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Firing speed in 40k Warships


Whitelion

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Hello everyone, I was wondering what was the time that the macrocannons take to reload. From the canon we know that they are recharged by slaves, but there is no mention of the time between one salvo and the next.

I ask this because even the video game is canon (like everything in 40k) and in it we see the macrocannons firing at a distance of seconds.

Do we know anything from the Novels? Any quotation about it exists?

 

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There is no consistent time on this sort of thing, even on ships of the same class let alone the insane variety in Imperial vessels unfortunately. Id suggest they generally fire at the speed of plot :D 

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I'm not even sure about how canon it is for ALL capital ships to use manual labour solely to reload guns. (I was always struck by that image in the BFG rulebook where a crowd of hundreds are pulling a shell on a track with ropes.) I'm not convinced it's commonplace.

 

Also, I doubt the Imperial Navy would call the ratings slaves, they probably (never) receive a pittance of a wage! Chaos on the other hand...

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I realise this is only vaguely helpful but there’s a space battle in (I think) one of the dark apostle series of books that describes the exact situation you’re mentioning. A ship is fighting and the overseer of the loading gang whips and cajoles them with such desperation that they manage to get the shell loaded faster than normal so the ship can fire one more time before it dies. The loading gang turn on the overseer and kill him as a result just before the ship explodes. It goes into detail about the timings quite well from what I recall.

 

Sorry this is vague but at least a it might point you where to look if you have access to those books.

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I think there I perhaps a great disconnect in how space combat has been portrayed in older material to newer.

 

The older material that came with the BFG table top game paints space combat being completely massive in scale - weapon ranges of tens of thousands of kilometres, thunderhawk sized fighters and bombers to cross vast distances, etc that all point to combat that'd last many hours to days. Gethsemane during the Gothic War lasted 4 days of fleet manoeuvres, while Abaddon took 3 weeks to actually reach Cadia after dropping in-system during the 13th Black Crusade. It made 40k much more cogniscent than most other sci-fi on the actual scale and distances in space. Not to say that ships being in visual range of each other was rare - but the fact that these massive distances were acknowledged and were common in the fiction was great.

 

This all clashes with the more compressed action-movie conflict presented in newer material, where ships are within visual range before they open fire, can make warp jumps in-system, etc. Obviousl this sort of battle that doesn't allow for an hour to reload a single shot makes the visual of masses of slaves painstakingly pulling shells the size of buildings less likely.

 

And I mean many Imperial Navy crews, much like the british navy on Earth would have been press-ganged - literally forced into service on the threat of force, imprisonment or death. Close enough to slavery.

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I'm not disputing the conditions would be horrible, or that they are likely pressed men and women. But they would have a slightly better quality of life than the slaves proper on the Chaos ships.

To my mind, the age of the ship would likely be the determinative factor. Ships built during the height of Man's technological advances would be less likely to require shells to be dragged by ropes and men into the breaches of the guns as automation within the process would be more prevalent in those vessels. Newer vessels, built in the doldrums of human technological prowess in the later millennia would be more likely to have less automation.

 

I do agree though that the scale of in system battles has been wildly inconsistent. Some books suggest that an in system warp jump would cause a catastrophic warp breach and is almost unthinkable. Others do it with abandon. The TBA books were reasonably good on the scale of them, particularly The Emperor Expects, where one system battle lasted weeks, or even months. (I also find it funny that some authors work in metric, others imperial!)

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Yeah, Brother Adelard has it right IMO. Ships in better condition would have more of the automation left intact, the "machine spirit" would be handling such stuff. Ancient vessels or vessels in much disrepair, whether from age and neglect or void combat damage, would have to find creative ways of substituting the automated systems with muscle work.

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Im pretty sure i recall a book where the lower decks didnt even realise the ship had changed sides given how little difference it made to them, though that may have been during the heresy so less time for gribblies to take up residence :D 

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Ships in 40k are unfortunately one of those things that even ships of the same class often end up radically different from each other. Sure, two ships might both be Lunar-class cruisers, but one of them still has its original Mars-pattern macrocannon, with Stygies-pattern plasma drives and power conduits, and the loading system was damaged in the previous battle, so it's been replaced with a retrofitted Mars-pattern macrocannon loading system usually installed in Dauntless-class light cruisers. The other has Ryza-pattern macrocannon and loading systems, a Mars-pattern plasma drive and power conduits, and the finest indentured crews from the training yards of Belis Corona. 

 

While both are Lunar-class cruisers equipped with macrocannon batteries, they're probably very different in capabilities. Battlefleet Gothic (the ttg) even accounted for this by having some ship classes able to swap out weapons or add abilities to reflect the differences of particular noteworthy ships.

 

In truth, though, it comes down to the particular author. Some prefer fleet battles to be more like what you see in pirate movies, from the Age of Sail, with rapidly moving ships very close to each other, blasting cannons at each other from point-blank range every 30 seconds or so (the Star Wars style).

