Analyzing WH40K: Roks and other quantification odds and ends

[Jedi Master Spock]

Here, to date, is what I know about Roks.

An Orkish Rok is essentially a hollowed out asteroid with a shield projector, a sublight drive, and some weapons slapped on. They are generally not supposed to be warp capable, but apparently exceptions exist to that rule.

Roks tend to multiply rapidly in systems, with dozens sprouting up in months; they are also known to land. From this, we could guess that most Roks aren't too much bigger than WH40K battleships - maybe some are >10 km, but the typical Rok should probably be less than that.

Roks are not particularly maneuverable or fast. Nonetheless, although not particularly useful in fleet combat due to their low speed and difficult to control maneuvers, they are not short on firepower or durability by WH40K standards.

[In game, the hollowed out asteroids themselves take about as much killing as a cruiser (8 hits and 1 shield), and have reasonably similar firepower.]

Does this sound about right? Anyone have any hard Rok numbers?

[Jedi Master Spock]

I've been curious for a while, nursing the suspicion that we only see high-ball estimates offered for WH40K because almost nobody who isn't a huge fan of WH40K is going to read any WH40K novels, which is where most of the estimates come from.

Apparently there's one ridiculous low-ball comment about "gigawatts" in one novel, but we can actually provide more reasonable low-end estimates using the same sorts of analysis that has been used to provide the ~ gigaton photon torpedo maximum yields, the 1-10 GT/sec phaser yields, et cetera.

So I figured I'd start with throwing some figures around, calculating a few isolated examples, just to have a few more numbers to look at. Some will be low-ball estimates; some may be about right; some may be high-ball. And just maybe, if I start pulling out some figures, other people will too.

For isolated examples, the high end, we already know, is pretty high (e25 J), and the low end, pretty low (e9).

[Jedi Master Spock]

Just a quick selection of WH40K quotes with commentary while I get a few things sorted out:

FTL speed

For example, a 100 light year jump will seem to take from 234 to 934 hours to a spaceship's crew, but between 3 days and 3 weeks will have passed in real space. These times do not include journey times out to and from jump points on the edge of the star systems. It takes from days to weeks of travel at sub-light speeds to reach a drop from the spaceship's starting planet, and a similar time to re-enter the destination system.The Imperium is approximately 75 thousand light years from edge to edge. A journey of this length would take between 75 and 300 days in warp time, and between 6 years and 40 years real time.

Those figures translate to 1,875-12,500 c for 75,000 light years, 1733-12175 c for 100 light years.
"Apparent" speed aboard ship is much faster but not very consistent.

5,000 light years would be the normal maximum jump, but longer jumps have been made.

Individual jumps are generally no more than 5,000 light years. Fairly straightforward.

Perceived journey time is 1-4 days per thousand light years, equivalent to 1-6 months of real time. Even so, a journey from one edge of the galaxy to the other would take between 85 and 510 months of real time.

This gives 2,000-12,000 c. Looks, actually, remarkably consistent so far, although the variability in the dilation is pretty large. The Imperial Guard book, though, muddles things:

Ten thousand light years can be traversed within 10-40 days by warp-capable spacecraft. By the
time ships have been moved into position, munitions collected and troops assembled, the response
time over this distance is in the order of between 30 and 120 days, typically about 75 days.

This has been given before as the apparent time elapsed on the ship. Now we've been given 90,000-365,000 c in the context of response time.

Ground warfare

In addition to their support and technical personnel, a Chapter contains tens of thousands of Marines (Note that after the Heresy new Chapters were formed with far smaller complements so that no Commanders would ever wield the same power as Horus).

High end of current chapter size: Tens of thousands of active Marines plus support personnel.

The Legiones Astartes is known always as the Space Marine, it comprises 1000 independent
fighting units called Chapters, each of roughly 1000 fighting troops.

Low end: ~1,000 space marines per chapter.

There's also a list of space marine abilities. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to include hyper movement speed, new kinds of muscular tissue, or reflex speed increases. All in all, I gather the impression that Space Marines are not particularly consistently described.

