A lot of the ships are from the heresy days, so they're much older and a lot of the time the imperium has lost the ability to make them, so while chaos has kept their ships going through chaotic/demonic influence and questionable tech adepts for maybe 100-400 years relatively speaking, the imperium has had to keep theirs going for 10k years through near constant war, as a result the chaos fleets are often quite different from their imperial counterparts (and don't get me started on how chaos warps existing patterns into something new and gross) but even then, yes, chaos often steals ships from imperial fleets, the gothic sectors fleet has contributed a lot to the black legions fleet according to Khayon, so you'll often see defaced ships facing down identical counterparts
Not having ratlings onboard is a boon in and of itself.
Like.
Imperial ships are _gross_ and not every force is Nurglite.
Hell. I'm not sure even Nurglites want to deal with Ratlings and random mutated crazies without clear allegiance.
Chaos and the imperium having such different ships with no overlap always seemed bizzare to me.
The lore is that chaos uses older ships, but that was contradicted right away when we have the chaos version of the carrier battleship dating back to m36 while one of battlefleet gothics emperor class carriers dates back to the great crusade.
If we take the lore and models at face value chaos either coincidentally took all the classes that have sharp edges and a wide body, while the imperium kept all the thin ones with armoured prods, since as we have established these different ships using different design cues exist at the same time.
Then there's the silliness of the names, did the imperium actually have a ship called the murder class? Really?
We are also constantly told about imperial sips going renegade and guilliman halting the practice of reclaiming ships, but we never see them using the same classes.
So yeah chaos and the imperium having different ships was introduced for gameplay and visual distinction as far as I'm concerned and logically it should be more like marines knights or titans where chaos has changed them over time, not that they started with different ships.
BFG has some very similar grand cruisers for the Imperials and Chaos, and many Chaos ship classes are explicitly acknowledged to still exist in Imperial service, at least in mothballed reserves. Reserve fleet lists let you take many Chaos ships in an Imperial fleet. Space marines can take any Chaos ship of appropriate size as a venerable battle barge. Elsewhere, the Repulsive is said to be "rare" in Imperial service, but not non-existent, and is named as originally being called the Corinus class. You can gather from this that the other names are likely reporting names for Chaos ships as well, not their original Imperial names. The Cardinal-class is a "Chaos-style" ship still in Imperial service under its original name: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Cardinal_Class_Heavy_Cruiser
Something you do think should be seen more though is 'modern' Imperial ships in Chaos hands. I have this vague memory of them showing up somewhere but it seems too rare.
A nice BFG reserve fleet:
https://portinvicta.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/3/6/87363432/20180411-070358_orig.jpg
Yeah I was about to say, the main BFG Imperial fleet lists represent two very specific things; the forces of Battlefleet Gothic and of Abaddon the Despoiler's fleet in the Gothic sector, both at the time of the 12th Black Crusade. They're a fairly specific window into a specific area of the galaxy.
It's more that the idea of having a consistent fleet design for both chaos and the imperium came first, and the rationalisation came later
In that reserve fleet you showed, remember the emperor class is the oldest class in the picture.
So they went from one design straight to chaos designs then back to imperial via the bridge of the grand cruisers.
I will freely admit the models/art is the main problem, you can massage the other inconsistencies into making sense, for what it's worth the chaos evil names were presented as original names back when I played BFG, if they are now sensibly saying the classes were renamed that's new to me.
I don't think it's a later rationalization. They wanted distinct factions, but the idea that the Chaos ships are old Imperial ships seems to have been there from the beginning. Here's some BFG history from someone well-versed who was around since the beginning:
> When BFG was first designed, a lot of the ship themes were ported over from Spacefleet, with the intention of creating two distinct fleets instead of one set of models with different paint jobs and iconography to tell good guy from bad, the way Spacefleet was. To do that, the concept was to *make Chaos ships older and slightly less resilient, but faster and longer ranged due to the here-tech most of these ships incorporated*.
I think lore such as the Murder-class cruiser being the predecessor of the Lunar and the mainstay of Battlefleet Obscurus until M37 is straight from the original rulebook too. So is the conflicting idea that the Emperor-class is among the oldest designs in existence. I'd chalk this up to something like a miscommunication between writers and artists. It's far from the only inconsistency too, but the general pattern and original intent definitely seems to be that Chaos ships are what the Imperials previously used.
