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GlassEye-Boy posted:Did they retcon the size of imperial ships? I remember reading something a long time ago where the imperial ships were so big each subsection developed its own culture and didn't interact with other areas of the ship. They vary in crew complement from the low tens of thousands to tens of millions. Considering that many live and die on the ships, that's plausible on the larger ones.
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May 10, 2024 19:29
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GlassEye-Boy posted:Did they retcon the size of imperial ships? I remember reading something a long time ago where the imperial ships were so big each subsection developed its own culture and didn't interact with other areas of the ship. In the first decade of the 21st century they transitioned from mostly vibes to actual figures for size and crew complements with the release of Battlefleet Gothic and its Armageddon and Armada supplements and then Rogue Trader. Frigates and cruisers do indeed have huge deck footprints, but it's really the battleships and bulk transports that get big enough to have whole societies that never interact with the outside world.
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May 10, 2024 20:20
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GlassEye-Boy posted:Did they retcon the size of imperial ships? I remember reading something a long time ago where the imperial ships were so big each subsection developed its own culture and didn't interact with other areas of the ship. Nope, and that still happens. The smallest ones are only a km or 2 long. The big ones are loving massive.
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May 10, 2024 20:34
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How long does it take an elevator to get from the top to the bottom? What is the daily commute for the crew who work in the more functional parts of the ship getting there from the crew quarters?
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May 10, 2024 21:25
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First of all, how DARE you suggest giving the bilge rats elevator access. The van Kjar dynasty is from the Calixis Sector's capital world Scintilla, which was settled from overpopulated core worlds in Segmentum Solar. So while it's on the frontier it retains the iron-bound hierarchy of traditional Imperial nobility. The navy and house officer class is drawn almost entirely from the hive spire nobility. So the idea that like the gun crews or the life support reclamation crews should live in the nice crew spaces and not sleep in or near their work spaces would be ideologically suspect to the upper decks crew. Probably the only space in the entire ship that everyone on board would visit in any given commission is the cathedral. So like for the Feast of the Emperor's Ascension* once a year the lower deck ratings and bilge clans would get to attend mass** in the fancy cathedral at some point in the 12 day observance and maybe even be served a nice meal before their carefully supervised trip back to their authorized area. *or whenever it's observed on board, because they could easily miss the actual date by accident in warp transit **in High Gothic of course, none of that blasphemous vernacular rite But yeah I envision there are four main gangways, two along the dorsal spine past the main battery fire control bunkers, two along the top of the bilges and cable tiers for cargo. There's currently an opulent officer's gangway that runs above the dorsal spine connecting all the dorsal superstructure, but I expect that to be rapidly cleared away to install power cables for the lance turrets they'll put in those empty barbettes. Anyway there are personnel lifts, cargo lifts, but also the gangways are big enough to drive vehicles in and there are people movers on tracks in the gangways as well. I imagine some of the cargo lifts can actually hook into the cargo hauler tracks. The ship is more than 2000 years old, 600 years in deep freeze and 1200 years active service, so a lot of these systems post date the original construction, so you can easily have a hodge podge of incompatible transport systems. Another way the Imperium's weird institutions are built into the ship is the engine spaces, which are pretty much an autonomous monastic area for the mechanicum tech priests and built with that division in mind. There's literally a 40 foot diameter blast door penetrating the engine room armor protection, which the tech priests can and did use to seal off the reactor and engine spaces. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 21:36
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Don't forget the vents, tubes, crawlspaces, forgotten hallways, sealed sections, and empty pipes for things to live in and travel through...
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May 10, 2024 22:18
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I was going back and forth between giving this ship the Haunted background or Wrested From a Space Hulk background. Ultimately I went with Rebellious personality to represent its wicked machine spirit and Wrested from a Space Hulk to represent its age (and thus quality manufacture) Something very bad happened to the ship and all the souls aboard her, but it wasn't actually supernatural... right?
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May 10, 2024 22:23
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Arglebargle III posted:First of all, how DARE you suggest giving the bilge rats elevator access. The van Kjar dynasty is from the Calixis Sector's capital world Scintilla, which was settled from overpopulated core worlds in Segmentum Solar. So while it's on the frontier it retains the iron-bound hierarchy of traditional Imperial nobility. The navy and house officer class is drawn almost entirely from the hive spire nobility. So the idea that like the gun crews or the life support reclamation crews should live in the nice crew spaces and not sleep in or near their work spaces would be ideologically suspect to the upper decks crew. Lifts? Lifts! Luxury. We've been climbing these stairs for generations, proudly! Each of us has the sacred duty to bring this Wonder of The Emperor to the top no matter how many people we must kill.
