Your opinions on collision attack between spaceships

[WhiteLion]

I was wondering for a long time how much a ship could withstand a collision. If a ship in a fight is cornered and decides to carry out a suicide attack how much would it damage the other? I remember the battle between Enterprise-E and Scimitar, practically Picard stalled a hopeless situation for him.

If you assess more extreme cases according to you in all the universes, is there a ship capable of blocking a drop of a 40k cruiser that are literally designed for repeated drops in naval combat? The ship has an adamantine armor several hundred meters thick, and the tip of the ship is even thicker and sharper, besides it has a ram-like awl with pure adamantine blades. All then seasoned with the fact that the ship reaches almost the speed of light (from the novels they report 0.9c) and has a mass of 31 million tons, that is how much energy develops? And if we consider the larger ships that reach 26km like the glorian class, or like the Abyss Class, the Hope, the Class buchephalus that are as big as continents?

[Elheru Aran]

I was wondering for a long time how much a ship could withstand a collision. If a ship in a fight is cornered and decides to carry out a suicide attack how much would it damage the other? I remember the battle between Enterprise-E and Scimitar, practically Picard stalled a hopeless situation for him.

If you assess more extreme cases according to you in all the universes, is there a ship capable of blocking a drop of a 40k cruiser that are literally designed for repeated drops in naval combat? The ship has an adamantine armor several hundred meters thick, and the tip of the ship is even thicker and sharper, besides it has a ram-like awl with pure adamantine blades. All then seasoned with the fact that the ship reaches almost the speed of light (from the novels they report 0.9c) and has a mass of 31 million tons, that is how much energy develops? And if we consider the larger ships that reach 26km like the glorian class, or like the Abyss Class, the Hope, the Class buchephalus that are as big as continents?

I assume you mean "ram" instead of "drop", which is somewhat meaningless in space.

Anyway, I'll just point out gently that you seem to misunderstand the situation with 40K ships. Certainly they have ramming prows, but the vast majority of 40K ship combat occurs at range. And the super-ships like Glorianas are not only rare, they don't really have the horsepower to ram opponents before they get out of the way, White Scars aside. Bucephalus, the Emperor's ship, was almost certainly an one-off like the Abyss.

To your specific question of "how much a ship could withstand a collision"-- that depends entirely upon the universe(s) involved and what is known about ships in that universe. A Star Trek Starfleet craft versus a 40K cruiser, well it's safe to assume the 40K cruiser is probably as, if not more, heavy than the Trek ship, but will it necessarily have the speed to ram a Trek ship before it gets out of the way? And so forth...

[The Romulan Republic]

I was wondering for a long time how much a ship could withstand a collision. If a ship in a fight is cornered and decides to carry out a suicide attack how much would it damage the other? I remember the battle between Enterprise-E and Scimitar, practically Picard stalled a hopeless situation for him.

If you assess more extreme cases according to you in all the universes, is there a ship capable of blocking a drop of a 40k cruiser that are literally designed for repeated drops in naval combat? The ship has an adamantine armor several hundred meters thick, and the tip of the ship is even thicker and sharper, besides it has a ram-like awl with pure adamantine blades. All then seasoned with the fact that the ship reaches almost the speed of light (from the novels they report 0.9c) and has a mass of 31 million tons, that is how much energy develops? And if we consider the larger ships that reach 26km like the glorian class, or like the Abyss Class, the Hope, the Class buchephalus that are as big as continents?

As noted above, it really depends on the setting, the strength of the materials they build ships out of and whether they have energy shielding, etc.

In a hard sci-fi setting, or any setting without strong energy shields/super materials, ramming would be an instant kill if you could get close enough to use it (highly unlikely against an armed and actively resisting target), but certainly not more than a one-use tactic. Specks of dust are potentially lethal projectiles at those velocities, never mind a multi-ton vessel.

[NecronLord]

I was wondering for a long time how much a ship could withstand a collision. If a ship in a fight is cornered and decides to carry out a suicide attack how much would it damage the other? I remember the battle between Enterprise-E and Scimitar, practically Picard stalled a hopeless situation for him.

If you assess more extreme cases according to you in all the universes, is there a ship capable of blocking a drop of a 40k cruiser that are literally designed for repeated drops in naval combat? The ship has an adamantine armor several hundred meters thick, and the tip of the ship is even thicker and sharper, besides it has a ram-like awl with pure adamantine blades. All then seasoned with the fact that the ship reaches almost the speed of light (from the novels they report 0.9c) and has a mass of 31 million tons, that is how much energy develops? And if we consider the larger ships that reach 26km like the glorian class, or like the Abyss Class, the Hope, the Class buchephalus that are as big as continents?

When you ask 'all the universes' you mean any published sci-fi? No, a Xeelee nightfighter could ram through the Bucephalus and destroy it without the pilot even noticing. 40k isn't even near at the top of sci-fi in 'power level.'

In TV sci-fi (as often books feel a little obscure), the same is true; a TARDIS could easily ram through any 40k ship and be unharmed. This is depicted in the Doctor Who spinoff material as one of their main forms of attack against conventional ships.

[Formless]

In my opinion, its a cliche meant to show that the situation has become desperate, and it neither makes sense nor is it particularly clever on the storyteller's part. First, its trying to import a part of naval warfare into a medium of battle where it does not belong, and its a part of naval warfare that is long slipped into history before the 20'th century. Think about it: how often do aircraft ram other aircraft in combat? Very, very rarely. I've heard of it happening, but its far more rare than fictional spacecraft hitting eachother. And for good reason. Its not only suicidal, the enemy is usually too maneuverable to make it work. About the only example I can think of was (iirc) an aerial duel in WWII where a pair of Japanese planes tried fighting off a larger American scout plane (a repurposed bomber), and the American pilot put the three planes into a constant turning battle where he was turning wide ovals, constantly threatening the two with his main guns and turrets but never quite getting a clean shot on the more maneuverable Zeroes. On the other hand, they couldn't quite get a good shot on any of his vitals either. Finally, he managed to tempt one of the two Japanese pilots to come close enough that the wings of the Zero clipped his, tearing off the wing of the smaller fighter while taking off only the wingtip of the larger American plane. The American plane could easily keep flying with that kind of damage, but the Zero went right into the ocean. And remember, that's just from clipping eachother's wings at high speed due to brilliant maneuvering by the American pilot to make the Japanese pilot screw himself. That's how almost every air-to-air collision I know of tends to go down. The planes clip each other seemingly very lightly, but because of the velocities involved it causes massive damage that destroys one or both aircraft.

It would be even worse with spacecraft, because the relative velocities get into the thousands of kilometers per-hour in orbit or even per-second in interplanetary space. This means that even the largest spacecraft will be a lot more maneuverable than their size suggests so that they can avoid colliding with large space debris (to say nothing of enemy spacecraft). And many science fiction series show ships with that kind of speeds and ability to dodge, so how is it that people in Star Trek keep hitting one another? They aren't doing any particularly clever maneuvers like the WWII example I came up with, they just turn their ship head on and turn the engines to full burn. But turning your engines to full just means you are accelerating constantly at maximum burn (well, I say maximum burn, but in reality maximum burn should turn the humans in the ship into pancakes, which is why kinetic attacks is for missiles or drones and not ships), making it ever harder for you to change your momentum with each passing second, which means that if the enemy moves laterally to dodge you, you can't easily change direction to keep track with them.

You end up overcommitting to your suicide attack, but you almost have to because of the ranges involved. The enemy in TV science fiction is usually at least hundreds of kilometers away, and in movies and hard science fiction they will be thousands of kilometers away for most of the battle (some would claim tens of thousands, but as a reader of Matterbeam's blog ToughSF, that's looking more and more unlikely to me). AND the enemy could force you to chase them by simply accelerating away from you-- remember, this is usually depicted as a desperation attack where the ramming vehicle is outclassed and often heavily damaged already. If they simply accelerate at the same rate as you in the opposite direction, the relative velocities once again screw you even if you can manage to get into their face. In fact, I think the only naval ramming attack from WWII I know of ended something like this: a British ship rammed a German sub, but one of the two was moving away so they ended up getting entangled, and the rest of the fight was the crews shooting at eachother with SMG's on deck. Hardly the dramatic results you would expect (although in a way better for the British because they got to capture enemy material).

And in the meantime, they are probably going to try and stop you from accelerating by pumping your ship full of holes with their presumably still loaded guns, hoping to critically damage your engines, reactors, computers, control systems, structural supports, heat management systems, or crew compartment in the hopes that one of those will prevent the attack from succeeding. Range and functioning ranged weapons is the advantage of the defender in a ramming attack. Most likely? I think any attempt to ram will end up with the ramming ship overheating and being forced to shut down their engine, reactor, or both due to the fact a full burn creates a lot of heat, and the enemy will probably destroy all of your radiators or the armor scheme meant to protect them.

Finally, any orbital ramming attack is going to cause Kessler syndrome, assuming the battle doesn't cause it to begin with. This means that spacefaring military organizations are going to be much more hesitant to do ramming attacks to begin with because it could put you in a strategic disadvantage in the long run.

And here's the thing: for a writer who wants to illustrate the desperation of the ship's crew, there are other ways that work better in the context of science fiction. They could have a self-destruct function on the ship that creates a radiation hazard over a large volume of space, giving them a similar option while being more practical and still being sufficiently familiar to the audience as a tactic. The self destruct could also serve as a one-shot Casaba howitzer, sending debris at near-relativistic speed at the enemy, which is infinitely more difficult to dodge and much more deadly (you can't just burn away from it to survive). Or here's an idea: don't rely on cliche's to begin with! Allow a ship that's been defeated to sit there in defeat while the characters take a breather before rallying what's left of their force. In more realistic science fiction, escape pods like they use in Star Trek actually don't make sense because the large hulk of a defeated ship will always have better life support for the crew than a dinky little pod does. Have the enemy move on because they assume the ship is unable to continue fighting and ignore it, while the characters piece together a plan with whatever resources are left to them on their ship as it is. Maybe there is some special equipment in their hold that they never finished installing, and with little other choice they have to finish the installation while fixing the ship. Maybe they have to move over a bit to collect some resources from another downed ship or a captured space station. Take the opportunity to show the character's resourcefulness and ingenuity. Don't just rely on an overdone cliche to increase the tension. Let the situation play itself out, and tension will naturally come about.

