User:Kathador/Imperium of Man high end fleet

People have done debates and blogs on this site that involve 40k minimally at least. if people wish too, this here for a little light-shedding on the IOM's capabilities if whatever they are doing involves 40k.

“In the depths of space, such fights took place at ranges that would swallow a star system, ships hitting ships beyond each other’s visual ranges.”

-Pg. 91 Deus Sanguinius So minimum two-digit AUs to maximum 1 light year. If we go by the Solar system, that's minimum 30 AUs. 2. Ship acceleration

"Fusion motors unleashed the tiny suns at their cores and pushed the craft away, climbing the acceleration curve in a glitter of void shields and displaced energy. In moments, the vessel was rising towards one-quarter lightspeed." Pg.725 Nemesis So this thing accelerates to 0.25c "In moments". As far as I know, "In moments" usually indicate a time length shorter than a minute. Assuming it took a minute for the ship to accelerate to 0.25c, that's approx. 1,250,000km/s^2, or approx. 130,000,000g. "The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.  The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.   Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.   There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth?s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach."  -p.158 Know no Fear e-book, pdf version is p.63, [mark: -0.18.34] This also fits nicely with the above figure. 3. Average combat speeds.

“For the second time in less than an hour, space tore open. The reality fissure leapt and crackled like a luminous cephalopod, lashing tendrils of warp energy into real space that twisted out, fizzled and faded. Non-baryonic light flared brilliantly through the tear, backlighting the arriving ships. Monumental silhouettes, they were shot forward into real space. Four ships, one of them very large. And they were moving. Point seven five light at least, cutting straight towards Herodor. They did not slow down. They were moving at cruise speed. Attack Speed.” / The Saint: A Gaunt's Ghosts Omnibus, p.893 & 894 Well, there we go. 0.75c is average combat speed/attack speed.:p Plus this, of course.

"Even if the ports had remained open, there was nothing to see. You were brawling with - and being fired upon by - an object that might be thousands of kilometres away in the interstellar blackness, and moving at a considerable percentage of the speed of light." -p.162 Salvation's Reach 5. Rate of fire "It lasted exactly fifty-one seconds, and several of those were gifts; the Covenant  of Blood toyed with its prey before the killing strike.   The Astartes strike cruiser drew closer, opening up with a barrage of lance fire. These cutting beams of precision energy slashed across space between the two vessels, and for several heartbeats, the void shields around the Maiden lit up in   flaring brilliance. Where the lances stabbed against the shields, a riot of colours rippled around the trader ship, like oil spreading across the surface of water.   The Maiden’s shields endured this beautiful punishment for a handful of seconds, before buckling under the warship’s assault. Resembling a popping bubble in almost all respects, the void shields collapsed with a crackle of energy, leaving the Maiden defenceless except for its reinforced hull armour.   Kartan Syne had the wherewithal to get his bridge crew together by this point, and the Maiden returned fire. The barrage from the trader’s conventional weapons batteries was monumentally weaker than the lance strikes of the Astartes ship. The Covenant of Blood drifted ever closer, its own shields now displaying the rippling colours of attack pressure, except?much to the unsurprised dismay of Syne?the warship’s shields showed no strain at all. The approaching vessel ignored the minor assault. It was already firing its lances a second time."  -p.14(pdf), Soul Hunter. The battle is said to have lasted 51 seconds. In this quote alone, we have the lances firing 2 salvos. Reading a few pages further and we get minimum 3 lance salvos in 51 seconds. So that's approx. one salvo per every 17 seconds or so.

6. Weapons accuracy

The mere fact that they can hit each other across such distances speaks for it self. Planning on doing calcs for how many macrocannon shells are there per broadside and etc.

7. Firepower

Okaaaaay, the cream of this anaysis.:)

"Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface; torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations." Pg.561 Nemesis So, let's start with the torpedoes first. Premise: A single torpedo warhead can literally 'atomize' two Austrailia-sized landmasses, down to the depth of 10kms(This is because IIRC some hives descend all the way down there, as well as some mies).