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May 10, 2024 22:39
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Arglebargle III posted:I was going back and forth between giving this ship the Haunted background or Wrested From a Space Hulk background. Hulks just speak to me on a primeval level. A giant mystery, floating in space for a while before returning to the warp, full of ancient treasure, lost technology and monsters.
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May 11, 2024 07:56
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Don't forget the vents, tubes, crawlspaces, forgotten hallways, sealed sections, and empty pipes for things to live in and travel through... Are 40k Jefferies tubes regular sized or as big as normal hallways so it's just cramped for space marines? Either way you know those ships are going to be riddled with them.
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May 11, 2024 11:26
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pygmy tyrant posted:Are 40k Jefferies tubes regular sized or as big as normal hallways so it's just cramped for space marines? Either way you know those ships are going to be riddled with them. You know it smell crazy in there
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May 11, 2024 11:43
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pygmy tyrant posted:Are 40k Jefferies tubes regular sized or as big as normal hallways so it's just cramped for space marines? Either way you know those ships are going to be riddled with them. I mean jeffries tubes are pretty dumb, you'd want most stuff to be accessible behind the walls of access hallways and things you can easily get through. You'd only want tubes when there's a good reason that you can't run much space through something for access. The way it was in TOS where they were just little short things going into the middle of machinery worked but TNG on where there's a big shipwide tube network as a 1/3rd scale alternative corridor system makes zero sense.
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May 11, 2024 11:53
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the flat-floored cave systems (common to m-class planets of the milky way) inspire starfleet engineers to create elaborate but extremely clean tunnel networks in their starships
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May 11, 2024 14:46
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MikeJF posted:And what's the total internal square miles of deck? Assuming that like 40% of the ship's volume is actually accessible deck space, it's 112 square kilometers or 43 square miles. So it's smaller than Washington D.C. Plasma tubes, reactor chambers, fuel tanks, macro-cannon magazines, torpedo bays, bulk storage, bilges, miscellaneous machinery and forgotten/sealed-off sections account for more than half the volume in my opinion. That's what I'm talking about with 40K ship sizes -- a crew size of 60-80,000 is too small for this ship, but it's also kind of on the low end of the right ballpark*. Real life DC has ten times the population but also doesn't need to carry supplies for a year and landing craft and enough weapons to subjugate a heathen planet. *not a level playing field Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 15:44 on May 11, 2024 |
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May 11, 2024 15:35
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Arglebargle III posted:Assuming that like 40% of the ship's volume is actually accessible deck space, it's 112 square kilometers or 43 square miles. So it's smaller than Washington D.C. Yeah but how much of DC is accessible space?
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May 11, 2024 16:10
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Arglebargle III posted:Assuming that like 40% of the ship's volume is actually accessible deck space, it's 112 square kilometers or 43 square miles. So it's smaller than Washington D.C. 40k has always struggled with scale. We get wars covering an entire sector that have millions of fighting men... When the eastern front involved 10 million troops.
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May 11, 2024 17:30
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I typed up a long response that boils down to "you're right but I'm mad that you said it." 40K struggles with scale, but at least it thinks seriously about scale. Like many long-running franchises some of its authors do a better job tackling it than others, some do a bad job, but at least it doesn't elide it. The core rulebook writing about it is in fact some of the best: the Imperium is Very Old, and Very Big, and has Countless Trillions of soldiers, and it takes loving forever for it to mobilize in a rational way, but when it does it can drown its enemies in manpower. As a Rogue Trader GM I am often in the position of having to bump numbers or rewrite backstory to get the scale to somewhere reasonable. For example presenting the stated army size of a planet at face value, and having the players shocked at how defenseless this valuable world is and ready to agree with the military that Something Must Be Done to kick off a long political saga that starts with gunrunning and ends maybe in military coup and a less pliable government. Or rewriting an Imperial hive world in the Expanse (does not make sense!) with a few hundred million inhabitants (extremely does not make sense!) to a pre-Imperial hive world that has had one of its manufacturing hives successfully and profitably reclaimed by a Rogue Trader dynasty. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 19:31 on May 11, 2024 |
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May 11, 2024 18:31
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One of the reasons ship masses and crew numbers are off is that like most scifi writers they never thought about the square cube law. So they go, ok, this ship is about twice the size, let's have twice the mass and twice the crew. But really it's eight times (2^3) bigger. So the bigger the ship, the more underestimated the crews and masses are.