This of course is ignoring any kind of ramming attack that is facilitated by an FTL drive, such as in that scene from the Star Wars movie that should not be named. In those cases, the writer should pay attention to the consequences and implications of the FTL drive's very existence and how it impacts the nature of warfare in the story. Personally, I would avoid those situations as much as I can, but its beyond the scope of this topic simply because FTL drives are so diverse.

[WhiteLion]

I thank you for the precise answers guys, I realize that maybe I had to be more precise and give more specific examples.
The question arose from these considerations:

(Excuse me for my bad english but i don't speak english very well,i do my best)


1) The ships I saw in Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica have a maximum armor thickness of ten meters and made of resistant materials but not at the absolute apex of resistance. Instead I noticed that the 40k Ships are made with the most resistant material in existence which is the Adamantium, moreover they have a thickness of several tens of meters for the cruisers and several hundred meters for the Gloriana, the Abyss Classes, Ark Speranza , Bucephalus and Imperator Somnium which are as long as a continent literally, so I assume they have a much greater thickness.

2) While it is true that clashes with long-range weapons are preferred, I have noticed that in many episodes they do not disdain to use a collision attack even at the opening of the battle, rather it is used very often if one has the possibility. This coupled with the fact that they have the bow of the ship made of blade with a thickness of adamantium much higher than the rest of the ship, and to the fact that they mount a spear in pure adamantine with the tip at least 200 meters wide led me to think that the ships they are designed for a continuous use of this attack (and I have had proof of this from the fact that the ships that rally do not report damage in the clashes), while the other ships of trek, wars etc. use it as a last resort because for them it is a use for which the ship was not designed.

3) Then I reflected on the fact that on average it is not rare to see a little bit in all the universes that often ships in combat lose their shields because their energy budget is saturated, and it doesn't take much then.
But the energy developed by a ship with a similar tonnage that travels at "almost" the speed of light is titanic (if anyone knows how to do it I'd like to calculate it), so I think the energy limit of the shields would be quickly saturated and the armor of ST, SW, SG and BG is neither made of a material comparable to the Adamantius, nor of a comparable thickness, and the ships were not designed for frequent use of collisions in combat. Moreover many ships of 40k have the Adamantio lance made of blades affixed to cut off hulls of tens of meters of adamantine and protected by shields of the void.

- For the larger ship classes I then got an idea of ​​the armor resistance from the fighting in history, a Glorian Class alone can defeat an entire fleet of Imperium ships, so let's talk about cruisers like the Overlord and Retribution Class that with a single trip can Destroy an entire continent. To damage the shields of an Abyss Class, instead, prolonged bombardments of a Glorian Class, two orbital attack platforms and many other cruisers were necessary, we are talking about an impressive volume of fire, and only managed to undermine the shields. armor.

These are the assumptions that made me ask the question, since I was too vague I would like to limit the field a little by taking only a few direct clashes of ships that are more or less known:

Overlord class (5 km - 31 million tons - 0.9c - armor in adamantium of about ten meters) vs Star Destroyer / Enterprise-E / Daedalus / Galactica
Retribution Class (8km - weight in billions of tons - 0.9c - armor in adamantios of hundreds of meters) vs Star Destroyer / Enterprise-E / Daedalus / Galactica
Retribution Class vs. Super Star Destroyer Ex / Eclipse / Mega Star Destroyer
Gloriana Class (26km - unknown weight but you can make a proportion - 0.9c - armor in adamancy of several hundred meters) vs Ex Super Star Destroyer / Eclipse / Mega Star Destroyer /
Abyss Class (dimensions of a continent - proportional weight - 0.9c - armor in proportion) vs Super Star Destroyer Ex / Eclipse / Mega Star Destroyer /

I have tried to give various examples with known ships of varying sizes

[The Romulan Republic]

I was wondering for a long time how much a ship could withstand a collision. If a ship in a fight is cornered and decides to carry out a suicide attack how much would it damage the other? I remember the battle between Enterprise-E and Scimitar, practically Picard stalled a hopeless situation for him.

If you assess more extreme cases according to you in all the universes, is there a ship capable of blocking a drop of a 40k cruiser that are literally designed for repeated drops in naval combat? The ship has an adamantine armor several hundred meters thick, and the tip of the ship is even thicker and sharper, besides it has a ram-like awl with pure adamantine blades. All then seasoned with the fact that the ship reaches almost the speed of light (from the novels they report 0.9c) and has a mass of 31 million tons, that is how much energy develops? And if we consider the larger ships that reach 26km like the glorian class, or like the Abyss Class, the Hope, the Class buchephalus that are as big as continents?

When you ask 'all the universes' you mean any published sci-fi? No, a Xeelee nightfighter could ram through the Bucephalus and destroy it without the pilot even noticing. 40k isn't even near at the top of sci-fi in 'power level.'

In TV sci-fi (as often books feel a little obscure), the same is true; a TARDIS could easily ram through any 40k ship and be unharmed. This is depicted in the Doctor Who spinoff material as one of their main forms of attack against conventional ships.

Yeah, Who is pretty much wank personified at times. I'd bet on the Time Lords or Daleks vs pretty much anything this side of the Q Continuum.

[Formless]

1) The ships I saw in Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica have a maximum armor thickness of ten meters and made of resistant materials but not at the absolute apex of resistance. Instead I noticed that the 40k Ships are made with the most resistant material in existence which is the Adamantium, moreover they have a thickness of several tens of meters for the cruisers and several hundred meters for the Gloriana, the Abyss Classes, Ark Speranza , Bucephalus and Imperator Somnium which are as long as a continent literally, so I assume they have a much greater thickness.

Excuse me, I have several problems with this:

1) Adamantium doesn't exist. Its properties are entirely fictional. Therefore calling it the "apex of resistance" is an entirely biased statement.

2) Adamantium doesn't exist in Star Wars, Star Trek, or any of those other stories. Star Wars itself has fictional materials such as Durasteel and Neutronium Laced Durasteel. Star Trek likewise has Tritanium, which is also fictitious. Yet at a glance, all three of these just look like ordinary metals. We cannot know how they compare to each other by just looking at artwork and imagining how they perform, we can only know by actually analyzing their performance to judge their apparent properties.

3) In the real world you might think that the "apex of resistance" is either steel, titanium, or tungsten, but the fact that its a toss up between three different metals should clue you in that its much more complicated than that. Steel and titanium don't have the sheer hardness or high melting point of tungsten, but in some ways that's actually problematic for tungsten. Steel can flex, and you often want that when manufacturing something . In fact, depending on how you define "resistance", none of those three are even contenders. For instance, as Matterbeam has shown, against a laser strike graphite outperforms steel by 67 times (by mass) even though its tensile strength is famously pitiful! This is because it has such an amazing heat capacity and ability to reradiate heat far better than steel. So a laser that could start melting or vaporizing steel armor at around 50,000 kilometers would only start damaging a graphite armored ship at just over 8000! Before calling something "resistant" you must specify "resistant against what?"

4) If its resistance against impact, survival of the ship takes precedence. And not just the hull-- the crew and internal machinery as well. This means that using the toughest materials available isn't necessarily the right move. Modern cars have crumple zones to ensure the people inside survive, because that crumpling action took kinetic energy away in a crash. Otherwise, people tended to get thrown from their seat and through the windshield. Airbags also helped, obviously.

5) Adamantium is tough, but according to the 40K fans I know, its not that tough, nor is it consistent in canon. It appears that there are multiple alloys that the Imperium just generally label "Adamantium", and the only thing that is consistent is that spaceships are made of it. But there are elite Imperial regiments that prefer different alloys not named Adamantium to armor their soldiers, because apparently other metals are just better and stronger. Meaning, even in 40K Adamantium is not actually the toughest material in existence-- just the most famous (probably because its name is a generic Fantasy trope )

3) Then I reflected on the fact that on average it is not rare to see a little bit in all the universes that often ships in combat lose their shields because their energy budget is saturated, and it doesn't take much then.
But the energy developed by a ship with a similar tonnage that travels at "almost" the speed of light is titanic (if anyone knows how to do it I'd like to calculate it), so I think the energy limit of the shields would be quickly saturated and the armor of ST, SW, SG and BG is neither made of a material comparable to the Adamantius, nor of a comparable thickness, and the ships were not designed for frequent use of collisions in combat. Moreover many ships of 40k have the Adamantio lance made of blades affixed to cut off hulls of tens of meters of adamantine and protected by shields of the void.

At relativistic speeds, material properties do not matter. At all, even for Adamantium. Those properties are the result of the electromagnetic field, but at relativistic speeds you are traveling so fast that atomic nuclei can actually start hitting one another directly. As a result, relativistic impacts can only be described in terms of particle physics-- essentially, the ships or projectiles can only be understood as massive particle beams moving at high fractions of the speed of light. I don't care how strong you think Adamantum is, its no stronger at relativistic speeds than durasteel or tritanium or any other fictional material. In a relativistic impact, both objects will be annihilated in a bright shower of subatomic particles as their atoms are literally shredded. It doesn't matter what atoms you put into the equation, at those speeds the result is inevitable.

This is why you don't screw around with relativistic speeds. It gives everyone a headache that hasn't got a PhD.