On the hive-world of Thranx over a million warriors died in a single day on the killing fields of Perdagor.

Someone in Games Workshop reads Alan Dean Foster.


Fleets

The Space Commander has direct command of a portion of the Segmentum's warfleet. A typical
command comprises about 50 interstellar ships, although the number would obviously vary
depending upon the needs of the sector.

A typical sector fleet has 50 interstellar warships. Straightforward enough. The whole of the Imperium fleet is "many thousands," with nothing more specific anywhere I could find.

The Imperial fleets number many thousands of ships, the majority of which are at least a thousand years old. Some are as old as the Imperium itself, a full ten thousand years. A very few claim a pre-Imperial origin. It is difficult for those born under the claustrophobic sky of a planet to appreciate the great dignity which is inherent in all old spacecraft. The spaceships of the Imperium are vast constructions that take many decades to build.

Average service life is longer than that of a Miranda or even a Klingon battlecruiser.

On the flip side, the Imperium isn't producing ships very quickly.

The living areas of a spaceship contain the thousands, often tens of thousands, of men that serve
aboard.

Thousands to tens of thousands of operating crew. Hundreds of thousands on maint duties, by the way.

Most of the galaxy remains unexplored.

A reiteration of the whole "space is big" theme. Warhammer's galaxy is much like ours.

Storms are constantly forming and dying down, at any time at least 10% of the galaxy's solar systems will be inaccessible because of storms.

On average, 10% of systems are inaccessible to FTL WH40K ships. Interesting fact.

One giant craft span out of control and crashed into a hab-unit, killing a hundred thousand people.

(This is from the Horus Heresy, by the way.)
Not a strange death count for a falling ship.
More importantly, however:

The great Sky Fortress bore Rogal Dorn and the remnants of the Imperial Fists to the inner palace. The loyal old general was determined to stand and die with his Emperor in the final hour. The Sky Fortress raced away from the palace in a desperate attempt to reach Jhagatai Khan and return him to the palace. It was destroyed by a blaze of fire fron the Death ́s Heads Titan Legions. Even in death its commander wrought havoc on the enemy, bringing the crippled vehicle down into the entre of the Chaos Horde. It seemed as if a new sun was born on Earth as the plasma reactor exploded, blasting out a crater three kilometres across. Those within the palace knew they were cut off; now they were truly alone. Only a miracle could save them.

Sky Fortress reactor exploding = 3 km crater on Earth.

Macharius' strategy of sudden and decisive attack was working better than could have been imagined. A hundred worlds fell to him in one year, three hundred the next, and in the third year of the campaign nearly seven hundred planets were taken by the combined forces of the fleets of the Segmentum Solar and the Imperial Guard.

The Imperial Guard's idea of a lightning-swift campaign. Not bad, actually.

[Jedi Master Spock]

As presented earlier, we can consider the typical Rok to be no more than 10 km across. They're made from fairly common sizes of non-rubble pile asteroids, and most of them can land. They aren't reinforced using miles and miles of hull material.

Let us consider a hollowed out hunk of granite 10 km across. What happens when we strike it with any kind of gigaton weapon?

The Rok shatters into pieces. Even if it's a mostly nickel-iron Rok, a gigaton explosion will crack it into several pieces most of the time.

How hard is it to kill an unshielded Rok? Well, it takes a few hits, usually. Maybe a full broadside from a battleship. Game mechanically, you need to roll an average of 23 attack dice to outright destroy an Ork Rok, and 12 to cripple it, so that shouldn't be too far off.

So, lowball #1: Full broadside of an Imperium battleship is somewhere around 1 gigaton. Orders of magnitude-wise, this is about as far below the explicit torpedo figure as the claimed nova cannon figures.

[Jedi Master Spock]

3 km is larger than any of the craters the US made using nuclear bombs... although the 15 megaton Castle Bravo test came close, leaving a 2 km crater.