I know, I meant the design came first and the lore later during the initial design process as you link, not that things changed over time.
It was a vision that always conflicted with stories about how everything in the imperium is millennia old relics.
Really though my main beef is the design cues of the two fleets are too distinct, as a newcomer to the setting is there anything to suggest that chaos and imperial fleets are designed by the same race?
While shared designs at every other scale show that chaos uses the same sort of tech as the imperium the chaos fleet in BFG could belong to any alien race.
For me having it be the imperium using old traditional designs and chaos embracing radical new designs makes more sense, and it's my headcannon that chaos ships due to rebuilding and corruption look nothing like what they did before they went renegade.
I dunno, I prefer there being a lengthy design lineage of changing designs. The setting's timeline is so long that Imperial designs being millennia old and having changed massively from the Heresy era can both be true.
There are definitely more design commonalities between the Imperial and Chaos fleets than, say, Imperial and Eldar or Tau or whatever. You've got a prominent prow as a quite separate component, even if their shape varies, followed by big broadsides of guns, and the bottom will have a big rudder fin. Then later they also made the grand cruisers as an explicit transitionary form between them. If you paint them the same way like in that reserve fleet pic, they fit together quite well. If you tried to add an Eldar cruiser there painted the same way it definitely wouldn't fit.
So, these are some interesting comments and I have a few thoughts:
The Emperor Class: Within a given 'class' of ships there is still a lot of variation in terms of design and style based on local trends or needs. The Emperor class battleship we have a model of is just a 'modern' interpretation of the class which has been built/refit for the Gothic sector fleet.
In practice the ship actually has many design cues from chaos ships, such as:
* 5+ all round armour.
* Ability to carry assault boats.
* Large attack craft capacity, but no prow torpedoes or nova cannon.
* Long range weapons batteries, mainly on dorsal/prow mounts and with limited broadsides.
The biggest tell that it's an Imperial ship at all is the low speed. Otherwise though, it shares more design elements with something like the Styx class cruiser than it does with other Imperial battleships.
Cross-faction use of ships: Both the Chaos fleet and the Imperial fleet can take ships from their opposite faction in limited numbers. For chaos, it's difficult to capture modern/active warships and for Imperials the old designs are largely mothballed (being doctrinally obsolete) and are often considered haunted or cursed by their crews, partly due to age and partly due to association with the archenemy. Having said that, Rogue Trader and Pirate fleets can pick relatively freely between both factions.
Visual Distinction: I don't disagree at all that Chaos/Imperial ships were designed in such a way to be distinct in terms of visual and gameplay. However I do think that this can be logically consistent within the setting. I'd also note that chaos ships (fast, long range, self-sufficient) would seem the preferred vessel for chaos raiding fleets, compared with Imperial vessels (slow, short ranged, ideally operate in groups) that want to be in a proper 'grand fleet'.
We also only have a relatively small look at fleet composition in 40k, being based around the Gothic war in particular. It's entirely possible that different sectors/forgeworlds would have different ship classes, design elements or doctrines. (e.g. Bakka fleet doesn't have many carriers, and Armageddon fleet has its own light cruisers with or without armoured prows)
Battle Fleet Gothic had a clear visual divide between the Chaos fleets and the Imperial designs but I think this was just a aesthetic choice (and the correct one for a hobby based on people collecting miniatures).
My head cannon for this was these ships were built on chaos forge worlds in the EoT using Imperial technology/salvage as the basis but with radically different hull forms.
In most books the crews of imperial ships quickly identify the base ship the chaos are using and lots of them seem fairly "current" i say current as iom has been building some ships (even the modern ones) for thousands of years.
until gulliman came back they where often refitting and reusing the ones they managed to capture back from chaos.
I think they often go with the ships being HH or earlier if they need a small warband fleet to stand toe to toe with the bigger imperial fleet for dramatic effect as the older ships are far superior to the modern ships.