And besides, in canon nothing in 40K ever gets up to relativistic speeds. Hell, the combat accelerations in 40K are in the single G's; for instance, a Cobra Class destroyer seen in Rouge Trader has an official acceleration of 7.6 G's max, and its one of if not the fastest ship in the fleet! In contrast, Star Wars ships can pull thousands of G's easily (eg. 3000 G's for a Venator class Star Destroyer), and while Star Trek likes to use funky physics with inertial dampeners and the like, they also manage higher impulse than that as well. From what I've heard, Stargate ships can actually outperform both. Really, of the various franchises you keep banging on about, the only one that really is less impressive than 40K is Neo-Battlestar Galactica. And no one is surprised.

Also, if you take the listed dimensions and official mass of that same destroyer (1.5 kilometers long, .3 kilometers wingspan, 5.7 megatons weight), you can use that to calculate its density. Turns out its about the same as the density of water ice. And I'm told a lot of these ships have around the same density, which amuses me to no end. Do you have any idea what would happen if a Star Destroyer decided to plow through that? The two ships have about the same length, yet even if the Star Destroyer didn't penetrate the AMAZING ADAMANTIUM HULL, it would toss the Imperium ship around like a soccer ball! Who cares if the outer hull survives if everyone inside got turned into chunky salsa? As I said, there is a reason modern cars have crumple zones.

[NecronLord]

Hey Formless,

It's worth noting that Rogue Trader RPG is an outlier on the extreme low end and most 40k sources indicate sublight accelerations in the hundreds or thousands of gravities are typical. The most famous example is the Campanile from the Horus Heresy books which executes a ramming attack from within the orbit of Calth's moon.

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.

This along with the speed at which they cross star systems is reflective of higher accellerations than the RT RPG suggests are the norm. Other examples that are explicitly high percentages of sublight (40% C achieved within hours of beginning fuel burn for instance, for warships, 75% C for some specialist scout-vessels) abound.

Rogue Trader RPG is similar in this respect to the old D6 and other Star Wars RPGs that tend to have Starships wallowing along at speeds that could barely cover their own length in a minute.

[WhiteLion]

1) The ships I saw in Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica have a maximum armor thickness of ten meters and made of resistant materials but not at the absolute apex of resistance. Instead I noticed that the 40k Ships are made with the most resistant material in existence which is the Adamantium, moreover they have a thickness of several tens of meters for the cruisers and several hundred meters for the Gloriana, the Abyss Classes, Ark Speranza , Bucephalus and Imperator Somnium which are as long as a continent literally, so I assume they have a much greater thickness.

Excuse me, I have several problems with this:

1) Adamantium doesn't exist. Its properties are entirely fictional. Therefore calling it the "apex of resistance" is an entirely biased statement.

2) Adamantium doesn't exist in Star Wars, Star Trek, or any of those other stories. Star Wars itself has fictional materials such as Durasteel and Neutronium Laced Durasteel. Star Trek likewise has Tritanium, which is also fictitious. Yet at a glance, all three of these just look like ordinary metals. We cannot know how they compare to each other by just looking at artwork and imagining how they perform, we can only know by actually analyzing their performance to judge their apparent properties.

3) In the real world you might think that the "apex of resistance" is either steel, titanium, or tungsten, but the fact that its a toss up between three different metals should clue you in that its much more complicated than that. Steel and titanium don't have the sheer hardness or high melting point of tungsten, but in some ways that's actually problematic for tungsten. Steel can flex, and you often want that when manufacturing something . In fact, depending on how you define "resistance", none of those three are even contenders. For instance, as Matterbeam has shown, against a laser strike graphite outperforms steel by 67 times (by mass) even though its tensile strength is famously pitiful! This is because it has such an amazing heat capacity and ability to reradiate heat far better than steel. So a laser that could start melting or vaporizing steel armor at around 50,000 kilometers would only start damaging a graphite armored ship at just over 8000! Before calling something "resistant" you must specify "resistant against what?"

4) If its resistance against impact, survival of the ship takes precedence. And not just the hull-- the crew and internal machinery as well. This means that using the toughest materials available isn't necessarily the right move. Modern cars have crumple zones to ensure the people inside survive, because that crumpling action took kinetic energy away in a crash. Otherwise, people tended to get thrown from their seat and through the windshield. Airbags also helped, obviously.

5) Adamantium is tough, but according to the 40K fans I know, its not that tough, nor is it consistent in canon. It appears that there are multiple alloys that the Imperium just generally label "Adamantium", and the only thing that is consistent is that spaceships are made of it. But there are elite Imperial regiments that prefer different alloys not named Adamantium to armor their soldiers, because apparently other metals are just better and stronger. Meaning, even in 40K Adamantium is not actually the toughest material in existence-- just the most famous (probably because its name is a generic Fantasy trope )

1) that does not exist in SW or other series does not mean that it is not comparable, many things in SW or ST do not exist in 40k, if the adamantio exists in 40k and have given it characteristics then it is canon, its characteristics must be taken to the letter and can be used as a comparison. It doesn't matter if it doesn't exist in other series, 40k ships are made of adamantium, it's canon, shouldn't we consider it just because it's not in other series? Then we should not consider the entire universe of 40k since even the physics of weapons from my point of view is non-existent in reality, but in the series the authors wanted it this way and should be considered applicable in the world of 40k. Otherwise with this logic 60% of all components of the scifi series would be excluded.

2-3) Reading the novels or even simply wikia of 40k I read instead that the adamantio is the hardest and most resistant material in the universe of 40k, in everything, temperature, shock and deformation, it is so resistant even to the heat that to melt it they must use plasma kilns with temperatures close to the stars, and it is unanimously called literally impenetrable, so much so that weapons like macrocannons with a power of dozens of Gigaton and Lance must be used that is known to be able to boil the oceans and have the warmth of a star. Being a fan of star wars more than a 40k fan I know only the materials of SW ships and a bit of star trek, and frankly from what I've seen in the series and in the books there is nothing even comparable to the 'adamantium.
On the other hand, materials like Neutronium and Tritanio are resistant, but from what I've seen in the respective films and episodes of the series they are anything but comparable to what I read in the 40k novels and to the specifications described by the adamantium.

4) your speech applies to an objective series, 40k is not, unlike SW and ST is a very Fantasy series in which the realism to what I have seen does not really matter, in fact I have never read in the novels (which they are canon material) of crews who died as a result of a collision, on the contrary the 40k ships often use it even to open a gap in enemy forces and without deadly consequences for the crew, evidently for the authors of 40k it is feasible even if in the actually it is not, but in a series it counts the canon defined by the authors.

At relativistic speeds, material properties do not matter. At all, even for Adamantium. Those properties are the result of the electromagnetic field, but at relativistic speeds you are traveling so fast that atomic nuclei can actually start hitting one another directly. As a result, relativistic impacts can only be described in terms of particle physics-- essentially, the ships or projectiles can only be understood as massive particle beams moving at high fractions of the speed of light. I don't care how strong you think Adamantum is, its no stronger at relativistic speeds than durasteel or tritanium or any other fictional material. In a relativistic impact, both objects will be annihilated in a bright shower of subatomic particles as their atoms are literally shredded. It doesn't matter what atoms you put into the equation, at those speeds the result is inevitable.

This is why you don't screw around with relativistic speeds. It gives everyone a headache that hasn't got a PhD.

And besides, in canon nothing in 40K ever gets up to relativistic speeds. Hell, the combat accelerations in 40K are in the single G's; for instance, a Cobra Class destroyer seen in Rouge Trader has an official acceleration of 7.6 G's max, and its one of if not the fastest ship in the fleet! In contrast, Star Wars ships can pull thousands of G's easily (eg. 3000 G's for a Venator class Star Destroyer), and while Star Trek likes to use funky physics with inertial dampeners and the like, they also manage higher impulse than that as well. From what I've heard, Stargate ships can actually outperform both. Really, of the various franchises you keep banging on about, the only one that really is less impressive than 40K is Neo-Battlestar Galactica. And no one is surprised.

Also, if you take the listed dimensions and official mass of that same destroyer (1.5 kilometers long, .3 kilometers wingspan, 5.7 megatons weight), you can use that to calculate its density. Turns out its about the same as the density of water ice. And I'm told a lot of these ships have around the same density, which amuses me to no end. Do you have any idea what would happen if a Star Destroyer decided to plow through that? The two ships have about the same length, yet even if the Star Destroyer didn't penetrate the AMAZING ADAMANTIUM HULL, it would toss the Imperium ship around like a soccer ball! Who cares if the outer hull survives if everyone inside got turned into chunky salsa? As I said, there is a reason modern cars have crumple zones.

If you think about it this is not the case, the transformation of mass into energy occurs at the speed of light, ships in 40k never reach it and I never said otherwise. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more what you say is true, but until the full speed of light is reached, the type of material always counts.
Furthermore the mass of a Star Destroyer is 5 megaton, that of an average 40k cruiser is over 30 megaton, and that of a retribution class is billions of tons, the superior ships have a hugely larger mass, the Abyss classes , Hope and Bucephalus are continents ...... of the continents ........ and mass matters, especially when we talk about speed close to that of light (if you read my previous posts carefully I reported data very precise on this). A Star Destroyer is inferior in mass and resistance of the armor, it is a fact that can be verified from the technical data and from the speed.

Personally I am used to report only observations made or read on canon material, in fact everything I said above can be verified by anyone, if you are interested I can report the citations of the novels and the links of the lexicanum that report what I wrote.

[NecronLord]

Honestly I'm guessing you're fairly new to 40K and still very caught up in the rhetorical element of it, there's a lot of 40k fans who think 40k factions are top of the charts among sci-fi and the most epic things ever, which just isn't true. Within the core question you have of 'would 40k ships come off better in a ramming scenario' than most other universes' ships? Perhaps.



Perhaps not. I wouldn't want to be on a Gloriana getting hit by that any more than the Supremacy itself.

