The 40k Lorecast - Episode 91 - The Fleets of the Imperium

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

On Today’s cast we cover the merchant and naval fleets of the imperium. We open with a breakdown of the segmentum fortresses and their purpose for the merchant and naval fleets. After that we go into the different types of merchant charters that exists and the good and bad of each of them. From there we jump into the void born and their incredible value to the spaceships of the imperium. From there we move over to the imperial navy itself. The technology, weapons, and ships of the navy. From there we conclude with the people that serve within the imperial navy and their roles.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast. It's me, John Barsadie and Bradchester. This guy. On today's cast, we're jumping into the fleets of the Imperium for the second time, because we've recorded this before. And yeah, we're doing it again because my audio didn't come through. And as much as...

You're trying to make the difficulty level come up because you were like, Brad, how are you feeling that time? And I was like, really good, John. We should rock this. I was super excited about everything. And then John went, hey, how are you today? And I'm like, I got hit by a bus. He's like, yeah, we don't have any audio.

The 40K lore cast is a weekly podcast, focusing in the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. If you like the show, please comment on it and like it and following us on Spotify or whatever you listen on really does help us. Additionally, we have now launched a Patreon for our fans. The Patreon simply gives you access to the show ad-free for $4.99. I'm going to take the time to learn them in other nationalities.

because that's what most of our patrons actually are. And then I'll start quoting those. Also, in the show notes, you'll see links to our merchandise, but more importantly, to our Discord. We have a wonderful Discord that I could not be more proud of despite constantly threatening to burn to the ground if it ever ceases to be amazing. But our Discord is designed for all of our listeners in mind.

It is meant to be a place that people who find 40K interesting and enjoyable can go and interact in a healthy environment, to get advice for hobbying, painting, reading. It's also really the best place, unless you know, see me on the street to explain to talk to me about the casts themselves. So Brad and I are both in there a ton, so please join. Big thank you to query, Cthulhu, Gersback, Nugles, Steve, Doc, Maestro, Snaz, and Solarsia, for moderating that discord.

They're doing a hell of a job, keeping it not just moderated in the sense of what we allow don't allow, but also keeping it organized and structured. It really is a very easy to interact with Discord. Let's talk about ships because it's cool. Last week, we covered how work travel is done, all the components to it, and then some of the structure lightly of the Imperium. This week, we want to spend a bit more time onto kind of two main parts of it. First is going to be the merchant fleet, which is the largest, and then the Imperial Navy, which I think has the bigger play in the lore. That's why we structured it that way. The merchant fleet isn't just bigger. It's like saying that I'm slightly shorter than the Empire State Building. The merchant fleet is a massive,

massive fleet, and we're going to go into it more and more, but there's, it is the most diverse elements. Amongst our weaponry includes such diverse elements as, and if you don't know, reference, what are you doing with your life? But also, there's just so many ships, because this is the people that do everything for the Imperium, from bringing widgets to food, to making sure everybody doesn't die. Yep. It's the way that the Imperium is structured, as we covered the last fleet, is it's broke up into segmentums. Some of them are kind of fun, like the sole segmentum, and some of them are nightmare zones, like the ultimate segmentum. But in each In each segmentum, travel and trade moves through within the merchant fleet.

And it's controlled in each section by what's called a segmentum fortress. And a segmentum fortress is the hub of all trade, but also all military. And we'll get to them in a minute in this portion of the galaxy. So the merchant fleet, the Navy fleets, civilian fleets, inquisitorial fleets, ad mex, base marines, all of them interact with a segmentum fortress. think of it like air traffic control for the entire segmentum. Because they want to know who everyone is and where they're going. Air traffic control, but you're always flying into a military zone.

Because if you do not respond back, they're most commonly just blowing you up. Yeah. And let's jump into the segmentum fortresses. So the segmentum fortress itself, as Brad was just saying, this is a fortress in an imperial, that is on a war footing. So these Sigmagnum fortresses, first and foremost, are a full-blown naval fortress. This is not, it is a trading depot,

but it's a trading depot surrounded by the largest military force you'll ever see, possibly in the history of galaxy. Yeah, but it's, yeah, I was just about to say. These are fortresses, and you just think, oh, it's a fortress. No, these are mobile moon-slash planets that are fortified with every possible weapon, every possible defense. Also, surrounded by a ton of large ships. They have everything from battleships to frigates.