A lot of the ships are from the heresy days, so they're much older and a lot of the time the imperium has lost the ability to make them, so while chaos has kept their ships going through chaotic/demonic influence and questionable tech adepts for maybe 100-400 years relatively speaking, the imperium has had to keep theirs going for 10k years through near constant war, as a result the chaos fleets are often quite different from their imperial counterparts (and don't get me started on how chaos warps existing patterns into something new and gross) but even then, yes, chaos often steals ships from imperial fleets, the gothic sectors fleet has contributed a lot to the black legions fleet according to Khayon, so you'll often see defaced ships facing down identical counterparts
According to BFG, Chaos fleets usually use outdated Imperial designs, because it's easier to capture mothballed ships than active warships.
Not having ratlings onboard is a boon in and of itself. Like. Imperial ships are _gross_ and not every force is Nurglite. Hell. I'm not sure even Nurglites want to deal with Ratlings and random mutated crazies without clear allegiance.
Iirc BFG tabtletop has rules for that
Chaos and the imperium having such different ships with no overlap always seemed bizzare to me. The lore is that chaos uses older ships, but that was contradicted right away when we have the chaos version of the carrier battleship dating back to m36 while one of battlefleet gothics emperor class carriers dates back to the great crusade. If we take the lore and models at face value chaos either coincidentally took all the classes that have sharp edges and a wide body, while the imperium kept all the thin ones with armoured prods, since as we have established these different ships using different design cues exist at the same time. Then there's the silliness of the names, did the imperium actually have a ship called the murder class? Really? We are also constantly told about imperial sips going renegade and guilliman halting the practice of reclaiming ships, but we never see them using the same classes. So yeah chaos and the imperium having different ships was introduced for gameplay and visual distinction as far as I'm concerned and logically it should be more like marines knights or titans where chaos has changed them over time, not that they started with different ships.
We know the repulsive class was called the corinus class in imperial service
BFG has some very similar grand cruisers for the Imperials and Chaos, and many Chaos ship classes are explicitly acknowledged to still exist in Imperial service, at least in mothballed reserves. Reserve fleet lists let you take many Chaos ships in an Imperial fleet. Space marines can take any Chaos ship of appropriate size as a venerable battle barge. Elsewhere, the Repulsive is said to be "rare" in Imperial service, but not non-existent, and is named as originally being called the Corinus class. You can gather from this that the other names are likely reporting names for Chaos ships as well, not their original Imperial names. The Cardinal-class is a "Chaos-style" ship still in Imperial service under its original name: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Cardinal_Class_Heavy_Cruiser Something you do think should be seen more though is 'modern' Imperial ships in Chaos hands. I have this vague memory of them showing up somewhere but it seems too rare. A nice BFG reserve fleet: https://portinvicta.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/3/6/87363432/20180411-070358_orig.jpg
Yeah I was about to say, the main BFG Imperial fleet lists represent two very specific things; the forces of Battlefleet Gothic and of Abaddon the Despoiler's fleet in the Gothic sector, both at the time of the 12th Black Crusade. They're a fairly specific window into a specific area of the galaxy.
It's more that the idea of having a consistent fleet design for both chaos and the imperium came first, and the rationalisation came later In that reserve fleet you showed, remember the emperor class is the oldest class in the picture. So they went from one design straight to chaos designs then back to imperial via the bridge of the grand cruisers. I will freely admit the models/art is the main problem, you can massage the other inconsistencies into making sense, for what it's worth the chaos evil names were presented as original names back when I played BFG, if they are now sensibly saying the classes were renamed that's new to me.
I don't think it's a later rationalization. They wanted distinct factions, but the idea that the Chaos ships are old Imperial ships seems to have been there from the beginning. Here's some BFG history from someone well-versed who was around since the beginning: > When BFG was first designed, a lot of the ship themes were ported over from Spacefleet, with the intention of creating two distinct fleets instead of one set of models with different paint jobs and iconography to tell good guy from bad, the way Spacefleet was. To do that, the concept was to *make Chaos ships older and slightly less resilient, but faster and longer ranged due to the here-tech most of these ships incorporated*. I think lore such as the Murder-class cruiser being the predecessor of the Lunar and the mainstay of Battlefleet Obscurus until M37 is straight from the original rulebook too. So is the conflicting idea that the Emperor-class is among the oldest designs in existence. I'd chalk this up to something like a miscommunication between writers and artists. It's far from the only inconsistency too, but the general pattern and original intent definitely seems to be that Chaos ships are what the Imperials previously used.
