Imperial Navy
The Imperial Navy is one of the main branches of the Imperial military in Warhammer 40,000 (although very little of the Navy actually appears in the tabletop game). They are also one of the main factions in the beloved spin-off game Battlefleet Gothic.
Unlike the Imperial Guard, who get killed in the thousands millions billions every day, the Imperial Navy rarely suffers that many casualties. This is because, unlike the flashlight used by Guardsmen, the main weapon of the Navy is a giant, heavily-armed, heavily-armored battleship that puts other races' spaceships to shame (well, except Necrons). These ships are also massive, flying, Baroque cathedrals.
Depending on how you look at it (and who you're looking at), the officers of the Navy are either wealthy cowards or badass gentlemen. In either case, their ships have crews numbering the hundreds of thousands or even millions (we're not kidding when we say that each ship has its own language(s) and culture(s)), since the Imperial Navy doesn't understand how auto-loaders work, so loading a gun requires thousands of slaves running on treadmills. Of course, this might be the fault of a certain other branch of the Imperium, who, coincidentally, do have working auto-loaders on their ships. In any case, the Imperium has found it cheaper and more effective to use manpower because they have that many people to throw at even the tiniest of problems. Of course, for a major officer, most days simply require him to press a button and blow something up, then go back to drinking his tea. Oh, and maybe scramble the ground-support flyers, if he's feeling charitable that day.
Note that, back in the Great Crusade, the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy were one and the same, operating under the far-less-badass name of "Imperial Army." However, thanks to the Horus Heresy, the two got split up, so that a single military commander couldn't control too many forces; a Guard commander isn't able to get off any given planet without the Navy, and the Navy isn't able to conduct wars (and, you know, occupy territory) without the Guard. Despite how much they need each other, the two bicker constantly, which, in fact, may be the reason for all the Grimdark the 40k universe is saddled with.
/tg/ has a hard-on for female Admirals, but come on, wouldn't you?
Types of Ships
The Imperial Navy has four types of ships they hide their cowardly asses in. The main ships are battleships, cruisers, escorts, and fighters
Battleship
Supposedly rare, but every Grand Marshal and High Admiral has one to hide in. Bonus points if that coward is also Chaos.
- Emperor: The "standard" battleship of the 40k 'verse, the ship has multiple fighter decks and weapons batteries. Unfortunately, most commanders like to use this ship as a hideout, causing the lack of sufficient air support in the ground wars. Tabletop-wise, it's status as the official battleship of Battlefleet Gothic doesn't stop it from losing carrier duels against the Chaos equivalent.
- Retribution: Packing all gun batteries, the ship can devastate an entire continent in one broadside, but for some reason cannot destroy a hive city or fort with void shields or in some cases, ones without any shields at all...either that or GW is just pulling another Michael Bay out of their asses again since they have no idea on how consistency works, let alone the simple knowledge of physics.
- Apocalypse: This ship packs a lot of lances and a Nova Cannon. Shares all the disadvantages of a Gothic-class cruiser.
- Oberon: The mixed-breed bastard of the Imperial Navy. It has lances, fighter bays, and weapon batteries. Its a powerful ship...
when fighting foes half its size"Newer" fluff says the Oberon is rare, but a complete success in making a ship capable of killing anything it comes across, alone. Unfortunately, fluff also says a ridiculously low number of these (apparently) powerful ships were made (like, 3 or so).
- Nemesis: The super-carrier of the Imperial Navy. It has SIX flight decks (the size of towns or small cities, each), more than any other ship in the galaxy. But because of Rule of Cool, it is incredibly rare since the Navy captains prefer to get up close broadside their enemies, or actually rather because all of the ships in this class were just ships modified from Emperor class ships in one particular war, because they were damaged or otherwise.
Grand Cruiser
Backwater and frontier commanders use these when battleships aren't available. Basically an older type of cruiser that has more armour, but consequently lower speed (and can nearly match a battleship in firepower). It is basically meant to be to advance screening what battleships are to full fleets, and it does this job well (though the lack of dakka means Imperial commanders tend to mothball it).
- Avenger: The granddaddy of "modern" Imperial warships. The Avenger was the winner of a GW-sponsored ship design contest, and was originally known as the Furious. Highlights include a half-armored prow that resembles those on standard Imperial ships but provides no additional protection, no forward-firing armament, and the firepower of two Lunar-class cruisers.
- Exorcist: An Avenger that has carrier bays in place of lances. Useful in providing carrier support to any Imperial fleet.
- Vengeance: An Avenger with only macrobatteries. Intended to break the line of battle like Nelson's ships at Trafalgar, while suffering from the lack of an armored prow.
Battlecruiser
What do you do when you forget how to maintain an entire category of heavy warships? You build a new bunch of heavy warships, with simpler technology.
Battlecruisers are basically upgunned cruisers, with more weapons (usually adding dorsal weapons and some armor), and are intended to fill the gap between true battleships, which are rare, and normal cruisers, which tend to die really easily to the ancient Chaos cruisers and grand cruisers.