Everything are all around these because these are such wildly important hubs. They also have a ton of everything you need to resupply from food to resources to fuel to actual troops and people to get into your ships. One of the biggest things about these fortresses, they are ready to resupply a, huge amount of fleets and everything else because they have to be. We're in a war society, like the entire economy is based on war. When things go badly, which they frequently do, even though we tell everyone we win every single battle. This has supplies, be it munitions, be it people.

And that includes they actually have extra astropath navigators in here that are for other ships. They basically can have the ability to poach navigators and astropaths because almost every big ship has extras because of the fact that especially if you're in obscuras, that's one of the biggest things that the chaos forces try to do. They're experts at trying to cripple ships by just killing the astropaths and the killing navigators. Exactly. And it gives you a hub situation to build off of because it's exactly your point. If all of a sudden a battleship, we'll cover them later, loses its navigator, you don't want to then not be able to use the battleship for a while. This way you can actually either, you know, if it's nearby, it can come back to the hub,

or more importantly, you can throw the extra navigator on a frigate and fire the frigate really quickly over the battleship to then, you know, resupply effectively. So these things, because again, when we talked about the segmentums, they're meant to all operate almost independently. I mean, it's not even almost independent. It's pretty much independent unless you get, unless Bobby G. shows up or bold solar macarius type things shows up, you're operating independently of each other. All right. Another key thing about these fortresses, though, is they're also used for trading. As we said, within the segmentums, all the trade occurs. But there are some supplies that have to go back to Seoul, like impossibilium or whatever, you know, not adamantium. Because there's plenty of adamantium, obviously.

There's obviously not enough unobtainium, though. Unobtainium. That's the one I'm thinking. It's an impossibility. I know there was one in there. Unobtainium. So those ones have to go back to Seoul, but those are very special, or not just so even other segments.

Those are very special journeys. So these fortresses serve as a holding point for those ones. So stuff comes in, gets loaded up, and then the ships that do those travels, that's where they come through. Obviously, there's a very critical fortresses. This is also why they tend to be positioned. in really key areas. For example, in Seoul, the fortress

sits right above Mars. Why? Because it's the biggest and most important trading hub. It's what it really is in the entire Imperium. In obscura, there's a forge world named Cypremundi, and Cyphermondi is one of the largest fordust of the galaxy. You were really not given its justice.

It's big. It's not Necromo, but it's still big. It might be number two behind Necramanda, and Necromanda's got a lot of issues, we're being honest. So this is where this is fortresses. Yeah. So each fortress is ruled by a pair of individuals.

The first one is called the Administratum Master. This person is just a pure bureaucrat. They oversee all logistics. I think that they're bots, to be honest. So I really think that no matter what, because everybody's enhanced that does any of these things. So these guys have to, they're bureaucrats, and you're putting them down a little bit, but man, they are in charge of, yes, like just a crazy

Oh, yeah. They are bureaucrats, but their job is to oversee all the logistics moving around their system. So this is air traffic control, police officer, Coast Guard, everything, all rolled into one. Interestingly, though, their job is to enforce all the rules and regulations, but they don't have the ability to grant. or anything at that level. That has to come back from the made administratum. So, you know, for example, if you are operating within the segmentum, it's not this individual who gives you your charter.

That still has to come all the way back from the main ad administratum, but this is the individual who would say, you know, your driver's license is not valid. That's basically, that's kind of their job. Now, also on the same fortress, though, is the inverse of this person. and this person will come up more later. It's the Lord High Admiral. The Lord High Admiral is a naval officer, and they're the highest-ranking naval officer

in the entire segment at this point. They have ultimate authority over the area. They decide where the naval fleet goes. They decide in the engagements. They decide the movement of troops. They actually do believe can override charters, if I'm not mistaken. They have pure,

unadulterated power. And this is because each Lord High Admiral, they're ranked out by segment. The highest ranking Lord High Admiral is the one, the Lord High Admiral for the soul system. That person's a high Lord of Terror. The mildly strong position versus Captain bureaucracy on the other side. True. Now, with that setup, I wanted to kind of dive a bit more into the merchant fleet. start kind of zeroing in on what makes up the merchant fleet. So you have inside a segment, the merchant fleet itself operates. And then within that segment, there is one administrator who watches over it. But the actual breakdown of it is kind of interesting to me.