Plausibly speaking, we're talking about less than 100 megatons for the plasma reactor of the Sky Fortress blowing up during the Horus Heresy. This is an interesting figure.

[Jedi Master Spock]

After some consideration, I've decided to bail into game mechanics and abuse those a little.

Statistically speaking, an average of ~30 bomber squadrons of eight bombers making an attack run will completely destroy an Imperium battleship. Each bomber could be carrying ~10 metric tons of ordnance each, so on average, 2,400 tons of bombs dropped in it at once. will destroy a battleship.

2,400 tons of total conversion bombs is 2e23 joules, or 50 teratons. This is the absolute upper limit by this estimate. Assuming that plasma warheads themselves make up 10% of the payload (armor piercing missiles), and that plasma is a 10% conversion weapon, we come to ~500 gigatons for the total durability of an Imperial battleship.

Absolute lower limit: Assume this is TNT they're packing, loosely justifying based on effects on infantry. We then reach 2.4 kilotons, which makes the "gigawatts" quote sound OK. (Now that's a lowball.)

[sonofccn]

Well I've just read the WH40K book Dark Apostle and I found a few interesting quotes so thought I put them here.

Also for those who are more into the series is this book repersenative of the rest? All they all this bleak?

The Planetary Defense Force had been overwhelmed contempuously quickly, a fighting force of two hundred thousand soldiers,defeated within days....

So a backwater planet that hadn't seen the sight of war in generations,something I would have thought unheard off of a future where there is only war, a PDF is smaller then many countries armies.

The men had never seen active service. War had never come to Tanakreg, and the only time the PDf had been required to use live ammunition had been to quell a minor insurgency within Shinar some four decades earlier. Most of the PDF soldiers had never fired on a live target.

Just establishing that this was a very peaceful planet, mutiple generations and the worst they had to deal with was a small revolt.

...The Exemplis will have to get close to them to engage,rather then blasting them from five clicks out.

A titan has a range of more or less five kilometers effective range. That isn't bad in the slightest but I expected slightly more from something that can be mistaken for a mountain.

More quotes later after I find them again.

General ideas:
For starters the Imperium get orbital control instantly, the Choas ship jumps to warp before they arrive and stays thier until the end of the book, yet it never dawns on anyone to use orbital weapontry to even the odds until the Demon tower is nearly complete and by that point it's to late. Even then it was an indisciment barrage designed to level the entire city not a tatical support.

Warefare in WH40K tends to be close combat. I found a few mentions to artillery but it wasn't strong enough to disperse a slave meatshield so I'm dubuios of it's effectiveness. Beyond that all tanks and APCs were firing at visual ranges if not feet from a Chaos Marine.

[Opecoiler]

So a backwater planet that hadn't seen the sight of war in generations,something I would have thought unheard off of a future where there is only war, a PDF is smaller then many countries armies.

The "Future where there is only war" only applies to the Imperium as a whole. It doesn't literally mean each and every planet.

[Cpl Kendall]

Well I've just read the WH40K book Dark Apostle and I found a few interesting quotes so thought I put them here.

Also for those who are more into the series is this book repersenative of the rest? All they all this bleak?

The Planetary Defense Force had been overwhelmed contempuously quickly, a fighting force of two hundred thousand soldiers,defeated within days....

So a backwater planet that hadn't seen the sight of war in generations,something I would have thought unheard off of a future where there is only war, a PDF is smaller then many countries armies.

The men had never seen active service. War had never come to Tanakreg, and the only time the PDf had been required to use live ammunition had been to quell a minor insurgency within Shinar some four decades earlier. Most of the PDF soldiers had never fired on a live target.

Just establishing that this was a very peaceful planet, mutiple generations and the worst they had to deal with was a small revolt.

...The Exemplis will have to get close to them to engage,rather then blasting them from five clicks out.

A titan has a range of more or less five kilometers effective range. That isn't bad in the slightest but I expected slightly more from something that can be mistaken for a mountain.

More quotes later after I find them again.