If your question is how would a star destroyer fare vs a specific 40k ship in a head on head collision, that's a different question. In a 'is there a better ramship than a 40k one' the answer is yes (indeed necron and ork ships are better rammers than Imperial ones even in the same setting!) then yes, TARDISes are an obvious example.

[Formless]

Hey Formless,

It's worth noting that Rogue Trader RPG is an outlier on the extreme low end and most 40k sources indicate sublight accelerations in the hundreds or thousands of gravities are typical. The most famous example is the Campanile from the Horus Heresy books which executes a ramming attack from within the orbit of Calth's moon.

No, Necronlord, Horus Heresy is the extreme outlier. Battlefleet Gothic, the Commissar Cain novels, and plenty of other sources all support accelerations in the single to double Gs (maybe hundreds, but its not sustainable; Rouge Trader says these are the maximum sustainable cruising burns, so in a suicide burn, sure, maybe a100 G's is possible) and as far as all the fans I know are aware of we never see relativistic speeds outside of Horus Heresy. Remember, novels in 40K are lower on the canon scale than rulebooks specifically because the novelists do not communicate with each other, and inconsistencies are abound in the books. In almost every other source, it is explicit that ships drop out of the Warp at the edge of systems and take days or even weeks (depending on the writer) to get from the edge of the system to the inner planets of the system, frequently with battles taking place on the way. On the other hand, a ship going at relativistic speeds would take mere hours to make that journey, although that doesn't account for the need to slow down. Still, it would allow ships to easily bypass a lot of those battles and go straght for the inner system to fight. It would also make Exterminatus a much less risky thing to do, as you could just accelerate a bunch of... literally anything at a planet and watch the fireworks. This goes against the famous "rocks are not free" creed that is used to justify all the Exterminatus-specific weapons that the Imperium actually uses for planetary depopulation attacks. Rocks Are Not Free requires relativistic speeds to be prohibitive to accomplish, because at those velocities a rock's material composition is irrelevant. You could use comets and it would depopulate a planet. Relativistic speeds are no joke.

In Battlefleet Gothic, there are entire ship classes and missile types that cannot escape low earth orbit. If the Imperium had the ability to sling ships into relativistic speeds within the distance of the Earth to Luna consistently, or the ability to sustain burns in the thousands of G's, then you would expect this situation to be more like Star Wars where even small fighters can escape orbit. But in the game, fighters are one of those ships that explicitly cannot, despite having greater in game speeds than larger vessels! Monitors also cannot. Surface to orbit missiles cannot. This is consistent with the accelerations described in Rouge Trader, and inconsistent with the speeds seen in Horus Heresy.

The problem that you are ignoring is that Horus Heresy does not take place in the 40,000'th century like most other sources, including the rulebooks. It takes place centuries earlier, during one of the Imperium's golden ages. As we all know the Imperium is on the decline, and its technology declines with it over time. The things described in Horus Heresy may even be in-universe myth and the feats cannot be relied upon as canon, but if you want to be generous and say that they must be you have to come up with something that explains why those feats are inconsistent with what is seen in basically all sources that take place in the game's "modern" age. The likely answer? Its archeotech, meaning the Imperium can no longer reproduce it and the majority of their fleets cannot accelerate like that. Hell, the Imperium may not have been able to reproduce it even during the Horus Heresy, but it doesn't matter. What we want to know is what the ships coming out of the Imperium's shipyards in the time the game actually takes place can do, not what quasi-mythical ships of the Hours Heresy could do. Technology wise, they are basically two different civilizations.

[NecronLord]

Rocks are not free, but the Imperium does indeed use its drive technology to redirect asteroids (or in the case I’m going to cite, minor moons) at planets as bombardment weapons, I direct you to Fall of Macharius for that. The post in question was one GW published for fun, not a statement of actual policy, even in the source you cite, Battlefleet Gothic’s rulebook, mass drivers are cited as weapons used among the more familiar staples of virus bombs and cyclonics for exterminatus.

‘Macragge’s Honour to full thrust,’ he said. ‘All fleet to full thrust.’

‘All fleet to full thrust!’ repeated the Master Divulgatus to his opposite numbers across the fleet. A ripple of activity spread out across the tiered work banks and station pits of the deck. Field-integrity technicians adjusted the energy matrices that stabilised the ship’s frame, compensating for the coming acceleration. Enginarium tech-priests passed on minute adjustments to their counterparts deep in the ship’s engine halls. Reactor outputs were carefully monitored.

‘Reactor ready,’ reported a metal-faced tech-adept.

‘Enginarium ready,’ said a man in a smart ensign’s uniform.

A coterie of electro-priests began the hymn, Body Electric. Tech-priests muttered their prayers over their desks.

The Master Motivatus gripped the rail of his podium. Around him in a circular array a dozen servitors sat, the calculations required to move the Macragge’s Honour from its current position into its attack run flickering through their butchered brains. Cogitators bleeped out rapid beats of binharic as the data was transferred to them.

‘Compliance. Engines operating at maximum efficiency,’ the servitors said with one voice.

‘Full thrust in three, two, one. Mark,’ said the Master Motivatus.

‘Mark. Engaging.’

A rumbling sounded aft, drawing closer like the approach of a great engine. A tremor passed up the ship, growing stronger. Machines burbled as it passed through their fabric. It joined with the never ending thrum of the ship’s systems, became one with it, and passed from the crew’s notice.

Acceleration was a gentle push in the chest, a trailing heaviness that dragged at the heels.

The Macragge’s Honour built up to one hundredth of the speed of light. Around it, the fleet’s engines blinked into life as all the vessels began their acceleration, holding formation perfectly.
[...]The leading elements of Guilliman’s fleet started firing as soon as they approached to within a million kilometres. Broad spreads of torpedoes fanned out in intersecting patterns. Cannons hurled multi-ton antiship shells at the enemy. Such munitions would take minutes to arrive, and most would not hit their targets, but they were not intended to. Guilliman was closing off avenues of manoeuvre for the traitors with streams of explosives, forcing them into the positions he wanted.

Macragge’s Honour is a Heresy era ship, of course, but the entire crusade fleet moves with it, without difficulty. This doesn’t make it look like orders of magnitude of engine technology has been lost, of course we are not explicitly told the fleet was at a relative stop beforehand, but the intention of the scene is certainly that the Master Motivatus instructs the ship to go and they’re at one percent C in short order, that doesn’t seem like the single digit gravities of Rogue Trader at all!

Still, let’s look for a better example set in the 41st Millennium using a more mundane ship.

Warp technology permitted travel at tremendous – albeit relativistic – inherently incalculable speeds, but intra-system transit remained as arduous as it must have been in the pre-expansionist epoch. At their current relative positions, Thennos was five light hours from Medusa. From the vibrations in the decking, Stronos could tell that the Clan Vurgaan system frigate, the Onslaught, was still accelerating towards its maximum velocity, about ninety five per cent of light speed. One day there, a few hours to convince the Iron Council of the logic of rescinding their interdiction orders, and then one day back. Stronos would be back with his clave before the order to push out passed through the interlink manifold.

What do we know, a peak speed, a distance, and a travel time, all in one paragraph.
5 light hours (36 AU)
Peak velocity 0.95 c
Time to travel one day.

That works out (thanks to the ever useful relativistic star ship calculator) at a minimum acceleration of 250C if that was sustained for the whole day, and that presumes that it’s a continuous acceleration, which of course we know is somewhat unlikely. It’s also possible that the Onslaught accelerated much faster than this and then reached the maximum safe velocity (otherwise why mention it) and went inertial for some time before decelerating.

Is it thousands? No, but again, this isn’t a star wars vs star trek thing, Star Wars’ ships are clearly far faster and I’ll defend that one too if you like, but at the very least Rogue Trader’s figures don’t agree with the general performance of Imperial starships in 40k books and certainly don’t agree with their stated maximum realspace velocities.

Of course we both know the Doylist reason why there’s a gap here, it’s because the writers in any of these settings are comfortable saying ‘seventy five percent light speed’ but not comfortable saying ‘a thousand gravities’ - relativistic travel is so outlandish that it doesn't break suspension of disbelief in the same way a specific unit such as gravities does. This is similar to a well known scene in Stargate Atlantis here where a ship is said to be travelling at 0.999 c and then turns its engines on to come to a relative stop, at 27 gravities… and no one mentions this would take over two years of sidereal time until the ship could come to a relative halt (though one imagines perhaps transporter rings could have sufficed to escape the Triia even while it was decelerating), and when in other examples from the same show ships travel comfortably at close to a thousand gravities (and goa'uld ships up to 32 kilogravities). Writers just aren’t comfortable presenting “five hundred Gs” of acceleration on the whole. Hundreds of gravities in any of these settings which is why (Dr. Saxton's SW books aside) you won't generally find such things spelt out anywhere.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and I would regard Dr. McKay's statement as incorrect given demonstrable accelerations in his setting just as much as I toss out the Rogue Trader RPG's examples.

While we’re at it, please do provide a quote where GW says that novels are on a lower scale of canon than a rulebook. A direct quote from a cited Games Workshop source. Because many of their writers have often said ‘there is no canon’ or variations on that theme.

And just to deliver sources on that one, here are some quotes, with links to original sources.

[Formless]

1) that does not exist in SW or other series does not mean that it is not comparable, many things in SW or ST do not exist in 40k, if the adamantio exists in 40k and have given it characteristics then it is canon, its characteristics must be taken to the letter and can be used as a comparison. It doesn't matter if it doesn't exist in other series, 40k ships are made of adamantium, it's canon, shouldn't we consider it just because it's not in other series? Then we should not consider the entire universe of 40k since even the physics of weapons from my point of view is non-existent in reality, but in the series the authors wanted it this way and should be considered applicable in the world of 40k. Otherwise with this logic 60% of all components of the scifi series would be excluded.

These points are meant to be taken together as part of a greater argument, so addressing point one by itself was utterly missing the larger context of what I was trying to prove.