So every single ship in the entire Imperium has to have some sort of charter on it. Now, your charter could be a rogue trader charter, a warrant of trade. It could be inquisitorial. Space Marine, Arbite, Admec, they each have their own. And that the same is true for the merchants, which is called a fleet charter, also known as Forklift Certified for the Imperial Galaxy. You drive. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

It's more impressive than someone who's not forklift certified, but it's forklift certified. What a fleet charter gives you the ability to do is it simply means you can be the captain of a ship. but that ship, you don't really get much say over where it goes because you're the captain of a ship that's part of a fleet. This is a big deal because they actually stated in some of the writings that the fleet commander, whoever's leading this, can strip them of their title as a captain, and it'll be roped and they give it to another person,

but they can do that at any time. So, like, if you're standing there and the fleet commander decides you're not doing a good job. They do the whole punch the, who's the head grip? Punch that guy. Right in the face. Hard.

So Les Grossman gets to tell that what's going on while he's doing his dance. But like these guys just get shot sometimes. Hey, you got delayed in the warp. This is for sure your fault. First in command,

shoot guy in the face. He's not. You're the captain now. He does a Vader on him. 100%. Because that's what these guys are. They're just a guy who's allowed to be the captain, according to the administratum. But this person has no sale over the trade routes that they go or anything.

Basically flying the small ship near the big ship that's got the guy who has the real charter on it. But you're also, you're the fall guy. Let's be honest. A lot of these guys. A lot of times, yeah, these guys are fall guys. But let's get to one that's actually interesting. So in ranking, these guys are the next up from the bottom, but I find them the most interesting. And it's called the free charter.

These guys are awesome. This is actually, this is one of the many things that I think that Cavill's 40K show could be around because these guys show up everywhere. The free charter is a charter given to a captain of an independent vessel that's not part of a larger fleet. This independent person is allowed to do kind of whatever they want with their vessel within, reason, obviously. So they decide where they go. And what that means is they actually are truly, they're out, they're a merchant. They're going out there, finding out. Well, planet X needs someone to take goods over to planet Q, and they're willing to pay this much for it. But planet F is willing to pay this much to take stuff to planet E. And this is, this becomes their goal. Because a key thing

about this is that the Imperium itself, trade within the Imperium occurs on a most, see a very macro scale. We are moving food, water, supplies for the military footing. Lots of weapons. And that's what this is. Everything's designed around, hey, we've got this mining world on planet Y, and they are mining all day. And we need a fleet of ships to take stuff from that to a forge world. These guys don't touch that. What these guys do touch is on planet, you know, Mercurial, they have actual beef. and very wealthy people would like to eat that beef. They don't make enough beef for the Imperium to really create a trade route for them.

So these free charter guys would then be the ones who take those from one place to another. And it's a big deal because they're going, hey, everybody can eat corpse starch. We're not restricting it to only be corpstarch, but also as long as everyone's alive there, we just don't care at all. I mean, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, to be fair,

I went too far for the appear. They said everybody's alive there. What I meant to say was as long as they're still meeting their quotas, I don't care. Yeah. But this is a, I think Brad and my love of this also may come from the fact that we both played Wing Commander Privateer back in the day, which I just looked up and discovered when it came out. And that didn't make, no.

Is it more? It's more. Oof. Well, actually, barely more. It's 32 years ago. I like this, though, because this makes me think of that, but it also makes me think of Firefly. You know, this is where you can get the, even though the Imperium's a nightmare, this is

where the excitement comes from. Because these guys also get some shenanigans because you're talking about very small level operators that are a lot of times taking the dangerous things. There are also the things that pirates want to hit because you're taking a expensive good that also, if you don't make it, the Imperium's not super, like, the actual Imperium. They're not even, they'll take care of, they don't want piracy, but also, like, the actual food got there. You just didn't get the better food there. Yeah.

And my guess is there's a little bit of this, like the game Starfield becomes the play in this a little bit, too. There's a few little different ways that this one, different ways this one can manifest itself. So the free charters are super cool. beyond the free charters, you get to what's called the heredity charter. And these ones are both good and bad. So the heredity charter is a trading charter that can then be passed down from generations. So you now are, you and your family are now ship captains. Well, there's two things.

