According to my back-of-an-envelope calculations, that's thirty six and a half litres (about 1.3 cubic feet) per day of food. That seems like quite a large amount to me.Originally Posted by BaronIveagh
According to my back-of-an-envelope calculations, that's thirty six and a half litres (about 1.3 cubic feet) per day of food. That seems like quite a large amount to me.
Cleansing could probably utilize other methods rather than just water alone, so that could cut down on the required amount. But I suspect that in an enclosed working environment, people might be inclined to consume more water.
Personally I don't think the pressed hands will be having many showers.
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This again.I jumped some pages and would just like to add That Andy Hoare helped with the Rogue trader RPG. And FFG works closely with GW to make sure they handle their IP well.
Yes FFG get atmosphere but they have been utterly disastrous when it comes to actual hard data and numbers, which are widely off other established data from other sources. The case of hive world population is a case in point. FFG's poor track record does not leave them a reliable source when it comes to numbers or actual scale. Nor do they get other things right about 40K ships, including their relative rarity or the length of time for construction (both overestimating their rarity and length of construction time).This again.
something tells me andy was more concerned with the other aspects of the game
If the false emperor will man tanks with scribes and clerks then we shall fill graves with fools and hypocrites.
Left hand down a bit...
Or they may cram as much as possible in for when they get lost and wind up on the other side of the galaxy...
Ok, sealed system.
If you use it to also clean out CO2 and generate O2 to breath, how do you get that in and out?
How do you get it out to eat?
What about if the lights fail, how do you get someone in to change the bulb?
Now you're into pipework and filters and flow baffles pumps and air locks and everything else, and that system has just gone crazy.
No, human mutation in the 40k universe is crazy sci-fi mutation - microbe mutation is a very real and present danger (MRSA anyone?)the mutation problem would only be a worry because mutation in general in 40k is crazy scifi mutation and cant be rationally inferred
If this is your food stock, you need it to be sustainable, which means it has to reproduce, and you're probably looking at a whole new generation every few days.
If, as the cliche says, the simplest answer is usually the best one, maybe the simplest solution is the correct one - and the simplest solution is load up with supplies before leaving port and don't muck about with things that need large amounts of space, power and personnel when you don't have to.
"Grimdark." Sorry, but to me that's the final resort of someone who's trying to justify something in the 40k universe that makes no sense whatsoever.the cheaper option is always the preferred one , however in this instance i must insist that ships would have some sort of soylent green machines, it just wouldnt be grimdark without them (i can just imagine the petty officers liking their lips every time a pressganger gets crushed)
Ok, rating Bob gets crushed to death. Are his friends going to be happy if his corpse doesn't get handled appropriately for his homeworlds own particular beliefs - especially if the officers do?
No, they're not - and congratulations, you've just sown the seeds of a possible mutiny.
If everything is grimdark, then there's no contrast - to quote Moving Pictures, you need the light to be able to see the darkness.
Sir, you deserve a cookie for that one.
Agreed.
If you need 20, or 200, or even 2,000 people to load a torpedo, fine. But you can't say that because you've got that many people available, you'll use them to load a torpedo.
Well, think what you eat in a day.
Take sugar in your tea/coffee, or put salt in the water when you boil your vegetables? Add that in.
Now include all the things like vegetable peelings, cooking oils and so on that you use to eat but don't consume yourself.
And throw in packaging (even if it's as lightweight and thin as possible to reduce mass and volume, it's still to be considered).
Well since this is the most recent background i would say it is established fluff. And there are as we have seen more contradictions around than you like to admitt.
Btw who say that cruiser "Angels fist" and cruiser "Fist of Angels" have the same number of crew? Maybe they are on different technological levels and thereby requiring different amount of crew.
And, as they(ffg and Andy Hoare) has said, they had so much in the Starship section they had to cut the majority out.
It is a source with poor track record and which stands as marked outlier in comparison with the existing body of evidence from multiple sources, both GW and BL, it is hardly established fluff. It's like saying Goto's garbage trumps and overrules all older Eldar codices.
We are not talking minor variation between individual ships within a class. We are talking differences of a magnitude or even according to some here in this thread, several orders of magnitude.Btw who say that cruiser "Angels fist" and cruiser "Fist of Angels" have the same number of crew? Maybe they are on different technological levels and thereby requiring different amount of crew.