Calc: Assuming that the entire land mass is made of SiO2, which has a heat of decomposition of -911kj/mol, a block of SiO2 with an area twice the total area of Austrailia and height of 10kms would be approx. 6,713,333,333,333,333,333,333 mols.

So in order to 'atomize' that, we get minimum thermal energy input of 6,115,847,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Js, or 1.46 EXAtons of TNT equivalent.

The Torpedo is an omnidirectional blast, so double tha number and we get approx. 2.92 exatons per warhead.

BFG and Rogue Trader RPG tells us there are on average around 6 torpedoes per torpedo salvo from a single ship. So that's around 17.52 exatons per salvo.

Next up, boiling oceans. In order to completely vaporize the Indian Ocean, you require at least around 159 petatons of energy.

""Outside the station the macro cannon and lances of the Aethon began to rotate. Plasma flushed into reactors and energy wells, the fury of suns snarling in its shackles."  Pg.374, Architect of Fate That, taken literally, can mean that 40k starships have energy generation capacity of 90~180 petatons per seconds that can be sent to the weapons. Oh boy, and then we have Nostramo.

"The Night Lords' ships orbited Nostramo, hundreds of weapons trained on the shrouded planet, the rays of the system's dying sun glinting from barrels too numerous to count. As the fabric of space buckled and twisted, disgorging the few craft able to keep pace, the lances and mass drivers of Night Haunter's flagship opened fire upon the planet.  Beam after beam of incandescent light joined the fusillade, all concentrating upon the same point, a weak spot in Nostramo's adamantium crust theorised to be left by the Primarch's initial landing. The lasers of the Night Lords' ships focused a blinding lance of pure energy into the planet's core, and with a cataclysmic explosion, the dark planet burst apart. "-Index Astartes II:Night Lords. So "hundreds" of weapons manages to mass-scatter a planet. And yes, it was mass-scatter, just read the Night Lords series and you'll know. So, this, no matter how you look at it, can't possibly be decribing an event that happened over a length of time longer than an hour. It is also said in the Night Lords series that individual marines watched the whole thing happen, and I find it hard to believe that marines would just stand there watching the hundreds of beams (very!) slowly eating it self into the planet's center for more than a full hour.

In order to mass scatter an earth-sized planet you need minimum 2.2e32 joules. Assuming 200 weapons and one hour for the job, we get approx. 73 petatons per second as a power output for each gun.

So lances and weapons batteries apparently can go all the way up to two~three digit petatons in ULTRA-high end 40k, with torpedoes being able to go up to single digit exatons.;)

8. Ship armor, shielding, and durability.

"The warheads, thirty of them, rained into the starboard side of the keeling ship, which had been knocked side-on into the path of the enemy by the first strike. Only wisps of shield remained. Two torpedoes detonated as they ploughed into the dense, glittering debris field that fogged the vacuum beside the Domino like a cloud of blood beside a floating body. Another triggered as it struck the hard, pressurised release of environment gases squirting through the Domino’s burst hull.  All three detonations, miniature starbursts too bright to look at, disappeared a moment later as the other twenty-seven warheads encountered the primary hull. Concentric rings of shockwave and overpressure criss-crossed, and twisted the fabric of the hull apart, like raindrops rippling the still surface of a pool. Light bloomed, a supernova, a ferocious pink-tinged white that scared away the blackness of the void like a sunrise and turned the Benedicamus Domino into a sharp-edged black silhouette. The frigate perished. Disintegration crept through its structure from the blast point outwards, vaporising the hull’s armour jacket, chewing away the superstructure, sloughing away surface plating like fish scales. Tidal waves of liquid flame poured and gurgled through each deck level, and then ate away the deck planes in between. Firestorms surged up connective shafts and access wells, boiled through environmental systems, and torched the ship’s leaking atmosphere. Within a second of the main strike, geysers of fire and explosive shockwash were squirting out through the other side of the ship like exit wounds, blowing out shuttered ports, carrier deck doors, airgates and gun stations. "  -p.171, Salvation's Reach, e-book is p.153. So, this frigate still has something left after eating 27~28 of those exatons torpedoes. Nuff said:D . You can use BFG and Rogue Trader RPG stats to figure out the rest.