I mean, we'll go into the bad, we'll go into the good, because these also have a lot of disparity between them, because a heredity charter is often, some of these families are bananas. as rich. You're talking about, you know, the Hilton's and all this, you know what I mean? The key thing about a heredity charter, though, is that unlike the free charter we just covered where they can go anywhere they want, the heredity charter means you and your ancestors can take the following route, you know, world A to world D. That's it. For the rest of your family's existence, you are going to trade from World A to World Day. There may be a couple extra routes in there, but effectively that's what you do. The problem with that is that sometimes world A or

world D ceases to be a place you want to be going to. And the Imperium doesn't really care about that because your charter says world A to world D. And if world D becomes an awakened tomb world, then you and all of your family, and until you run out of ancestors, will continue to fly your ships to that Necron tomb world. I don't know. Maybe you get lucky.

Maybe, you know, trades in the infinite will decide to trade with you instead of blowing you out of the sky. In my mind, I do have, like, you usually, you get a lot of people killed, but occasionally the necron's just go,

all right, what's actually in this ship? Man, this is crazy that you're doing this. So screw it. Let's just check it out. At the 50th ship has shut up, they've blown out of the sky. They're like, all right, fine. Like, how much? They're just working up there.

Like, do you take whatever currency we invented 65 million years ago? Is this still working? Is this a gold de bloom? Can we use those? He just have to make that they just get so confused that they might just go, all right, fine. Fine. Like, you know, it's just, this feels mean at this point.

But that's the heredity. charter. The next tier up from them is the ultimate. This is basically the best you're going to do outside of being a rogue trader. And this is the heredity free charter. Now, the heredity free charter is very rare. This is only given to people who operate large fleets themselves. It's a very powerful families that usually have had to use the wealth they've gained to get influence all the way back to the Lords of Terra to get this type of thing. You know, I have the best analogy for this. I actually think this is like the spice traders for Doom. This is one of the major houses, and this is a hereditary free charter.

When you get this, you are unbelievably wealthy. You have a lot of power because they don't give these to up-and-coming merchant, you know, this scrappy duet. You have to have, they have small, I can't even say small. They have military fleets of their own to protect the fleets. These are given to powerful houses that can take care of themselves and are given, just like the spice and tune, a very important role of transporting things. No, it's a great analogy. And so one of the key differences I'm going to point out between the heredity free charter and the heredity charter is the heredity charter is linked to a trade route. The heredity free charter, you still end up linked to a trade route, but you bid on it.

they can change. In the example I used before, where one of the worlds you're going to became a Necron Tomb World, everyone with a heredity charter would die. The heredity free charter would be able to say, yeah, I'm not going there anymore. And they could then bid for other routes. And they could then get them. And therefore, these are, to Brad's point, these become flotillas. I mean, we are talking massive British East Indian tea company. That would have been a heredity free charter. I think you're going for more like the Quarians floating around with their Flotilla. No, but the Florins don't do trade. Stop trying to wedge.

Don't, not really. You will accept the Quarians are awesome and tally's the best companion you can have. We both know that's not true. Like, we both. Whatever. You're probably favorites Jacob. I just play the whole game. Jacob or die.

You got to roll Jacob. No, doesn't everyone use the sniper and the. big angry reptile? Big angry reptile. It's Rex, but I just love the big angry reptile. Yeah. And did anything I say make you not think of rats? No, it's Garrison Rex.

It's perfect. Yeah. Yeah, I described Garrison Rex perfectly. Look at that. Look at me. Go. All right. But let's talk about the merchant fleet experience, though.

As we talked about before, the merchant fleet functions in a lot of ways, the way intercontinental trade on earth happened in the 16th and 19th centuries. GW needed a good influence and it was just sitting there. So as colonies are built up around the globe, trade exploded. And this is it on earth. The main thing about that as this trade exploded for a lot of the citizenry, a lot more money made unmoving of the goods around the globe than there was actually creating the goods back at home. So you start getting this massive independent merchant fleet start popping up all around the world. We have to go for a little bit of why, though.