General ideas:
For starters the Imperium get orbital control instantly, the Choas ship jumps to warp before they arrive and stays thier until the end of the book, yet it never dawns on anyone to use orbital weapontry to even the odds until the Demon tower is nearly complete and by that point it's to late. Even then it was an indisciment barrage designed to level the entire city not a tatical support.

Warefare in WH40K tends to be close combat. I found a few mentions to artillery but it wasn't strong enough to disperse a slave meatshield so I'm dubuios of it's effectiveness. Beyond that all tanks and APCs were firing at visual ranges if not feet from a Chaos Marine.

You do know that the PDF is essentially a Reserve formation that is not really expected to engage in serious combat right? They are literally the WH40K equivilant of Toons. Their only there to put down revolts, provide security and back up the Guard if something happens.

[sonofccn]

The sheer number of caualties amongst the techguard had been staggering, but ever more of the mindless tech-soldiers marched from the vast factorum crawlers that ground over the Earth in the wake of the army.

Just found it interesting that the tech-priest's army could replace itself so quickly via recycling thier dead. The battle this quote is taken from was a five day long affair so they can apparently grow/build the cyborgs fairly quickly. Very impressive.

He jammed his melta-pistol into the daemon's mouth and pulled the trigger. The thing lit up from the inside before it broke up into a million tiny pieces of ash...

The daemon in question is atleast man size or better and that puts a meltapistol at a pretty nice discharge to nearly instantly turn it to ash.

You do know that the PDF is essentially a Reserve formation that is not really expected to engage in serious combat right? They are literally the WH40K equivilant of Toons. Their only there to put down revolts, provide security and back up the Guard if something happens.

I am aware that the PDF is more or less a planet's millitia and that it is not designed to go and fight the various xenos that plauge humankind. However I've been told that PDFs run in the millions of men and I found that quote amusing because of it.

The "Future where there is only war" only applies to the Imperium as a whole. It doesn't literally mean each and every planet.

Well I poked fun at "in the future where there is only war" just for fun. I mainly was just wanted to be clear that it was a peaceful planet with such an low PDF.

[Cpl Kendall]

You do know that the PDF is essentially a Reserve formation that is not really expected to engage in serious combat right? They are literally the WH40K equivilant of Toons. Their only there to put down revolts, provide security and back up the Guard if something happens.

I am aware that the PDF is more or less a planet's millitia and that it is not designed to go and fight the various xenos that plauge humankind. However I've been told that PDFs run in the millions of men and I found that quote amusing because of it.

PDF's are proportional to the size of the planets population. A hive world will have a PDF that runs into the millions, a small colony will have a tiny PDF. Holy Terra's PDF is massive, probably the largest one in the Imperium bar perhaps Cadia.

[Gniops]

Also for those who are more into the series is this book repersenative of the rest? All they all this bleak?

Dark Apostle isn't particularly horrific by the standards of chaos, although it is the first good look we've had at how the Word Bearers approach Daemon World creation, and the sort of targets they pick.

So a backwater planet that hadn't seen the sight of war in generations,something I would have thought unheard off of a future where there is only war, a PDF is smaller then many countries armies.

Just establishing that this was a very peaceful planet, mutiple generations and the worst they had to deal with was a small revolt.

yet it never dawns on anyone to use orbital weapontry to even the odds until the Demon tower is nearly complete and by that point it's to late. Even then it was an indisciment barrage designed to level the entire city not a tatical support.

I don't think you read Dark Apostle that closely....

Warefare in WH40K tends to be close combat. I found a few mentions to artillery but it wasn't strong enough to disperse a slave meatshield so I'm dubuios of it's effectiveness. Beyond that all tanks and APCs were firing at visual ranges if not feet from a Chaos Marine.

Yeah, see above....

However I've been told that PDFs run in the millions of men and I found that quote amusing because of it.

I'm noticing a distinct trend here, anyone else ?

I mainly was just wanted to be clear that it was a peaceful planet with such an low PDF.