2-3) Reading the novels or even simply wikia of 40k I read instead that the adamantio is the hardest and most resistant material in the universe of 40k, in everything, temperature, shock and deformation, it is so resistant even to the heat that to melt it they must use plasma kilns with temperatures close to the stars, and it is unanimously called literally impenetrable, so much so that weapons like macrocannons with a power of dozens of Gigaton and Lance must be used that is known to be able to boil the oceans and have the warmth of a star. Being a fan of star wars more than a 40k fan I know only the materials of SW ships and a bit of star trek, and frankly from what I've seen in the series and in the books there is nothing even comparable to the 'adamantium.

You forget that Adamantium is also used as tank armor by the Imperium, and tank armor in the game can be penetrated or defeated by such things as man (well, Orc) portable melta guns and Tau railguns which reach velocities of about 3 KM/sec or so (see the Cain novels, these projectiles move fast enough to create a sonic boom downrange, but any faster than a few KM per second in atmosphere and they would start producing plasma-- which they don't). If melta-guns could reach solar temperatures, they would have serious usability and collateral damage issues to say the least. And the velocities of Tau guns are pretty similar to modern tank guns. So Adamantium may be impressive, but its hardly indestructable.

Also, even if it took gigatons of energy to melt adamantium (it doesn't), turbolasers easily get into the gigaton range, or even higher. I'm guessing you haven't been here long.

Look, materials science is complicated. Hardness isn't everything, and there are reasons you might actually want an armor to be deformable to some degree. For instance, we don't use high hardness tool steel as armor because when it does break, it shatters, and you don't want to fill a vehicle with spall shrapnel every time it takes a hit. Diamond is the hardest substance known, yet gemcutters can cut it with hand tools. Why? Because its shear strength is low enough you can do that if you cut along the correct plane. There are many ways of measuring a material's strength, like tensile strength, shear strength, compressive strength, hardness, springiness, deformation resistance, heat of melting, heat of vaporization, shock resistance, thermal shock resistance, and so on. In order to predict what would happen during an impact between a 40K ship and a Star Destroyer or any other spaceship, we would need to know all of these properties for Adamantium, and the same for the materials the other ship was made of. Collisions are messy and complex affairs, and this is just one of the reasons why.

4) your speech applies to an objective series, 40k is not, unlike SW and ST is a very Fantasy series in which the realism to what I have seen does not really matter, in fact I have never read in the novels (which they are canon material) of crews who died as a result of a collision, on the contrary the 40k ships often use it even to open a gap in enemy forces and without deadly consequences for the crew, evidently for the authors of 40k it is feasible even if in the actually it is not, but in a series it counts the canon defined by the authors.

If you concede objectivity, then no discussion of the topic is possible in a crossover context. If you allow for more objective discussion of the evidence, then you must admit that the sucessful use of ramming attacks by the Imperium against its usual enemies does not predict how successful the tactic would be against ships from Star Wars, Star Trek, or Stargate. This is because the Imperium's enemies use similar starship construction techniques; those other series do not. Stargate ships made by factions such as the Gould are expressly made of high density materials such as Naquidah and its alloys. Therefor, if the density calculations of 40K ships hold up (and by the way, if they do that actually says one good thing for Adamantium-- it weighs very little for its strength), then an Imperium battleship ramming a Ha'tak would have a rather amusing result of the Imperium ship simply bouncing off with relatively little momentum transferred, even though both ships appear to be made to a similar scale. We can predict the Ha'tak to weight much, much more because of the materials it is made of.

If you think about it this is not the case, the transformation of mass into energy occurs at the speed of light, ships in 40k never reach it and I never said otherwise. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more what you say is true, but until the full speed of light is reached, the type of material always counts.

No, you misunderstand. No mass is being transformed into energy here. At relativistic speeds, the energies are already so high that atoms and atomic nuclei can be ripped appart into subatomic particles. They do this at the LHC and other particle accelerators all the time, just on a smaller scale than we are talking about here. And in real life, we certainly cannot accelerate anything to lightspeed, as that violates known physics.

Personally I am used to report only observations made or read on canon material, in fact everything I said above can be verified by anyone, if you are interested I can report the citations of the novels and the links of the lexicanum that report what I wrote.

Yes, in fact I'm going to demand you start doing so right now for the following reasons:

Furthermore the mass of a Star Destroyer is 5 megaton

This is a lie. There is no canon mass for a Star Destroyer, and most other Star Wars capital ships likewise have no canon mass. Because of kerfluffles relating to the D6 RPG system giving incorrect figures, Lucasfilm and Disney have traditionally avoided listing these numbers. They will give the dimensions of a ship, the cargo capacity of a ship (in metric tons), but not how much it weighs. Moreover, even if they did, Star Wars is aggressively metric, so they wouldn't use megatons. They would put the figure into scientific notation, say for instance, 5 * 10^6 metric tons for a 5 megaton ship, assuming metric tons (and most of 40K is also metric, so there is that). I grew up with Star Wars, don't think you can pull this kind of bullshit with me.

that of an average 40k cruiser is over 30 megaton

I have Rouge Trader sitting right in front of me right now, and I must point out that cruisers are divided into several weight classes. Light cruisers are listed as being somewhere between 20 megatons to 24 megatons depending on the ship. All of the ships listed in the Cruiser class proper are just under 30 megatons, with the heaviest being 29 megatons. Its only the Battle Cruisers and Grand Cruiser classes that are above 30 megatons, but those are their own ship classes. To lump them in with cruisers proper is playing a dishonest semantic game.

and that of a retribution class is billions of tons

Rouge Trader doesn't list the masses of any ship heavier than a Grand Cruser, and I also have Battlefleet Gothic in front of me. Guess what Battlefleet Gothic doesn't talk about? That's right, ship masses. Rouge Trader is the only official source that gives official numbers of the tonnage of Imperium ships, and while some people may not like it, Games Workshop has confirmed the accuracy of Rouge Trader's stats. While there are no battleships in Rouge Trader, the heaviest ship in Rouge Trader, a transport, is actually longer than some battleships, and its weight is given at only 60 megatons. Remember, a megaton is only a million tons, so anyone claiming a battleship in 40K is in the billions of tons is most likely talking bullshit.

A Star Destroyer is inferior in mass and resistance of the armor, it is a fact that can be verified from the technical data and from the speed.

Citation needed.

Do you know the other reason why we are making a big deal about the accelerations of the ships? Because the superstructure of a ship needs to be able to survive the ship's own ability to accelerate. That puts stress on the ship from the back to the front. Now we know that ships in Star Wars can pull thousands of G's-- the 2300 G figure for an Imperial I class is no longer official, but the 3000 G figure for a Venator still is, confirming the 2300 G figure as more than plausible. So we know for a fact that Star Destroyers can survive thousands of Gs of acceleration from their own engines. That says a lot about the materials they are made of. We have also seen Star Destroyers collide with one another in Rouge One, and in that instance, the armor actually seemed to mostly survive-- it was the upper superstructure that sheared off from the impact. That means durasteel is tough stuff! Moreover, we know the energy levels of Star Wars weapons, and we know that their ships can survive prolonged bombardments from their own turbolasers. We see shots impacting directly, so they aren't just relying on their shields like Star Trek ships tend to do. A lot of analysis has been done on Star Destroyers over the years, because in case the banner hadn't tipped you off this forum is full of Star Wars nerds. We know how tough the damn things really are. Its Imperium ships that have a lot to prove here.

One last thing:

Furthermore the mass of a Star Destroyer is 5 megaton, that of an average 40k cruiser is over 30 megaton

Setting aside that these statements are individually untrue, you realize that a Star Destroyer is, lengthwise, more comparable to an Imperium destroyer category of ship, right? Appropriate for the name, I suppose. 1.6 Kilometers, that's the length of the classic Imperial I class. A Venator is even shorter at 1.1 kilometers. A cruiser in 40K-- as in a true cruiser and not a battlecruser or grand cruiser-- is 4 to 5 kilometers long. Even the Resurgance class Star Destroyer preferred by the First Order, who love making things bigger and badder than their daddy the Empire, are only 2.9 kilometers long! Its not that the Empire and First Order can't make bigger ships, but they tend to jump past the 4 kilometer mark and straight into the really big stuff like Super Star Destroyers, which are 19 kilometers long, or Snoke's personal pimpmobile at 64 kilometers wingspan. Why doesn't the Empire use larger ships like the Imperium? It appears that quantity of smaller ships is simply more advantageous for them. But anyway, that seems like the fairer comparison group, Imperial Star Destroyers and Imperium destroyers. Even with the oddly low densities of Imperium ships, you can't exactly act like its a surprise that a 5 kilometer long ship outweighs a 1.6 kilometer ship. If it doesn't, then something very strange is going on.

[Batman]

Um-since a megaton is merely 1 million tons it's pretty much a metric unit?

[Formless]

Um-since a megaton is merely 1 million tons it's pretty much a metric unit?

But its not scientific notation, which Star Wars virtually always uses when the figures get this high. I've only ever seen the term "megaton" in two contexts: when describing nuclear bomb yields, and in Rouge Trader to describe the masses of Imperium ships. Plus, when I mentioned the density of ships in 40K I mentioned a ship that weighed 5.7 megatons-- and he then turns around and says a Star Destroyer is 5 megatons... see what he did there?

Rocks are not free, but the Imperium does indeed use its drive technology to redirect asteroids (or in the case I’m going to cite, minor moons) at planets as bombardment weapons, I direct you to Fall of Macharius for that. The post in question was one GW published for fun, not a statement of actual policy, even in the source you cite, Battlefleet Gothic’s rulebook, mass drivers are cited as weapons used among the more familiar staples of virus bombs and cyclonics for exterminatus.

