel, the width of a bay would need to be ~4x fighterwidth + some safety distance. Of course we run into problems here as descriptions vary - e.g. some ships launch the fighters one after the other, some launch a wing (2 fighters) at once and so on.

 

 

edit:

charts comparing vessels from various sci-fi universes do exits, but usually do not state the source for measurements, e.g.:

https://www.deviantart.com/dirkloechel/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-Spaceships-398790051

(imperial ships are near the upper left on that chart)

Edited by Exilyth
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