Quite a lot of peaceful planets in 40k, garden worlds, holiday worlds for Officials etc.

its a big galaxy, with lots of space to cover, I'm kinda lost as to what you think you've uncovered here.

[sonofccn]

I don't think you read Dark Apostle that closely....

Fill free to show were I missed orbital bombardments, I'll gladly stand corrected if done so. You are also free to show me that combat didn't tend to become close range,bear in mind I didn't say always, I said tended too as in most of the time.

Quite a lot of peaceful planets in 40k, garden worlds, holiday worlds for Officials etc.

its a big galaxy, with lots of space to cover, I'm kinda lost as to what you think you've uncovered here.

I didin't uncover anything. I read a wh40k book and posted a few tidbits I found interesting on the thread for that purpus. Now maybe to you it's old news, but this thread was made to better understand and know about wh40k and I don't think it was common knowledge to everyone here that thier are so many peaceful worlds out there in the Imperium. They are always protrayed as tough as nails people who have to survive nightmarish odds as a matter of course. So yeah I found it funny for world that was so peacful and untouched by war that it could have been part of the Federation. It wasn't a debate or anything else, merely an observation.

[Cpl Kendall]

I didin't uncover anything. I read a wh40k book and posted a few tidbits I found interesting on the thread for that purpus. Now maybe to you it's old news, but this thread was made to better understand and know about wh40k and I don't think it was common knowledge to everyone here that thier are so many peaceful worlds out there in the Imperium. They are always protrayed as tough as nails people who have to survive nightmarish odds as a matter of course. So yeah I found it funny for world that was so peacful and untouched by war that it could have been part of the Federation. It wasn't a debate or anything else, merely an observation.

There's a few constants with WH40K. One is that there is a lot of war. Another is that no two worlds in the Imperium are the same. For example in 15 Hours the main characters homeworld has never known war and happily produces food for the rest of the Imperium. Other worlds like Cadia (naturally) are under constant attack. The Imperium spans at least a million worlds so what's the case somewhere is not the case everywhere.

[Gniops]

Fill free to show were I missed orbital bombardments, I'll gladly stand corrected if done so. You are also free to show me that combat didn't tend to become close range,bear in mind I didn't say always, I said tended too as in most of the time.

You miss my meaning, I don't believe you've actually understood what you've read in Dark Apostle. The Imperial forces aren't there to annihilate the planets infrastructure, or kill its populace they are there to liberate it and kill/drive off the invaders.

Not to mention that Imperial military doctrine dictates the use of airpower, not orbital fire to provide ground support during a ground campaign, which is used quite profusely, despite the interference from the Gehemahnet and daemons.

You also stated "in 40k" combat became "close range".

This is obviously crap, since you admit to having only read a single novel, and your conclusions are based on dubious logic such as

Beyond that all tanks and APCs were firing at visual ranges if not feet from a Chaos Marine.

Exactly what is close about "visual range" in ground combat ? You do realise you can see for thousands of meters with your bare eyeballs ?

Did you even read the segments about the howling storms, night combat, how Marduk could see with his visual feed at maximum zoom Elysians disembarking from their transports while under fire from Word Bearer artillery ?

Not to mention that in every scenario the aims of the various sides basically dictated that one side close in on the other. Sitting back and having an artillery duel with a bunch of space marines while their own unlimited ammo Daemon engines pour fire back at you is frankly insane.

I didin't uncover anything. I read a wh40k book and posted a few tidbits I found interesting on the thread for that purpus. Now maybe to you it's old news, but this thread was made to better understand and know about wh40k and I don't think it was common knowledge to everyone here that thier are so many peaceful worlds out there in the Imperium. They are always protrayed as tough as nails people who have to survive nightmarish odds as a matter of course. So yeah I found it funny for world that was so peacful and untouched by war that it could have been part of the Federation. It wasn't a debate or anything else, merely an observation.

I've bolded the pertinent parts of what youv'e said.

Its pretty dishonest what you are implying mind, but thats something I've become used to with posters on this board.