- Armageddon
- Overlord
- Mars
- Overlord
Cruiser
Cruisers are the bread and butter of the Imperial Navy. Much larger than escorts and light cruisers, but less rare than battleships, cruisers are what the Imperial Navy (and Chaos and Xenos) use to fight their campaigns across the stars. Thus far, all Imperial Cruisers have been shown to utilize the same hull-type: a squat armored prow in front, capable of mounting a prow-mounted weapon system, and a big bunch of engines in the back, with baroque and Gothic architecture in-between.
- Dictator
- Dominator
- Gothic
- Jupiter: A kitbashed design, converted from other classes of cruiser that have been heavily damaged in battle. By stripping out all the damaged components and replacing them with launch bays, you get a pretty sturdy carrier. Just don't let the enemy get anywhere near it. Apparently the Imperium doesn't build these normally at all.
- Lunar
- Tyrant
Light Cruiser
Smaller than true cruisers, light cruisers are used in two ways. Either you use a fast, maneuverable light cruiser like the Dauntless to add some extra firepower to a scouting squadron or long-range patrol, or you use a pocket cruiser like the Voss light cruisers to add some heavy firepower and armor to a convoy, fleet, or base. The advantage of the light cruisers are that they're cheaper to build and operate than real cruisers.
- Defiant
- Dauntless
- Endurance
- Endeavor
- Siluria
Ironclad
8 kilometer long battering rams. No, really.
Escort
Most common ship class in the Imperium, ranging from about 1-1.5km long. They are used for all sorts of duties, from transporting important officials to convoy escorts to attack squadrons in fleet engagements. They are almost always squadroned in the latter cases, and it's absolutely necessary on the tabletop for them to be effective.
- Cobra: The PT-Boats of the Imperial Navy. Small, fast, and lightly armed, their one purpose in life is to fire shoals of torpedoes from 3-8 ship squadrons. A great part of the Imperium's military advantage (in fluff and on the tabletop) comes from all the torpedoes they can fire at the enemy, and the Cobra's are a big part of that.
- Falchion: A new (245 years old) class of escort ship built by Voss Prime. Slow as balls but still capable of firing torpedoes. While Cobras are used offensively in fleet actions, Falchion's are designed to be convoy escorts and stick close to larger warships to defend them from enemy escorts.
- Firestorm: A Sword-class frigate with a prow-mounted Lance. Gives the Sword some extra anti-ship punch that it dearly needs.
- Sword: The most common warship in the Imperial Navy, and one of the simplest. No torpedoes or lances to distract you here; a Sword puts two massive laser batteries behind a pointed armored prow and cuts into enemy formations like a multi-laser through canon.
Fighter
Reusable torpedoes
Armed Freighter (in the Battlefleet)
Ships bought, borrowed or stolen and then armed in the misguided attempt to boost the strength of a fleet in desperate need of ships (instead of simply using the legio cybernetica to make robots to do the monotonous manual labor so 90% of the hundred thousand crew members can be spread out amongst a hundred more warships)
Important Details
Crews
Consists of either bridge officers, slave drivers or slaves. Each ship needs hundreds if not thousands of men to man the ship. Whenever the crew count gets low, the Imperial Navy sets up fake strip clubs on a planet claiming "Free Hookers" to lure in unsuspecting men (and the occasional woman). Once a future crewman steps in, he/she's knocked out, bound, gagged, and taken to the ship, where they'll slave away the rest of their soon-to-be-short existence doing everything needed to make flying through space and fighting in the void possible. Still, at least for the crew sex is allowed, infact encouraged, if for no other reason than the fact that ships will often be in space for long enough periods that natural means is the most viable way of getting replacement personnel. Seriously, whole fucking cities and civilizations arise from the more massive ships, every bit as intricate as say a long lived Hive City. Here is an idea of how it works, right up to the Roman armor, whips and beatings. Oh and apparently besides whole civilizations, there are whole civilizations of mutants around too. They can more or less settle new worlds for da Emprah by simply disgorging their excess population
Travel
The ships of the Imperium travel through the Warp using what's called a warp drive to get to where they're going. However, this isn't your happy, fancy tunnel-of-light like in Star Wars, or everything-moves-fast Star Trek, it is an alternate dimension full of Chaos. In order to avoid being turned inside-out (think event horizon) and getting hentai-raped by every daemon in the warp, the ships rely on what is called the Gellar Field to keep the furries, undesirables, and various other evil beings out of their ship when traveling through. The Baroque decorations are also implied in helping to ward off said daemons. They rely on a Navigator that uses the Empra as a beacon to safely navigate the Warp, hence the title "Navigator".
Notable Problems
These are problems some have with the Imperial Navy and their fluff....