Because in 40K, the Imperium has made certain worlds, and we've talked about this previous cast, wildly more than any other civilization or even race, we've made certain planets completely not viable unless an Imperium exists around it. We have planets that don't provide any food or they have no food or water. plant. It's just a completely It's a barren wasteland manufacturing. Right. And we have to have these planets supplied with food

and water and everything else. And also we have a ton of these other planets that not only do they not have that, they also don't have the raw materials anymore. So they get sent all of Rock A. They get sent all the unobtaining and they can possibly do.

Because their planet only makes tanks, guns, whatever. So we have to have these merchants moving things from point A to point B because we've isolated these planets of you only do this. Now, wild, it's kind of actually bananas efficient for a war economy. It's terribly inefficient for anything else because you want to just have these guys put out Lasgun rifles, whatever they're making. You get them here and you destroy them, go. I think a cool thing about this, The merchant fleet is made up largely of volunteers, in fact, almost exclusively of volunteers

who want to take part in this trade, Brad was just talking about, in order to keep the Imperium alive, because they can make a lot of money. But there isn't that much money in it. And the reason I bring that up is these merchant fleets, what makes them so lucrative, what makes it such a way to make money is you don't have navigators, you don't have astrophats, you barely have Gellerfields, like not strong ones. It depends on the size. If you're talking to hereditary, some of those just have Navigator houses hitched to them.

98%, 99% do not go. It's like businesses are right now. You have giant businesses that we have what the majority are. And this is one of the reasons why I think that we talked about the fortresses in a segmentum. Why those people are so powerful is they have all this information that might not even make its weight. back to Tara and the Lords of Torrent-Tero and this. These guys have such a huge position because they're in charge of all of this. Exactly.

And so the life on these ships is why I want to talk about is interesting to me, because what you have is these fleets are jumping across the galaxy. Even the free charter guys, they're sitting there trying to get as much trade as they can in a lifetime, but some of these trips can take a while because you're doing blind hops. So it could be a six-week journey. It could be a two-year journey to bring this stuff across and not just like two years hanging out safely traveling. It's two years of ducking pirates, doing warp jumps, readjusting yourself, all of these things. For John's point on this, it's such a big deal because what the Imperium does is, hey, I need to send whatever to Planet D.

Well, I know that these warp jumps are, some ships are going to not make it. These jumps are going to take too long. So the Imperium just loads up a bunch of ships every, either every week, every day, every couple months, and they just sling a whole bunch of them at there and some of them stick. And that we keep doing that. Well, and that's actually kind of, there's a, I mean, some of that's crazy too, where you might be at a port city, you and the ship next to you, you know, you're drinking at the bar, and you're both getting loaded with a same supplies to go to the same place, and you might get there four years before they do,

three years after they do, or they may never arrive. And you just know that. But the odds of the two of you leaving at the same time, transiting to the warp at the same time, and arriving at the same time is non-existent. It has to be, one of my favorite, just Brad, Canada, they don't even have a ton of stories for this, is you get sent with war gear. You need to get here with the resource is to fight this and then you get lost in the warp and you show up and they're like hey man that's was done for a couple hundred years now yeah who are you yeah exactly also why do you have this we haven't needed any of this for forever this is vital for the war you like that that ended like a long time ago man so one of the things that's cool about this is that as these ships come into port and move

to the next spot they pick up these ship hands and the ship hands are there to do a number of different things. Sometimes it's just a person who just hates the world there on and wants to go to another one. So they're effectively hitchhiking across the galaxy, but they're working in order to get there. Again, hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, maybe the best sci-fi book ever written. What happens, though, is that over time, some end up joining the ships and never leaving. What ends up happening is that this creates almost a new civilization that lives amongst the stars. They don't live on planets. And they over time are called the voidborn. These are really interesting to me because they start to get highly specialized.

You saw a little bit of it in the expanse with the belters. By the way, if you haven't seen The Expans, go get that. It's fantastic. Also, the books are good too. But in 40K, the Voidborn become wildly specialized and also highly adept at what they're supposed to be doing. A lot of these, well, let's go farther into this. Let's talk about the Voidborn.

I think the Voidborn are really cool because they do. appear in novels and games a lot. So I want to spend some time talking about them to kind of, to answer some questions people having, what is a voidborn? So a voidborn is not just someone who's born on a spaceship. This happens.