"It returned fire just as its shields died, unleashing a blistering barrage of lances, solid shells and plasma fire from its prow weapons batteries, as well as a precisely timed single magma bomb warhead, principally designed for surface attack, from its bombardment cannon.  This payload struck the Sword just as massed fire from the three other Traitor Astartes vessels coordinated their prow weapons on the same target. It was as close to the shark-like unity of the black sea sharks as the Exalted could have imagined, but that was hardly foremost in the Night Lord commander’s mind.   All of this unleashed punishment was enough, barely, to achieve the Exalted’s desires. The colossal Sword of the God-Emperor, pride of Battlefleet Crythe, flagship of Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur, no longer shimmered behind an invinciblescreen of rippling energy.   Its shields were down, overloaded by the sudden savage assault of the Astartes strike cruiser. The Exalted was not a fool. He knew void war, and he knew the capabilities of his foes, the strength of their weapons, and the power of their vessels. He knew the Sword of the God-Emperor was bristling with failsafes and auxiliary generatoriums, and his attack had inflicted no real damage to the enemy flagship beyond temporarily overloading its shields by giving them too much to absorb at once. They would be back online within moments?a minute at the very most?multi-layered and strong once more."  -pdf version, p.50, Soul Hunter. It takes 4 coordinated strikes from Astartes strike cruisers to take down a Grand Cruiser's shields. Assuming a 300 petaton broadside from the figure above, we get minimum 1.2 exatons to bring down a Grand Cruiser's shields.

You can use the game stats in BFG and Rogue Trader to figure out the rest. Also do note, unless precision weapons are used to destroy the secondary generators and etc, the shields will be back full strength within a minute.

"The Aggressor Libertus, a significant ship in its own right, began firing as it turned, loosing as much as it could at the oncoming [TORMAGEDDON MONSTRUM REX]. The daemon ship's shields held firm. The Libertus's barrage, enough to strip a hive down to the mantle, spattered off the voidshields like firecrackers." - Salvation's Reach, pgs. 172-173 This, while supporting double~triple digit petatons depending on how you look at it, also gives such resistance to the shields. 9. Ship numbers

"The hazy sky was full of metal and looked like it should fall. The awesome power of the  Imperium was there for every Verghastite to see: ten thousand ships, some the size of cities, some   bloated like ornate oceanic turtles, some slender and serrated like airborne cathedrals." -p.309, Necropolis, pdf version p.174 So a crusade fleet has minimum ten thousand ships. Assuming that a crusade fleet like this would be around 4 times larger than a normal battle fleet, we get 2500 warp-capable ships per battlefleet. Then we have a quote from Rynn's world that falls withing the error range.

"Deguerro directed Kantor’s attention to the orbital plane of the Rynnstar system’s outermost planet, Phraecos, a barren, moonless world with a surface of frozen methane. Just within the hololithic ring of the planet’s orbital path, a formation of  glowing blue triangles flickered into existence, attendant streams of digital data spooling through the air beside them.   “Two thousand two hundred and sixteen warp-capable ships,” said Deguerro, “and nothing smaller than a Dauntless-class light cruiser.... A bit later on into this quote we discover this fleet has 8 battleships total. Anyways, we can get from the following quotes that the Imperium has minimum 2 million worlds.

"It is a given fact that through the might and valour of the Imperial Navy, the raging tides of foul aliens and vile heretics that infest the galaxy have been stayed from overrunning the millions of worlds that over the millennia have come under the Emperor's beneficent rule."-p.1, BFG Fabric of the Imperium "They were the best troops the millions of worlds the Imperium of Mankind could produce."-p.4 Ragnar's claw, pdf ver. "It was only one world but there were millions of such worlds in the Imperium, separated by thousands of light years of distance. He had heard it said that if a man could visit one new world in the galaxy every day of his life, he would not have visited a thousandth of the inhabited worlds by the time he died."-p.23 Ragnar's claw, pdf ver.  "The Imperium is a mighty conglomerate of millions of worlds spread over unimaginably large distances."-p.2, Inquisitor's Sketch book "It was merely one of many such worlds that floated in the space around that huge sun. And in turn the Eye of Russ was just one of millions of suns that made up the galaxy and around many of which orbited other inhabited worlds."-p.105, Space Wolf, pdf ver. We can also conjecture from BFG Rulebook page 159 and Dark Heresy Rulebook 288~289 that there seems to be on average around a hundred Imperial worlds per sector. That gives the Imperium 20,000 sectors. Going by the 2,500 warp-capable combat vessels per sector, we get minimum 50 million warp-capable combat vessels.