One reason I can't quite get a grip on either the scale or mechanics of 40K naval architecture or crewing is probably due to the fact I used to design warships for other systems. Sailors tend to be inherently better trained to deal with the usual tasks that are required to be done onboard, usually are kept busy with a variety of jobs (if related to their primary task).
Though the larger the crew, the less likely the chance of mutiny regarding disposal of the remains.
Warship or starship design in other systems usually still operates in a paradigm where technology is understood in general and not hoarded and kept under the control of a few. That is not the case in 40K. In the BFG rulebook for example, there is a story where a team sent to put out a fire wait til a Tech-Priest has blessed the fire extinguishing equipment before they turn it on the fire.
The average crewman is likely to have little idea of the overall function of the ship beyond their assigned duties and location. Sure they may know somewhere there are engines and reactors and somewhere there are torpedoes, but in a nebulous sense. The crewman in Andy Chambers' story about crew size didn't know how many people were in the lance turrets, and Andy's statement on lance turrets suggested lance crews spend all their time in the turret emplacement, never seeing the rest of the ship.
Again, not a remotely difficult technical challenge. The C02 is bubbled in near the bottom, and the O2 accumulates and can be extracted at the top. A system could even be designed to work entirely in zero-G. There will be fluid traps and automatically-closing valves to prevent mixture getting where it shouldn't. Meanwhile the whole process is happily proceding along, with seeder algae and nutrients inserted at one end, and piped out the other, with some of the new growth fed back to the start.
Mutation isn't going to be too much of a problem, because you're in such a stagnant and unchallenging environment that no traits get selected for. In the case where something does occur, you just have to boil the whole batch and start from another tiny pack of freeze-dried algae from when things were just fine.
Light? Well the tanks can be transparent, or have windows, or the light-tubes can be inserted into transparent pipes within the reaction vessel, or all sorts of other solutions.
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Poor track record? Yeah. In my eyes both GW and BL have a bad track record.
In anyway it sounds like your opinion and not some "official poor track record" judgement.
But you may enlighten me about their "poor track record" if you wish. I have all the books, and i have read majorty of BL productions(well 40k one atleast).
I cannot see whats so bad about ffg's "track record". (exept the Vindicare assassin career in Ascension which is there only by popular demand it would seem).
FFG's hive world population numbers are inconsistent with hive world populations and definitions as given in the 3rd ed. 40K rulebook and also as a reference the "average" hive world given as example in the 5th edition rulebook. By the 3rd edition standards, none of the worlds in FFG's Calixis sector would approach the population levels to warrant classification as hive world. Their supposed teeming hive world sector capital has only 1/4th of the minimum population to even qualify as a hive world according to the Imperium wide scale of planet classification listed in the 3rd edition rulebook.
FFG is inconsistent in ship scale and crew size with Andy Chambers' stated scale from the old bfg list. It is also inconsistent with reported crew size of a standard Dictator class cruiser from the BL BFG novel Shadow Point:
FFG's numbers are also inconsistent with the BL novel Soul Hunter (more recent than FFG's RT), which describes a crew for a grand cruiser, which is larger than a cruiser, more in keeping with Andy Chambers' scale:Now, six years later, he was one of the most senior non-commissioned officers amongst a crew of almost thirteen thousand... p. 62, Shadow Point, by Gordon Rennie
In comparison, FFG is claiming a crew of about 90,000 for a Lunar class which is a factor of over 6x the number for a comparable cruiser as shown above, and over 3x that for a larger and more heavily armed ship class. This is not even considering FFG gives crew sizes for a light cruiser that are over double that for the above grand cruiser.Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches... p.95-96, Soul Hunter
There is also the matter of scale. FFG gives sizes for cruisers on the order of 5km, which is again significantly off from the accepted BFG scale of 3km cruisers and approximately 6km battleships. The latter scale is backed up by examples such as from the BL Word Bearer novel Dark Disciple
What these examples show is that there is a largely internally consistent scale for ship size and crew within the BFG and BL background, by multiple different authors in multiple sources published at some fairly widely varying dates, including some very recent ones that are even more recent than FFG. There is also some consistency in hive world population from 2 different editions of the main 40K rulebook.Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness.