While I know that the post is half-joking, its still taken by most as a major reason any specialized Exterminatus weaponry exists at all. While dropping rocks is an option they sometimes take, its not their preferred technique. But if they could easily accelerate anything up to 40% the speed of light, there is no reason it wouldn't be. At those velocities, you could turn a city killer asteroid into a KT extinction event asteroid. The easy explanation for why they don't do that is that they can't do that, or at least not reliably. Even in the quote you give, they only manage to accelerate the fleet up to 1% lightspeed, which is not actually implausible with the acceleration speeds listed in Rouge Trader. Acceleration is not speed, its the rate at which you change speed. So at, say, 7 G's it would take longer to reach 1% C than if you could pull 100 G's, but eventually you would still get there.

Macragge’s Honour is a Heresy era ship, of course, but the entire crusade fleet moves with it, without difficulty. This doesn’t make it look like orders of magnitude of engine technology has been lost, of course we are not explicitly told the fleet was at a relative stop beforehand, but the intention of the scene is certainly that the Master Motivatus instructs the ship to go and they’re at one percent C in short order, that doesn’t seem like the single digit gravities of Rogue Trader at all!

First of all, speeds are not considered relativistic until 4% the speed of light, and the text specifically says the ship accelerated to "one hundredth the speed of light". It also does not say that the other ships were keeping pace with the hero ship, only that they managed to hold formation.

Moreover, your own text sabotages your argument. After the cut in the text, it says that they start firing at ~one million kilometers, yet it also specifically states that it would take minutes for the shells and torpedoes to arrive at their targets. Assuming that the shells and torpedoes will reach their targets in 2 minutes, we can calculate that they are traveling at less than .03% the speed of light. The longer it takes for them to reach their targets, the slower they are going.

That's not relativistic. That's fast, but it means something happened in between the jump in the text. Either the ships did not in fact accelerate to 1% the speed of light, or they decelerated right before they went on the attack. But anyway, 1% the speed of light is under the threshold for relativistic speed, and its certainly not 40% C in just a few million kilometers like in Horus Heresy.

What do we know, a peak speed, a distance, and a travel time, all in one paragraph.
5 light hours (36 AU)
Peak velocity 0.95 c
Time to travel one day.

That works out (thanks to the ever useful relativistic star ship calculator) at a minimum acceleration of 250C if that was sustained for the whole day, and that presumes that it’s a continuous acceleration, which of course we know is somewhat unlikely. It’s also possible that the Onslaught accelerated much faster than this and then reached the maximum safe velocity (otherwise why mention it) and went inertial for some time before decelerating.

This text reads very strange, and contains language that betrays the laymans' understanding of its author. He says that the ship's maximum velocity is 95% C, but we both know there is no such thing as maximum velocity (unless you count the speed of light itself). Now you interpret this as a maximum safe velocity, but that is not stated in the text. That is an assmption you have made for the sake of argument. They also say that they are accelerating up to this velocity, but not what they expect their actual peak velocity to be during this trip-- indeed, it would not make sense to for them to reach 95% C for the very safety reasons you cite, as well as the political fact that this is a civilian vessel. Why would it be allowed a drive that can accelerate fast enough to qualify as a weapon of mass destruction? The travel time sounds helpful at first, but its actually more vague and unhelpful than that initial impression suggests. When a person says something will take "a day," they could mean 16 hours (one waking day) or 24 hours (one true day). Moreover, this being science fiction where not all planets have the same length of day, it could theoretically be even longer than that. We also don't know the ship, when it was made or who made it. Once again, the ship could be archeotech, alien, or otherwise modified up beyond what the Imperium can normally make. So even if the calculations here uphold hundreds of Gs as possible for these ships, it says nothing about what a ship of the line can do. That's the difference between these random novel quotes and the figures found in Rouge Trader and Battlefleet Gothic (where it can take four hours for a ship in low Jupiter orbit to reach the farthest theoretical moon that could exist in the system). Rouge Trader and Battlefleet Gothic are concerned with reproducible, consistently manufactured starships of the Imperium, not one off examples from a bygone era or experiments.

These same layman tendencies also effect the credibility of the narrator, who we have no reason to treat as an expert. They are merely giving their itinerary, which sounds suspiciously idealistic even if we take for granted the speeds they are proposing they are travelling at. I've never read this novel, but given this is chapter 1, I'm betting they never actually get to their destination.

While we’re at it, please do provide a quote where GW says that novels are on a lower scale of canon than a rulebook. A direct quote from a cited Games Workshop source. Because many of their writers have often said ‘there is no canon’ or variations on that theme.

There are no quotes to back that up, I will admit, but I will give an argument that if there is a hypothetical tier list, the novels are near the bottom and the game books are at the top. And that's the actual behavior of Games Workshop and its well known habit of rebooting everything all the time. The Necrons you see in the novels are no longer the canon Necrons as far as Games Workshop is concerned. They put out a new gamebook that completely changed them. This is not the first such change, but it is the most signifiant one. Everyone hates it except Games Workshop... and there is nothing anyone can do about it. This firmly cements gamebooks as canon, the newer the better, and novels are secondary to that by default because Games Workshop freely contradicts them whenever they feel like. And it does so through the gamebooks, which they have full control over.

Another argument. The person who you link to interprets the quote by GW about how the canon of 40K is muddled by propaganda, politics, legends, and myths to mean that the novels use an "expanded" background while the game uses a "restricted" background, but otherwise that canon is purely up to interpretation. But I don't think that's what the company intended with that statement. They seem to mean that the novels are inherently full of unreliable narrators, because their perspectives are warped by the very nature of the setting. But at the gaming table, there is no such thing as an unreliable narrator. The information has to be accurate, or it ruins the experience, especially in a competitive wargaming match. But so too in role playing games, for a different reason. The players are too deep into the experience, and know everything that their characters know. And if that information is wrong, the players feel like the GM or the game itself is screwing them. So RPGs include accurate, if incomplete, information, and about things other sources might ignore-- like ship tonnage. And I believe the makers of these games are aware of the need for accurate, trustworthy information in the gamebooks.

[WhiteLion]

Thanks for the answers guys, I try to respond calmly and orderly to everyone

Hey Formless,
It's worth noting that Rogue Trader RPG is an outlier on the extreme low end and most 40k sources indicate sublight accelerations in the hundreds or thousands of gravities are typical. The most famous example is the Campanile from the Horus Heresy books which executes a ramming attack from within the orbit of Calth's moon.

No, Necronlord, Horus Heresy is the extreme outlier. Battlefleet Gothic, the Commissar Cain novels, and plenty of other sources all support accelerations in the single to double Gs (maybe hundreds, but its not sustainable; Rouge Trader says these are the maximum sustainable cruising burns, so in a suicide burn, sure, maybe a100 G's is possible) and as far as all the fans I know are aware of we never see relativistic speeds outside of Horus Heresy. Remember, novels in 40K are lower on the canon scale than rulebooks specifically because the novelists do not communicate with each other, and inconsistencies are abound in the books. In almost every other source, it is explicit that ships drop out of the Warp at the edge of systems and take days or even weeks (depending on the writer) to get from the edge of the system to the inner planets of the system, frequently with battles taking place on the way. On the other hand, a ship going at relativistic speeds would take mere hours to make that journey, although that doesn't account for the need to slow down. Still, it would allow ships to easily bypass a lot of those battles and go straght for the inner system to fight. It would also make Exterminatus a much less risky thing to do, as you could just accelerate a bunch of... literally anything at a planet and watch the fireworks. This goes against the famous "rocks are not free" creed that is used to justify all the Exterminatus-specific weapons that the Imperium actually uses for planetary depopulation attacks. Rocks Are Not Free requires relativistic speeds to be prohibitive to accomplish, because at those velocities a rock's material composition is irrelevant. You could use comets and it would depopulate a planet. Relativistic speeds are no joke.
The problem that you are ignoring is that Horus Heresy does not take place in the 40,000'th century like most other sources, including the rulebooks. It takes place centuries earlier, during one of the Imperium's golden ages. As we all know the Imperium is on the decline, and its technology declines with it over time. The things described in Horus Heresy may even be in-universe myth and the feats cannot be relied upon as canon, but if you want to be generous and say that they must be you have to come up with something that explains why those feats are inconsistent with what is seen in basically all sources that take place in the game's "modern" age. The likely answer? Its archeotech, meaning the Imperium can no longer reproduce it and the majority of their fleets cannot accelerate like that. Hell, the Imperium may not have been able to reproduce it even during the Horus Heresy, but it doesn't matter. What we want to know is what the ships coming out of the Imperium's shipyards in the time the game actually takes place can do, not what quasi-mythical ships of the Hours Heresy could do. Technology wise, they are basically two different civilizations.

Horus Heresy is absolutely canonical, it is one of the books that is never questioned, it represents a cornerstone of the history of Warcraft, therefore everything that is seen is canonical. You can't say it's not just because in other books you can't reach that speed. The enterprise has only used the Pegasus phase transition device once but this is not a canonical one. If something appears in a canon event then it is canon, we do not decide what is it and what is not but the works recognized as canon. If by choice in the other works the captains of the ships choose to accelerate less not made not canon Horus Heresy. No one except the authors of the game can make a canon event not canon, if in Horus Heresy the ship accelerates to 1000g means that squeezing the engines is able to do so.
The novels have never been declared inferior as a canon to the Rogue Trader regulation

1) that does not exist in SW or other series does not mean that it is not comparable, many things in SW or ST do not exist in 40k, if the adamantio exists in 40k and have given it characteristics then it is canon, its characteristics must be taken to the letter and can be used as a comparison. It doesn't matter if it doesn't exist in other series, 40k ships are made of adamantium, it's canon, shouldn't we consider it just because it's not in other series? Then we should not consider the entire universe of 40k since even the physics of weapons from my point of view is non-existent in reality, but in the series the authors wanted it this way and should be considered applicable in the world of 40k. Otherwise with this logic 60% of all components of the scifi series would be excluded.