From the Rynn's world quote, we can get a rough idea on the composition of the 50 million ships. Directly after the quote Deguerro metions there being a 'few' Astartes battle barges but most being the navy.

So accounting the space marine escorts and etc, let's assume 16 of them belong to the space marines. That leaves 2,200 ships for the navy. Assuming this fleet represents the total number of ships in a typical battlefleet(leaving aside the 'nothing smaller than a Dauntless-class light cruiser', as with Rynn's worlds's fleet it was obviously a special case, since something equivalent of a sector fleet gathered all at one place), let's go ahead with the calcs.

There are 8 battleships in that fleet. Moreover, we know from BFG and other multiple sources that escorts make up the majority of the fleet. So let's assume fully half of the 2,200 ships are escorts.

Eventually, we get a ratio of 8:1,092:1,100, Battleships:Cruisers:Escorts. That simplified would be 2 : 273 : 275. Assuming this applies roughly the same to the navy as a whole, we get approx. 182,000 battleships, 24,800,000 cruisers of various classes, and 25 million escorts.:eek:

10. Warp speeds

"Without the warp drive the Imperium and its civilization could not exist. Spacecraft equipped with warp drives can, under the guidance of a specially gifted Navigator, move into, across, and out of warp space. By doing so, a spacecraft can move hundreds of thousands of light years in only a few hours. And the power to move such distances is also a power that wins battles and maintains empires." -p.4, Adeptus Titanius Rulebook, 2nd edition. So, assuming 3 hours and 200,000 LYs, we get 584,000,000c Let us not forget that despite the might of the Imperial Battle Barge, it is left blinded and stranded in the dust by the likes of the Battleship Renascence fleet model. At over 300km in length, 30km high and with a hull thickness of over one kilometer of reinforced Adamantium shielding, it possesses three main bow canons, each ten kilometers in length which individually produce skyscraper sized bolts of NOVA plasma shots twenty kilometers in length used for the destruction of gas giants. Followed closely by millions upon millions of weapons batteries, rail guns, plasma batteries, missile launchers, plasma torpedoes, lancer beams and nova (Anti-Planet) canons interlacing the entire hull. Couple this with the fact that the ship generates a warp energy shield, making it stronger with each energy based strike, has a five kilometer thick adamantium battering ram on the fore bow (It can smash through a Halo installation and not even notice). It also generates several Micro Dyson fields to maximize the storage capacity of the interior, generates its own atmosphere and agricultural biosphere, contains an internal dry dock, vehicle and weapons factory (It can continually construct titanic amounts of fleet support and ordinance) and house over several billion crew and residents’ and we begin to see the emergence of one, very nasty ship. Now despite the fact that there are only handful of these ships available in the nearby proximity of Segementum Solar, just one of these ships is enough to cause trouble for *any* opposing Navy. Imagine over 200km worth of interlaced weapons batteries firing 300 meter long bolts of Plasma every few seconds in continuous salvos.

Kor Phaeron steps forward and places his left hand on the master control.

He presses it.

The weapons grid begins to fire. Concentrated and coherent energy. Shoals of missiles. Destructive beams. Warheads of antimatter sheathed in heavy metals. The rays and beams will take almost eight minutes to reach their target. The hard projectiles will take considerably longer. But they will all hit in turn, and continue to strike again and again as the merciless bombardment continues.

Their target is the blue-white star of the Veridian System.

Kor Phaeron begins to murder the sun. - Know No Fear, pg. 347

the IOM has planetary defense systems that murder suns.

so, that is quite a lot. the IOM ain't shabby. course this is nothing to the necrons, but still, quite decent.