...Six kilometres from stern to prow... p. 31, Dark Disciple
FFG departs dramatically from both main bodies of evidence, and stands as a lone data point notably outside the general bounds of the rest of the data. In practical functional terms, they've done a Goto and gotten their data jarringly wrong and inaccurate.
Last edited by Iracundus; 21-04-2010 at 10:57.
Au contraire my dear Iracundus, we very well could be. For a ship that uses macro cannons which are hand loaded and hand transversed could very well have an order of magnitude larger of a crew compared to a ship that simply uses upscaled plasma cannons. You could be looking at a crew of 5 for the gun including technicians in that point versus a crew of 40ish for the other. Both in BFG could be treated as Tyrant class cruisers despite such vast crew differances.
Imperial Guard W/L/D 1/5/1
Assuming all the traps and valves work all the time.
Nope, sorry, you've mistaken the occurance of mutation with the process of natural selection - genes mutate all the time (your DNA is probably something like 40% exactly like your dad, 40% exactly like your mum, 7% & 7% where the chromosomal arms linked and recombined, creating new DNA sequences from existing ones, and the remainder mutations caused by environmental factors and random read errors during the DNA replication phases of cell division - as is mine, and everyone else's who's reading this).Mutation isn't going to be too much of a problem, because you're in such a stagnant and unchallenging environment that no traits get selected for. In the case where something does occur, you just have to boil the whole batch and start from another tiny pack of freeze-dried algae from when things were just fine.
It's only when an event causes some genotypes to show that they're more suited for survival in/after that event do those traits get selected.
And that's also assuming you catch it in time before it poisons half the ship, and a tiny pack of freeze-dried algae may take many days to grow enough to replace what you've had to destroy - what do you eat and breath in the meantime?
Light will only be useful to a certain depth - you're either into tall, thin tubes, a very large tank with multiple tubes running through it (like a steam engines' boiler) or a flat vat. Either way, there's still limitations.Light? Well the tanks can be transparent, or have windows, or the light-tubes can be inserted into transparent pipes within the reaction vessel, or all sorts of other solutions.
Also, the light sources will heat the medium, and you'd have to be very careful not to over heat it and kill off everything.
Were it as simple as you describe, we'd have created it ourselves today, and be pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and feeding the third world with it.
Also, most of the power on a ship will be going to the engines first, followed by the shields, whilst energy weapons will likely take power that would otherwise go to different systems (lighting etc) - although they may also take a constant feed to power capacitors and storage cells outside of combat.
Such a system as you describe would require massive amounts of power too - and if it had to be shutdown to supply power to weapons, or because of damage, then you're going to be in trouble.
And no, just throwing on extra power plants to run this isn't the answer - they'll be effectively commandeered and added to the engines and combat systems
Define hand-loaded.
Is hand loaded where some people pull open a breech, other people push the shell into the barrel and then the breech is closed by the first bunch pushing on it?
Or is hand loaded where someone pulls on a handle, which causes hydraulics to open the breech, someone else pushes a button that causes the shell to be pushed off the ready magazine onto a cradle, then another button pushes the cradle in line with the breech and a third person pulls a level that causes a hydraulic ram to push the shell into the breech, then everyone pulls levers and presses buttons again to withdraw the ram, move the cradle and close the breech?
Is hand traversed a bunch of ratings with winding handles (like the Bofors turrets on HMS Belfast), or a gun controller either pressing on a foot pedal or moving a joystick to direct power to a motor that turns a gear meshed with a rack to traverse it?
I personally like to think of it being all of the above, with ships being built across the galaxy and across millenia, all still in service, the variety would be pretty large, even given attempts at standardisation. With gun crews and lower ranked ratings spending thier entire career on a single ship they wouldn't have a problem with adapting to a new system every few years, once you've got to know your particular vessel. (This is an assumption, is there a record of crews changing ships regularly?)
Last edited by Burnthem; 21-04-2010 at 14:31.