Others take the "space is big" approach, and have that in most fleet engagements the opposing ships won't be visible with the naked eye, engaging at literally astronomical distances from each other, taking ages to launch each volley that will take a long time to reach the enemy (even lances/las-weaponry will take several seconds/a minute to reach, with torpedoes/macrocannon shells taking half an hour or more). This approach errs towards the longer side of how long it takes to reload.

 

Personally, I tend to go with the second approach, as we're talking about absolutely massive weapons firing shells larger than houses. While the game shows them firing every few seconds, this can be rationalized as akin to a time-lapse to make the game actually playable, instead of "well, I clicked to shoot that guy, my other cruiser is coming about and will be done in 20 minutes, I'll set the timer for 15 minutes or so and come back then".

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well, thank you all for the posts, very clear and useful.
Does anyone remember a novel in which we can read about fast naval combat, which exchanges many shots in a short time?
I searched for the Age of Sail novel but didn't find it.
Edited by Whitelion
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It's been years since I read it, but I remember Andy Chambers explaining about the timings, I think in White Dwarf. IIRC the first turns in BFG where the distances are vast were 4-6 hours a turn and then once the ship's get really close to each other it's more like 15 minutes a turn. So you could argue that re loading a weapons battery might take 10-15 minutes, depending on source material. Of course that completely ignores things like some weapons batteries being almost entirely laser based (sword class) and others things like plasma (tyrant class). If you want to read more AC did a short story called ancient history that was based around a gun crew and the book Relentless was a good Napoleonic spin on 40k ship crewing.
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well, thank you all for the posts, very clear and useful.
Does anyone remember a novel in which we can read about fast naval combat, which exchanges many shots in a short time?
I searched for the Age of Sail novel but didn't find it.

 

 

Sorry, I didn't mean "Age of Sail" was a book title, but rather as the term for when British/European navies were commonly engaged in trade disputes, piracy, etc.

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Yeah, Brother Adelard has it right IMO. Ships in better condition would have more of the automation left intact, the "machine spirit" would be handling such stuff. Ancient vessels or vessels in much disrepair, whether from age and neglect or void combat damage, would have to find creative ways of substituting the automated systems with muscle work.

 

This seems right. Even modern attack subs have a backup, manually-powered loading system for the torpedoes in case the hydraulic are damaged or break down (it's literally ropes and pulleys). Assuming a similar arrangement on Imperial Navy ships, and given how long it takes these technologies to be built and repaired in-universe, you could imagine a ship defaulting to manual loading just because it's always been done that way on that particular ship. I recall reading somewhere that entire generations have been known to be born, live, serve, and die on some of the larger ships. Tradition would carry a lot of weight in that scenario.

Edited by Spleenex
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I'm not even sure about how canon it is for ALL capital ships to use manual labour solely to reload guns. (I was always struck by that image in the BFG rulebook where a crowd of hundreds are pulling a shell on a track with ropes.) I'm not convinced it's commonplace.

 

Also, I doubt the Imperial Navy would call the ratings slaves, they probably (never) receive a pittance of a wage! Chaos on the other hand...

The picture you describe is supposed to show loading a Nova Canon not a normal Macro weapons battery.

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If I remember correctly, the mechanicum also used the teleportarium to load bullets in case of need, does anyone remember the novel?

On the level of "dangerous, stupid, and dangerously stupid" using a Teleportarium to load ammunition is probably the downright silliest thing I've ever read.

 

(Imperial) Teleportation is already fraught with potential for mishaps. Using it to load a ship-grade weapon is basically playing Russian Roulette, only instead of killing oneself, you're going to blow up your entire vessel. Because you're no longer playing dumb with a revolver, you're using starship-grade munitions! :laugh.: Because unlike, say, a Terminator having a teleport mishap and ending up thousands of feet away from his squad, or halfway into a wall, you could possibly teleport that ship-grade munition into your reactor core.

 

TL;DR: That's one of those things that's in the realm of "well, it can be done.... But it's likely not ever going to be used even by the most desperate"

Edited by Gederas
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Why not just teleport it into the enemy ship? Surely that would be safer!

was it ever done?

 

 

Under BFG TT, the mechanics of the game requires a ship to have no shields in order to make a teleport attack. You might as well fire directly at the ship at that point if you want to outright destroy / wreck it? Teleport attacks seem to be surgical strikes aimed at decapitating/assassinating the ship or taking vital parts of the ship.

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Why not just teleport it into the enemy ship? Surely that would be safer!

was it ever done?

Not at a ship but the Black Templars have a short story in their Omnibus doing something similar at Armageddon 3.

 

Templars are going to destroy an orc facility. In their way they find a Dreadnaught thought lost in Armageddon 2.

At the end the Dreadnaught is alone in the base fighting the orcs. He is the teleported back / rescued on a ship while some sort of bomb / warhead Takes his place.

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