Elukka fucked around with this message at 20:00 on May 11, 2024 |
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May 11, 2024 19:57
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With 40k you just need to add a power to everything. 60,000 becomes 60,000,000 1,000,000 becomes 1,000,000,000 Etc
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May 11, 2024 20:05
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you by no means must specify hard numbers for things like that; but, if you decide to do so, you end up a cartesian plane whose axes are DATA/VIBES and COMMITMENT/REVISION. if you do some research, think about technology and its limits, maybe sketch some things to get a sense of space, arrive at a number, but remain willing to revise as needed as you uncover new info even if you are now doing just the latest installment of a long-running setting—that would be near the furthest limit of the DATA-REVISION corner. if you slam down a number based on what you need this paragraph to feel like and then make important decisions about the setting based on having that number already established, that is far into the VIBES-COMMITMENT corner. (reckon what the other corners are by using faculties of inference) i admit a certain romantic affection for going hard toward COMMITMENT and skewing gently toward VIBES because that leads to daring creative challenges
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May 11, 2024 20:26
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I feel like all spaceships in 40k being stupid stupid huge huge actually works against the setting overall, since it was entirely built around battles between armies that don't usually go above 200 soldiers, and even the Epic game can seem somewhat anemic compared to actual troop numbers in actual battles in actual wars. Entire space marine chapters top out at one thousand soldiers, and needing a crew of hundreds of thousands to ferry them around just feels dumb. Which sure, the entirety of 40k is extremely dumb, and the entire franchise has been built on the back of a series of old jokes. But the franchise also largely stopped treating those jokes as jokes decades ago, and it is only through the weird struggles of a weird fan community that some amount of the spirit of the old jokes survives.
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May 11, 2024 21:41
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like all spaceships in 40k being stupid stupid huge huge actually works against the setting overall, since it was entirely built around battles between armies that don't usually go above 200 soldiers, and even the Epic game can seem somewhat anemic compared to actual troop numbers in actual battles in actual wars. Entire space marine chapters top out at one thousand soldiers, and needing a crew of hundreds of thousands to ferry them around just feels dumb.
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May 11, 2024 22:07
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Elukka posted:One of the reasons ship masses and crew numbers are off is that like most scifi writers they never thought about the square cube law. So they go, ok, this ship is about twice the size, let's have twice the mass and twice the crew. But really it's eight times (2^3) bigger. So the bigger the ship, the more underestimated the crews and masses are. Real world ship crew requirements are way more function dependent than size though, like a container ship with twice the capacity of another could have the same size crew, but dwarf a cruiser with 4x their combined crews. It's going to depend on how much automation there is, which 40k is weird about, but it's also strongly tied to number of systems rather than size, so a ship with the same number of engines but much larger engine volume is only going to need a few more hands to maintain them and the same number to operate. That being said I try to just ignore any numbers in this kind of thing because what do I know about crewing requirements for an astropathic choir or warpcore maintenance
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May 11, 2024 22:22
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SlothfulCobra posted:Which sure, the entirety of 40k is extremely dumb, and the entire franchise has been built on the back of a series of old jokes. But the franchise also largely stopped treating those jokes as jokes decades ago, and it is only through the weird struggles of a weird fan community that some amount of the spirit of the old jokes survives. This was true for maybe 4 years of a 35 year old franchise. The grimdark tone was in place already in 1993. 40K is a very big franchise, and while the space marine domination of the tabletop game and the fascination with big spacemen is indeed pretty stupid, there's a lot to like as well.
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May 11, 2024 22:42
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pygmy tyrant posted:Real world ship crew requirements are way more function dependent than size though, like a container ship with twice the capacity of another could have the same size crew, but dwarf a cruiser with 4x their combined crews. It's going to depend on how much automation there is, which 40k is weird about, but it's also strongly tied to number of systems rather than size, so a ship with the same number of engines but much larger engine volume is only going to need a few more hands to maintain them and the same number to operate. Elukka fucked around with this message at 02:50 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 02:47
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Over in Trek the original design with TNG was that the Enterprise-D, about 2.5 times the length of the original Enterprise, would have a crew of 5000 (as opposed to the original's 430) but ultimately they didn't believe they could make it feel like that many crew on a TV production so they scaled it back to 1000. (Also the intent was that the actual necessary crew size was just a handful of people by that time due to automation)
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May 12, 2024 05:20
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There's a youtube video on all this.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx5uB0pyhQ But yeah, most writers suck at scale of any kind. Hell, most can't even tell the difference between a stellar system, galaxy and universe.
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May 12, 2024 05:57
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The plans, especially the early ones, for the Enterprise-D kinda justified the discrepancy by depicting the saucer as basically a thin crust of living/working space wrapped around a big core of tankage and bays and materiel and machine capability, since the ship was basically designed to be able to go out on its own for decade long missions in unexplored space without necessarily getting resupply and be able to handle just about anything. Also they mention in the show at one point that there are entire sections of the ship that haven't even been outfitted yet and are just framework for future expansion and swing use. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 07:03 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 06:59
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MikeJF posted:Also they mention in [TNG] at one point that there are entire sections of the ship that haven't even been outfitted yet and are just framework for future expansion and swing use. When? There are large parts of the Enterprise D that are referenced to exist but weren’t shown due to budgetary constraints, most notably cetacean ops (there are dolphins onboard for… reasons). The main shuttle bay is also enormous. You can see that one in those fan made 3D modeling efforts that keep getting shut down. Even taking those into account the crew is tiny, as that video shows. I kind of like how the sparse number of crew you see walking around in the show supports the idea that it’s very empty. Not entirely sure that was on purpose but it works.