General Logistical Problems
The big problem that the Imperial Navy has is that it's the only organised navy in the galaxy that's trying to defend its massive amounts of space. To do this takes vast numbers of ships but rather thinly spread out. Given the problems of warp travel it's also extremely hard to reinforce friendly fleets under attack. The foes of the navy come essentially in two flavours; raiders who might just manage to scrape together a few converted transports (building even escort-sized ships is a huge undertaking, akin to building aircraft carriers from iron ore) which take an escort squadron to murder, and huge organized invasion fleets that take a whole fleet to fight. These combine together to mean that outside of fleet bases and important strategic worlds there is nowhere in the Imperium that is actually well-defended. At best a fleet has to be formed and sent out and they could arrive months later. Travel takes a lot of time, and out in the void it can be extremely hard to know what you are actually fighting against, especially since the enemy tend to kill anyone who tries to look at them. So when there's a large enemy force that you absolutely must fight (not fighting is much preferable) you don't just band together whoever was within shouting distance of the flagship and go murdering, you pull together every single vessel in the sector and hope to the Emperor it's enough to do the job.
Warships genuinely are vast things and obscenely expensive and risking them at all in major actions is not something anyone does lightly. Each cruiser is larger and more complex than a fully-kitted titan legion. These things are MASSIVE. In the BFG book there's a fluff story of a cruiser being built at a shipyard that orbits a primitive world. The entire population of the planet were given over to mining the resources needed to build one single cruiser. It took them eleven years to mine the ore. Sure, that's a primitive world, but if you think about it that makes carving out the rocks for it the largest single project ever engaged upon without mechanisation. If you add together all seven wonders of the world you aren't even close to the pile of rock we're talking about. So these things are a big fucking investment and the high lords really don't like risking them without a really good reason.
So if you ever wondered why the Navy doesn't get more action, now you know. By the time the big, awesome ships get on the scene the invasion already probably finished and the bad guys moved on. Then you nuke the shit out of them from orbit or drop millions of poor bastards into the meat grinder. Far better idea all round. It's the reason that the enemy, even nutters like Chaos, don't fight in the void without reason. On the ground it's just a scrap, and maybe you win or maybe you don't. If you lose in the void then your campaign on the surface is dead. No reinforcements, no support and a massive constant orbital bombardment to kill everyone left. That tends to mean fleets hover around and not fighting, one ensuring the other can't directly interfere with the surface war.
Thus the rumour that the navy has no balls. But who needs balls when you have a nova cannon sized dick and eighteen dice worth of fire power.
Ship Size
No one is quite sure how big the ships really are. One story claims the Retribution-Class is a mere 3 kilometers long, while another says it is 9 kilometers and up to 20 kilometers.
Your best bet is Rogue Trader. From a helpful poster on Heresy-Online we have this:
For the most accurate scale, look towards the Battlefleet Koronus Expansion, as it is more a stat/rulebook rather than a story. That and previous consensuses, as well as cross referencing with the Horus Heresy rulebooks by Forge World (which places Battleships at 8-12kms) place cruisers just above 5 kms, and Battleships in the mid 8's. Please note that most ships above the size of 8ish kilometers are either a unique modified/purpose built flagship or a ship of a small class that is not in widespread calculations.
Transport.
<1 kilometer-ish. That's the small ones, there are super transports in 40k as well though.
Escort.
1-2 kilometer. "Small" ships, like the cobra. Designed to flank foes and operate in squads.
Light cruiser.
3-5 Kilometer. A smaller cruiser, not super common.
Cruiser.
5-6 Kilometer. The standard fighting vessel, every imperial fleet has them. And they are the most numerous. (Perhaps some escorts are more common, i might be wrong though)
Heavy cruiser.
5-6 kilometer. A beefed up cruiser.
Battle Cruiser. 5-6 kilometer. Beefed up Cruiser, generally more 'modern' than a Heavy Cruiser
Grand Cruiser. 6-8 kilometer. Pocket Battleship. Very old.
Battleship.
8-12 Kilometer. The biggest of the lot. Simply put.
The Horus Heresy novel "Know No Fear" had this to say about ship sizes, taken from /tg/ who quoted it from the book and written here is just the lengths and names of the ships, for simplicity and space:
Macragge’s Honour. Twenty-six kilometers - Flagship
Spirit of Konor. Seventeen kilometers - Battleship
Antrodamicus. Twelve kilometers - Grand Cruiser
Antipathy. Nine kilometers - Cruiser (note that the book said it had "six thousand lives" on board, small crew for it's size)
Aegis of Occluda. Seven kilometers - Class unknown
Gladius. Four kilometers - Escort
Then there is the Abyss-class created by Lorgar that is said to match the Phalanx in size. He made three of them.
Weapon Effects
If the weapons can annihilate a continent, why can't it destroy a mere hive? Because different writers don't talk to each other that's why. Also shields maybe.
Lack of Balls
It is well-known that most Imperial Navy Officers don't have em.
An Imperial Navy fleet is most effective when Inquisitors take it over. See Here.
External Links
Gallery
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The Lord Admiral's Love Shack
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The Grand Marshal's Summer Palace of PWNAGE
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Imagine how quick land battles would be if these things actually helped
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The Bullet-Catchers of the Navy
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Another demonstration of too much spare time
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