These points are meant to be taken together as part of a greater argument, so addressing point one by itself was utterly missing the larger context of what I was trying to prove.

You forget that Adamantium is also used as tank armor by the Imperium, and tank armor in the game can be penetrated or defeated by such things as man (well, Orc) portable melta guns and Tau railguns which reach velocities of about 3 KM/sec or so (see the Cain novels, these projectiles move fast enough to create a sonic boom downrange, but any faster than a few KM per second in atmosphere and they would start producing plasma-- which they don't). If melta-guns could reach solar temperatures, they would have serious usability and collateral damage issues to say the least. And the velocities of Tau guns are pretty similar to modern tank guns. So Adamantium may be impressive, but its hardly indestructable.

In fact I only said that it is the strongest and most resistant material in existence, in fact I have also specified that to break the armor the Lances of the atronavi are necessary

Also, even if it took gigatons of energy to melt adamantium (it doesn't), turbolasers easily get into the gigaton range, or even higher. I'm guessing you haven't been here long.

Yes, I have not been here for a long time, I presume that the source that attributes a power of gigatons to the turbolasers is ICS. Since 2014 Dysney, current holder of the Star Wars brand has declared the entire legend non-canonical, so even ICS, currently there are no canonical sources that attribute to the tubolaser that power (unfortunately because I am a huge fan of the Executor and Eclipse)

Yes, even star wars are successfully performed with ramming, but only against armor of star wars, certainly not against a hull often hundreds of meters in adamantium and protected by shields of empty layers, I believe there is a substantial difference. The adamantium can be light but a cruiser has a mass of about 30 megatons and a Retribution class billions of tons, I am attaching the source: https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Di ... Dimensions, https: //warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Navy#Battleship, so the result does not change.

To respond to the other points of your speech:
I assumed that the star destroyer had a mass of 5.7 megatonnes from your post above, check, if I was wrong to read I apologize, as I said my English is not very good.
I cite the destoryer class as examples, but I have never spoken of destroyer classes but of cruisers (Mars, Dictator, Overlod) which are over 5 km long.
I repeat that even I am a fan of star trek since the release of episode 3, I love both the design and the setting and I literally drool for the SSD and the eclipse, but I can't not rely on the canon. For disney ICS is not canon so the power of turbolasers in the scale of gigatons can no longer be considered canon. In 40k on the other hand we have canon material that demonstrates the maximum power of both macrocannons and lances as well as two-stage cyclonic torpedoes, Destroy continents and planets ... to correct you I drop the sources:

- The destruction of the planet Nostramo, which exploded after being hit by a single heavy lance set at maximum power.

In the attack on Dagonet it is explicitly quoted: "Each weapon in the armory of the battleship was prepared and oriented downward on the surface; torpedoes full of wars that could atomize entire continents in a single blow, energy guns capable of boiling the oceans, kinetic killers who could behead the mountains through the brute force of their impact: this was only the power of the ship itself, then there was the smaller fleet of auxiliary vehicles on board, the wings of fighters and bombers that could fall screaming in the atmosphere of Dagonet on plumes of white fire. Rapid death bearers who could raze cities, burn the nations. "

-Sanguinis destroyed the planet on which the hive was:
"'Orders, my lord?' "This ends," said Sanguinius. "Admiral DuCade, the control of slave weapons on all ships present at my command word. Tell all ship commanders to trigger their cyclonic torpedoes and megaweapon gauge systems for full bombing. Target Holst. "A wave of uncertainty passed through the human crew at the thought of such a huge mammoth." All weapons? Against the beehive city? "DuCade asked," Against the planet, "he corrected the primarch." Synchronize the aiming points along the equator, follow the geological flow. I want this world to be shattered ".

Azkaellon felt a shiver go through him. The hammer of the Emperor's will was a powerful force and in the wars of the Great Crusade it was often regrettable to punish entire worlds with merciless intent. The commander of the guard had seen the cities wiped off the map in the blink of an eye, sprayed with lance cannons and macronuclear bombs, continents burned by laser barriers; burnt skies. And while the power to kill a world? really destroy it completely? he had always rested within reach of the Legiones Astartes, it was not an order that Azkaellon had ever witnessed running. "All the masters on board report the ready weapons." DuCade reread the state in a dead voice, as if he were unwilling to believe what would happen next.

"Your will, my lord." Azkaellon felt nothing less than the anger of the primarch over the destruction of Paleknight, he knew that no one aboard those twin ships felt otherwise; but the act of war that was before them still gave him a break. Eventually Sanguinius moved away from the large window and looked at his old friend and companion in the eye. In the noble face of the Angel there was immediately a great distance that reminded Azkaellon how far his master was placed above his superior transhumanity . And inside, he saw a determination, as thick as neutronium and equally indestructible. "My patience with this shadow game is over," said the primarch, and the words seemed to be only for Azkaellon. "The order is given: exterminatus extremis."

The void surrounding the planet Holst flashed red as the energies were released and directed, as a wave of weapons of mass destruction whizzed from the launch tubes and launched into the turbulent world. The energy impulses struck first, moving at the speed of light and boiling the vapors that envelop the sky, striking the surface of nitrogen ice. The rock layers that had been sealed under the permafrost for millions of years were burned clean and exposed. The burst of torpedoes arrived a few seconds later, large rockets fueled by fusion with lethal warheads. Each of them had the power to devastate a continent, but in this case they combined with sufficient strength to cast the melted heart of a world.

finally

Two-stage cyclonic torpedoes
A two-stage cyclic torpedo, which is a more exotic form than the standard cyclic torpedo, is the most common of a special class of rare Exterminatus weapons, designed for use against atmosphere-free or biologically empty worlds (some tomb worlds of Necron being the main example).
These torpedoes have two-stage warheads: the first is an unusually powerful charge of melta that crosses the crust and mantle of a planet to its interior. The second stage is a modified cyclonic plasma charge that destabilizes it, in most cases physically destroying the planet from the inside
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Cyclonic_Torpedo

Now even though I'm a fan of SW and ST (but actually I prefer Stargate) I can't help but admit that this power of weapons makes one turn pale, consider that ships have at least 6 torpedo launchers, and shoot one save after another . I don't think there's a comparison.

But anyway we are talking about Ram, you asked me for the sources and I gave you them for transparency, it was not my intention to talk about weapons.

[WhiteLion]

excuse me, i do a caos with quote function, but the post was very impegnative

[NecronLord]

While I know that the post is half-joking, its still taken by most as a major reason any specialized Exterminatus weaponry exists at all. While dropping rocks is an option they sometimes take, its not their preferred technique. But if they could easily accelerate anything up to 40% the speed of light, there is no reason it wouldn't be. At those velocities, you could turn a city killer asteroid into a KT extinction event asteroid. The easy explanation for why they don't do that is that they can't do that, or at least not reliably. Even in the quote you give, they only manage to accelerate the fleet up to 1% lightspeed, which is not actually implausible with the acceleration speeds listed in Rouge Trader. Acceleration is not speed, its the rate at which you change speed. So at, say, 7 G's it would take longer to reach 1% C than if you could pull 100 G's, but eventually you would still get there.

Absolutely they do put engines on rocks without much trouble, it’s not something the Imperium does because even if you are talking endless megaricks of RKV it’s still less easily deployed than a cyclonic torpedo, which is after all a missile that can devastate a world in a single shot. In the example given Macharius just says he wants a moon turned into a projectile and the tech-priests do it without trouble.

Of course, the Rocks are not Free text was about using a ship to accelerate an asteroid as a projectile and then leave that asteroid to coast, the example in Fall of Macharius was about mounting disposable engines (a cost to be sure) on the moon in question. I would imagine there might be complications in using an asteroid as a projectile compared to turning up and firing a torpedo pre-built for the task, particularly in terms of allowing the ship to tow or push the asteroid.

First of all, speeds are not considered relativistic until 4% the speed of light, and the text specifically says the ship accelerated to "one hundredth the speed of light". It also does not say that the other ships were keeping pace with the hero ship, only that they managed to hold formation.

Moreover, your own text sabotages your argument. After the cut in the text, it says that they start firing at ~one million kilometers, yet it also specifically states that it would take minutes for the shells and torpedoes to arrive at their targets. Assuming that the shells and torpedoes will reach their targets in 2 minutes, we can calculate that they are traveling at less than .03% the speed of light. The longer it takes for them to reach their targets, the slower they are going.

That's not relativistic. That's fast, but it means something happened in between the jump in the text. Either the ships did not in fact accelerate to 1% the speed of light, or they decelerated right before they went on the attack. But anyway, 1% the speed of light is under the threshold for relativistic speed, and its certainly not 40% C in just a few million kilometers like in Horus Heresy.

I’d be interested to see where that 4% cutoff is from.

Granted the numbers don’t fit together well, and some deceleration is implied between the boost to 1 PSL and the attack, but it’s most notable for a heresy era ship leading a vast formation of modern ones and not immediately pulling out ahead, and the viewpoint character (Guilliman) who also lived during the Heresy, not bothering to say ‘ah this ship used to go a hundred times faster than this.’

This text reads very strange, and contains language that betrays the laymans' understanding of its author. He says that the ship's maximum velocity is 95% C, but we both know there is no such thing as maximum velocity (unless you count the speed of light itself). Now you interpret this as a maximum safe velocity, but that is not stated in the text. That is an assmption you have made for the sake of argument. They also say that they are accelerating up to this velocity, but not what they expect their actual peak velocity to be during this trip-- indeed, it would not make sense to for them to reach 95% C for the very safety reasons you cite, as well as the political fact that this is a civilian vessel. Why would it be allowed a drive that can accelerate fast enough to qualify as a weapon of mass destruction? The travel time sounds helpful at first, but its actually more vague and unhelpful than that initial impression suggests. When a person says something will take "a day," they could mean 16 hours (one waking day) or 24 hours (one true day). Moreover, this being science fiction where not all planets have the same length of day, it could theoretically be even longer than that. We also don't know the ship, when it was made or who made it. Once again, the ship could be archeotech, alien, or otherwise modified up beyond what the Imperium can normally make. So even if the calculations here uphold hundreds of Gs as possible for these ships, it says nothing about what a ship of the line can do. That's the difference between these random novel quotes and the figures found in Rouge Trader and Battlefleet Gothic (where it can take four hours for a ship in low Jupiter orbit to reach the farthest theoretical moon that could exist in the system). Rouge Trader and Battlefleet Gothic are concerned with reproducible, consistently manufactured starships of the Imperium, not one off examples from a bygone era or experiments.