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May 12, 2024 14:29
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david_a posted:When? Troi mentions when giving someone a tour of the ship at one point that there's a part that's unfinished and sometimes used for if they need extra space for something. The tech manual goes into more detail. david_a posted:most notably cetacean ops (there are dolphins onboard for… reasons). The reason being that they look cute in uniforms! https://i.imgur.com/Wgvh4QU.mp4 (The cetacean crew on the Cerritos are belugas) It was kinda infamous in the fandom but not that notable in the show itself, I think it got mentioned in a background announcment sound effect once and there was a door label. It was mostly a tech manual thing until Lower Decks. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 17:40 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 17:30
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MikeJF posted:
I love the “Town Square” bits, to reiterate how big the ship is.
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May 12, 2024 18:31
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MikeJF posted:
Geordi also asks someone if they’ve seen the dolphins yet in an episode, I think it was The Perfect Mate The overhead announcement was during Yesterday’s Enterprise
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May 12, 2024 19:24
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notaspy posted:40k has always struggled with scale. We get wars covering an entire sector that have millions of fighting men... When the eastern front involved 10 million troops. Sure, but not 10 million troops at the same time in a single battle, which is honestly the tone the complaints take sometimes. 40k also has an insane scale of warfare capacity, where a single Space Marine can wipe out whole companies of common infantry and their largest field armor are literal mobile fortresses.
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May 12, 2024 22:38
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One attraction of the system is that 40K leans into the dysfunctions of war with an intentionally disunited command structure, so for example a space marine unit might refuse to participate if assigned any mission at all, as they expect to be given operational control no matter how small a detachment they bring to a fight. (Echoing the Spartan rear end in a top hat behavior in every Greek alliance.)
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May 12, 2024 23:53
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I do like the idea of aquatic-based aliens creating their own spaceships full of water instead of air, but I don't think I've actually seen much really done with it. Star Trek was doing something weird with whales in one of the movies that it never really fully examined, much like how nothing ever really touched on the machine race that fostered V'ger or that one giant floating head. Trek actually did the most with the concept as part of the show Enterprise with the aquatic Xindi. They had a couple episodes.  There were also the Orz in Star Control who clearly have some kind of aquatic environment inside their ships, which is actually complicated a bit by their ship's special ability being the ability to deploy space marines to attack other ships. Which it isn't really illustrated how that works in the game, but some people can imagine.    https://androidarts.com/ Most of this is overlooked by people looking at the lore, because the Orz are also some kind of extradimensional cosmic horror that wiped out a civilization and are perhaps all just individual extrusions of a larger elder-god-type thing. Star Control 2 was a very eclectic game. Although I guess at the end of the day, aquatic spaceships are a lot like the idea of aliens that breathe gasses other than oxygen, interesting, but not often explored directly. Aquariums are already basically spaceships for fish.
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May 13, 2024 00:43
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I remember a really great shot with the Xindi-Aquatic ship where one was destroyed and it broke apart with all the water spilling out into space.
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May 13, 2024 00:59
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notaspy posted:40k has always struggled with scale. We get wars covering an entire sector that have millions of fighting men... When the eastern front involved 10 million troops. I still haven't heard a convincing explanation why the "only" 1km-long destroyers are too small to carry hangars for fighter squadrons.
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May 13, 2024 01:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:I do like the idea of aquatic-based aliens creating their own spaceships full of water instead of air, but I don't think I've actually seen much really done with it.   
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May 13, 2024 01:05
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Madurai posted:I still haven't heard a convincing explanation why the "only" 1km-long destroyers are too small to carry hangars for fighter squadrons. They needed the room for grimdark torture chambers and a tumblehome bow
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May 13, 2024 01:06
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Madurai posted:I still haven't heard a convincing explanation why the "only" 1km-long destroyers are too small to carry hangars for fighter squadrons. They do carry dozens of support craft, but Imperial strike craft are quite large. The real explanation is that BFGA is inspired by dreadnought era combat and rogue trader is inspired by age of sail, so naval aviation doesn't really fit the background. The BFG rulebook flat out says that the carrier revolution got underway in the imperium and then was aborted when it turned out strike craft just aren't capable enough to replace the big gun. Either that or the people responsible defected and took their tactics with them. It's deliberately unclear. But in any case, the Imperial navy doesn't like strike craft and doesn't use them outside the scouting role that often. They prefer torpedoes for long range bombardment.
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May 13, 2024 01:27
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