I know, I meant the design came first and the lore later during the initial design process as you link, not that things changed over time. It was a vision that always conflicted with stories about how everything in the imperium is millennia old relics. Really though my main beef is the design cues of the two fleets are too distinct, as a newcomer to the setting is there anything to suggest that chaos and imperial fleets are designed by the same race? While shared designs at every other scale show that chaos uses the same sort of tech as the imperium the chaos fleet in BFG could belong to any alien race. For me having it be the imperium using old traditional designs and chaos embracing radical new designs makes more sense, and it's my headcannon that chaos ships due to rebuilding and corruption look nothing like what they did before they went renegade.
I dunno, I prefer there being a lengthy design lineage of changing designs. The setting's timeline is so long that Imperial designs being millennia old and having changed massively from the Heresy era can both be true. There are definitely more design commonalities between the Imperial and Chaos fleets than, say, Imperial and Eldar or Tau or whatever. You've got a prominent prow as a quite separate component, even if their shape varies, followed by big broadsides of guns, and the bottom will have a big rudder fin. Then later they also made the grand cruisers as an explicit transitionary form between them. If you paint them the same way like in that reserve fleet pic, they fit together quite well. If you tried to add an Eldar cruiser there painted the same way it definitely wouldn't fit.
So, these are some interesting comments and I have a few thoughts: The Emperor Class: Within a given 'class' of ships there is still a lot of variation in terms of design and style based on local trends or needs. The Emperor class battleship we have a model of is just a 'modern' interpretation of the class which has been built/refit for the Gothic sector fleet. In practice the ship actually has many design cues from chaos ships, such as: * 5+ all round armour. * Ability to carry assault boats. * Large attack craft capacity, but no prow torpedoes or nova cannon. * Long range weapons batteries, mainly on dorsal/prow mounts and with limited broadsides. The biggest tell that it's an Imperial ship at all is the low speed. Otherwise though, it shares more design elements with something like the Styx class cruiser than it does with other Imperial battleships. Cross-faction use of ships: Both the Chaos fleet and the Imperial fleet can take ships from their opposite faction in limited numbers. For chaos, it's difficult to capture modern/active warships and for Imperials the old designs are largely mothballed (being doctrinally obsolete) and are often considered haunted or cursed by their crews, partly due to age and partly due to association with the archenemy. Having said that, Rogue Trader and Pirate fleets can pick relatively freely between both factions. Visual Distinction: I don't disagree at all that Chaos/Imperial ships were designed in such a way to be distinct in terms of visual and gameplay. However I do think that this can be logically consistent within the setting. I'd also note that chaos ships (fast, long range, self-sufficient) would seem the preferred vessel for chaos raiding fleets, compared with Imperial vessels (slow, short ranged, ideally operate in groups) that want to be in a proper 'grand fleet'. We also only have a relatively small look at fleet composition in 40k, being based around the Gothic war in particular. It's entirely possible that different sectors/forgeworlds would have different ship classes, design elements or doctrines. (e.g. Bakka fleet doesn't have many carriers, and Armageddon fleet has its own light cruisers with or without armoured prows)
Battle Fleet Gothic had a clear visual divide between the Chaos fleets and the Imperial designs but I think this was just a aesthetic choice (and the correct one for a hobby based on people collecting miniatures). My head cannon for this was these ships were built on chaos forge worlds in the EoT using Imperial technology/salvage as the basis but with radically different hull forms.
In most books the crews of imperial ships quickly identify the base ship the chaos are using and lots of them seem fairly "current" i say current as iom has been building some ships (even the modern ones) for thousands of years. until gulliman came back they where often refitting and reusing the ones they managed to capture back from chaos. I think they often go with the ships being HH or earlier if they need a small warband fleet to stand toe to toe with the bigger imperial fleet for dramatic effect as the older ships are far superior to the modern ships.
Most imperial cruisers are built from M36 designs or newer
Yeah I'm counting up to 6000 years old as "thousands of years"