These same layman tendencies also effect the credibility of the narrator, who we have no reason to treat as an expert. They are merely giving their itinerary, which sounds suspiciously idealistic even if we take for granted the speeds they are proposing they are travelling at. I've never read this novel, but given this is chapter 1, I'm betting they never actually get to their destination.

For what it’s worth the frigate in question is a space marine ship, not a civilian one. But I’m really going to let this stand as an example of quite tortured pleading.

I’m particularly amused at your strange decision to talk about the writer as a layman (Compared to whom, Lucas? Timothy Zahn?) is actually in relation to one of Black Library’s authors who actually holds a doctorate in a scientific field; David Guymer who wrote that excerpt has a PhD in microbiology. This David Guymer is also this David Guymer, as visible on his website here.

While that’s biology, not astrophysics, the general slur that he’s uneducated is clearly untrue.

There are no quotes to back that up, I will admit, but I will give an argument that if there is a hypothetical tier list, the novels are near the bottom and the game books are at the top.

I am uninterested in hypothetical tiers that you’ve made up. The opinions of GW’s writers have tended toward there being multiple simultaneous valid perspectives on the setting and no given thing being ‘canonical’ or non-canonical, and certainly you won’t find a quote saying that novels are at a lower tier of canon than rulebooks (let alone rulebooks for an RPG produced by a third party company as opposed to BL).

And that's the actual behavior of Games Workshop and its well known habit of rebooting everything all the time. The Necrons you see in the novels are no longer the canon Necrons as far as Games Workshop is concerned. They put out a new gamebook that completely changed them. This is not the first such change, but it is the most signifiant one. Everyone hates it except Games Workshop... and there is nothing anyone can do about it. This firmly cements gamebooks as canon, the newer the better, and novels are secondary to that by default because Games Workshop freely contradicts them whenever they feel like. And it does so through the gamebooks, which they have full control over.

Except the ‘new’ Necrons were first published in a Black Library Novel, Fall of Damnos, which was out before the 5th edition codex on a limited release basis (I fondly remember reading it in one night in a hotel room after Games Day 2011!) and featured various elements of the new Necrons from their conceptual status as royalty, through to units published later in the codex (Lychguard, Crypteks) and the explanation of how necrons become Flayed Ones.

Other Black Library novels featuring the ‘new’ Necrons are numerous, ranging from Devourer, which is a necron perspective novella partly from the perspective of a character introduced in the 5th edition Codex, Anrakyr, who is even on the cover leading his famous Phyrran Immortals against the tyranids. Other examples include Fabius Bile: Clonelord, where the protagonist Fabius has lengthy conversations with Trazyn, Wild Rider, which features a short lived alliance between a Phaerakh and the Aeldari of the Ynnari, World Engine, which expands on the story from the codex, Hammer and Anvil, which integrates the old story of Sanctuary 101 with the new necron lore, and of course, Word of the Silent King, which features the Silent King, the supreme necron monarch. There’s even a Black Library novel that features an escaped C’tan shard acting of its own accord, but I will not mention which one here unless asked as it’s something of a twist in the book.

There’s more Black Library novels about the new Necrons than there are about the old ones, and of course everything published since the 5th edition codex uses that version of their history and society, because Black Library is a subdivision of Games Workshop – there’s a reason it’s incomes are listed on the Games Workshop investor report! Games Workshop has full control over Black Library too, but not Fantasy Flight Games (who originally wrote the Rogue Trader RPG).

Incidentally it’s rather unfair to keep treating the 5th edition Necrons as ‘new’ the ‘old’ version (Necrons as slaves of the C’tan) dates from their 2002, while the new version was released in their 2011 codex (C’tan as slaves of the Necrons), 2002 to 2011 is 9 years inclusive, and 2011 to present is 8. In that same time, Star Trek has been rebooted into Star Trek Discovery and Star Wars has of course junked all its EU and restarted with a new expanded canon. So using this as proof that Games Workshop is infamous for retcons is rather spurious (the fact that people still take the new lore as johnny-come-lately material is perhaps proof that their fanbase won’t shut up about change though!)


Not everyone hates the new necrons, I don't hate them, though I am not truly sure which rendition of my beloved killer robots I prefer.

Another argument. The person who you link to interprets the quote by GW about how the canon of 40K is muddled by propaganda, politics, legends, and myths to mean that the novels use an "expanded" background while the game uses a "restricted" background, but otherwise that canon is purely up to interpretation. But I don't think that's what the company intended with that statement. They seem to mean that the novels are inherently full of unreliable narrators, because their perspectives are warped by the very nature of the setting. But at the gaming table, there is no such thing as an unreliable narrator. The information has to be accurate, or it ruins the experience, especially in a competitive wargaming match. But so too in role playing games, for a different reason. The players are too deep into the experience, and know everything that their characters know. And if that information is wrong, the players feel like the GM or the game itself is screwing them. So RPGs include accurate, if incomplete, information, and about things other sources might ignore-- like ship tonnage. And I believe the makers of these games are aware of the need for accurate, trustworthy information in the gamebooks.

Ah yes, the RPGs use stats therefore the stats must be accurate. And the RPG you cite is one that was published by a company who have now lost the liscence. The currently supported Roleplaying Game is one called Wrath and Glory, now published by Cubicle 7 Games but originally by a company called Ulisses Spiel.

What does this one have to say about Starship speeds and acceleration?

Crusing Speed: The medium speed in kilometres of a voidship in combat. A voidship’s maximum speed in combat is twice its Cruising Speed. The sheer mass of a voidship makes it difficult to bring a voidship to a dead stop. As a result, a voidship’s minimum speed is half its Cruising Speed.

Imperial Frigate […] 6km

So the maximum speed of an Imperial frigate is 12km per [unit of time] according to the new roleplaying game. Would you like to defend these figures too? By the rules you’ve invented WANG trumps Rogue Trader.

Note that while Rogue Trader wisely abstracts things like weapons ranges and describes them, when it must, as thousands of kilometres, the new roleplaying game which has replaced it gives Imperial Frigates’ macrobatteries the maximum range of 4km; short enough that they can’t even fire from the bow to the stern of one of their larger brothers.

Tell me again how the roleplaying games must provide more accurate and sensible figures compared to the novels and that new sources trump old ones...

[WhiteLion]

one user on another star wars forum gave me two links that could be helpful, one related to the impact of a jem0hadar pleasure ship on a galaxy class, and the other related to the impact of an asteroid on a star destroyer . The events occurred in the DS9 series and in the movie The Empire Strikes Back, for which they are canon material.

http://st-v-sw.net/STSWweakhull.html

In the second link instead calculations are made to determine the energy of the USS Voyager which impacts at relativistic speed, at 0.9c we are at 20,000,000 gigatons. The Voyager is 700,000 tons.

http://st-v-sw.net/STSWwarpram.html

In our case a Dictator cruiser of the imperium is 29,000,000 tons, while a Battleship is billions of tons (sources for both classes of ships: https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Di ... ss_Cruiser,
  https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Im ... Battleship).

[Adam Reynolds]

I wouldn't trust any of those calculations unless I redid them all myself. While all of this was before my time, the creator of that site was a notorious Trekkie troll on this forum and before that on ASVS. Literally all of his numbers are as biased as possible.

While it could be argued under the new canon that much of SD.net itself is wrong, RSA's site is still more wrong.

[WhiteLion]

for the calculations I cannot tell you if they are truthful because I did not veirificate them, I work as a doctor and with mathematics I do not get along very well. I have to try to make them do a few friends at university, maybe in the week I try to look for someone and then post the correct result.
Anyway I have to update myself on the new canon both SW and ST because what I've read has changed quite a bit. In short, what was declared non-canon of SW and ST? It seems strange to me because on this forum, good or bad, I saw that you make several sensible and objective arguments, which is why I like the environment.

[Elheru Aran]

Trek canon hasn't changed substantially. As long as you remember there are two (possibly more) timelines that are considered 'canon', the Prime timeline (Original Series through Voyager, includes Enterprise... more or less) and the nu-Trek timeline (new films), the canon policy for Trek has pretty much always been 'what you see on screen is canon, anything else isn't'. Star Wars reset its canon a few years ago when the sequel trilogy came out in order to accommodate the changes to the timeline that the new trilogy caused; now only the films, select television shows, and any material written after the cut-off date not marked 'Legends' is canon. 'Legends' material is from the old Expanded Universe, and no longer canon.

[NecronLord]

The big thing that makes RSA's calcs via ramming irrelevant is that Star Trek has Mass Lightening technology (mentioned on screen from time to time and explained in the tech manuals) which reduces the physical mass of the ships in order to get more accelleration out of the same thrust by some clarketech, this is also a thing in Stargate (at least for the goa'uld and ancients) and how they achieve the same speeds.

That means that their potential as RKVs is less than might be expected from their speed.

[Sky Captain]

For anything to survive relativistic impacts it would have to be made out of something other than normal matter composed of atoms. Otherwise it would disappear in a flash of radiation and particle showers. It takes about 1 eV to break chemical bonds in normal matter. In a relativistic impact particle energy would be in MeV or GeV range. There are multiple orders of magnitude more energy available than necessary to destroy any known material.