Sticky! Thank you Darnok!!
pipework, filters and pumps, such things could never exist on a STARSHIP
im sorry your objection is vacuous in this instance, the technology for such as system is extremely simple, much less complicated then virtually any other piece of technology found on the vessel
we are talking about technology that already exists, and is cheap and easy to manufacture and use, the only difference is that the produce we make now with it is not eaten, it is the basis for manufacture of many of our medicines (but in the future it will be used to make fuel, the application for food generation is only being considered in space missions)
you do not appear to have any clue about mutation, how it works and the consequences especially if you think tau, kroot or tyranid evolution is not crazy sci-fi mutation (S. Aureus is a ridiculous red herring that has no relevance, and if you dont know why then i might have to teach you about basic evolutionary and molecular biology, which id prefer not to do considering warhammer is my escape from my work) also the generation times for yeasts are as little as two hours, days is laughableNo, human mutation in the 40k universe is crazy sci-fi mutation - microbe mutation is a very real and present danger (MRSA anyone?)
If this is your food stock, you need it to be sustainable, which means it has to reproduce, and you're probably looking at a whole new generation every few days.
additionally even if mutation was a problem (which it is not since the vast majority of mutations do nothing, and of those that do do something most are deleterious), you can simply store freeze dried spores of your food stock organism and each batch can be spawned from the original sample stock
yes that is sensible, and it might be completely unnecessary for a ship that calls in to port regularly, but consider some ships like mechanicus explorator vessels might not see a friendly port for generations, in this scenario bioreactor food cultivation is the only optionIf, as the cliche says, the simplest answer is usually the best one, maybe the simplest solution is the correct one - and the simplest solution is load up with supplies before leaving port and don't muck about with things that need large amounts of space, power and personnel when you don't have to.
except corpse starch is mentioned in the fluff all the time (mechanicum and the necromunda rulebook off the top of my head) it makes perfect sense"Grimdark." Sorry, but to me that's the final resort of someone who's trying to justify something in the 40k universe that makes no sense whatsoever.
have you read any fluff regarding how ratings normally live or are treated? they have more then enough grounds for mutiny already and most of them will come from hive worlds anyway where corpse recycling is common practiceOk, rating Bob gets crushed to death. Are his friends going to be happy if his corpse doesn't get handled appropriately for his homeworlds own particular beliefs - especially if the officers do?
No, they're not - and congratulations, you've just sown the seeds of a possible mutiny.
did i say everything needed to be grimdark?If everything is grimdark, then there's no contrast - to quote Moving Pictures, you need the light to be able to see the darkness.
Last edited by MagosHereticus; 21-04-2010 at 14:59.
If the false emperor will man tanks with scribes and clerks then we shall fill graves with fools and hypocrites.
absolute rubbish, firstly mutation and evolution are inherently linked, mutation is half the mechanism in evolution, secondly genes do not mutate all the time, the point mutation/insertion/deletion rate occurs roughly only once in every 10 billion transcription events and chromosomal crossovers are not "mutations" per se but an entirely different event and unless the crossover intersects a gene or its promoter it will likely not have an effect, lastly those percentages you've cited are made up
your talking out your ass
If the false emperor will man tanks with scribes and clerks then we shall fill graves with fools and hypocrites.
Minor nitpick: Dark Heresy rulebook that mentions these figures was published by Black Industries, not FFG.
Also, Calixis sector is a small sector on the verge of Imperial space, colonised only 2000 years ago. It's bound to have non-standard populations, but it's undeniable that the main type of habitation on it is a Hive, thus making it a hive world. The clasification in 3e rulebook is also problematic, if "Hive World" designation was a function of population only, most Forge Worlds would have to be hive worlds too. I've seen Armageddon and Valhalla called both hive worlds and industrial/death worlds, so it's definitely possible that there are different classifications.
For one, the numerical designation could be for the purposes of tithing, while the one used in DH is based on the archetypical inhabitant. It is again undeniable that Scintilla despite its smallish population breeds people that are more similar to Necromundans, than say Cadians. That's because the former both live in hives, hence the hive world designation.
I can't argue with your defence of Andy Chambers' ship sizes - they have more precedent, but I just like the FFG's more - even despite not being a fan of 1km titans or 2,5m Marines. That's just the one case where bigger is better for me.
It's a shame that FFG made these two errors, but I'd refrain from denying their games' canonicity. I find that DH and RT both present a fascinating image of the world, much deeper than boring warporn we are constantly being subject to. Their publications are consistently head and shoulders above all other GW material (with the exception of Imperial Armour on a good day), with unparalelled depth and internal consistency.
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