There's plenty of those. Yeah. I mean, we're doing multi-year journeys. You're going to have sex and have to make kids. That's going to happen. The void born are people. This is a culture of way. Yeah. That's why I use a term civilization. I think the void born are their own mini-civilization.

within the Imperium, because the void-born are only live in space. They'll touch down on a planet for a short period of time. The thing about the void-born being born generation and generation in space, according to GW, this is enough time with them to actually evolve to be more space-faring. Now, GW admits it's because of radiation and exposure to warp because you don't evolve in like a thousand years, guys. But whatever, what makes them interesting about that is that They're also somewhat abhuman because they look like a being that only lives in space. So the void point are thinner. They're gaunt.

They also are heavily, well, they're mutated, but they're also heavily augmented for whatever it is that they do on the ship. So you see actually different levels of the ship. They do a great job of this in Road Trader the game, and they have a lot of short stories about this in traveling. the Inquisition books, which is you have these very tall, very gaunt, but very heavily augmented to, and you can tell, like, a couple of the books talk about the Inquisitors meeting some of these Voidborn and instantly know that they are from this particular section of the ship because they have the augments to work on this part of the ship. And they are also, I have to give you them credit, this is pretty cool. They have, their families are on these same ships for

thousands of years sometimes, and they have heavily modified the ship also because they have to make this thing work through, you know, generation and generation and generation. Yeah. And this is what makes the voidborn so interesting, because they're both shunned and embraced by the Imperium. It basically is, where do you live? If you live on a planet, you don't like the voidborn, because the Brad's point, they're odd looking. And they also, they think, too we should also mention is they also don't like being on planet. mention, these are people who live their entire lives, living in bulkheads of spaceships, suddenly standing a planet, aside for the fact that gravity starts crushing their bones immediately,

they also are terrifying. Oh, God. Excuse me to me. Again, I admit, I'm claustrophobic. You put me in a small, confined space. I don't really like it. These people are the inverse. They've only ever been in a small confined space.

Then you put them somewhere where the sky never ends, and they just freak out. So it means a lot of times what I like about this is that they're interoperable. interactions with people on planets are largely negative because they're freaked out at the time. They're basically having a panic attack and are incredible amounts of pain and when they talk to anybody. So they really get along very well. However, the Imperial Navy and anyone who works kind of in orbit loves the voidborn because, to Brad's point, they are masters of this technology. And a family would, you know, for example, within a, much like within a hive or most of the Imperium, where you're born is where you will die unless you join the guard.

The void born, yeah, the void born, what they do is they're going to be born, let's say, near the engine compartment, for example. They and their entire family will work on that engine. That's all they've ever done for generations. They are, they're better at work on that engine than anyone. There's even stories of the admec coming down into the bowels of ships to meet with the Voidborn to learn how some of the technology works because the admec have a schematic for an engine. Then they look at said engine and say, that's not the schematic anymore.

It's because it's been modified over the years by the Voidborn. The Voidborn pushed the Mechanicum in their knowledge. The thing is that a lot of times these ships are thousands of years old. They've been in constant active duty. especially on a lot of these military. I mean, on the military ships, 100%. But a lot of these, maybe the road trader ships and some of these larger hereditary ships and stuff like that,

you've been doing these routes for since, hey, when was the ship, Chris, in M32, and it's still in operation right now, and it's still running. And you go, hey, let's, I've got the schematics for the ship, and you go, this doesn't look like anything. So this is why in games, if you are a voidborn, it actually gives you a bonus to your ship's performance. Because the thing of the voidborn is this knowledge they have tends to also just be spaceship knowledge.

Because the voidborn don't just serve in the bowels of a merchant vessel or even the bowels of a naval vessel. They will become naval commanders. They will become breaches. They will take on numerous roles. You know, some of them may become road traders with time. they can get a lot of power and they are masters of space because it's all that they know. They're masters of ships. You get some cool stories where you'd have something going wrong on a ship.

But luckily, a random guy on the ship is voidborn and just kind of runs over and fixes it while the imperial mechanics are struggling. That's why the voidborn are cool. And they're fantastic for especially again in the dark space, you know, dark future, there is only war. these guys are great for combat fixes. They are just like, yeah, whatever, man. My whole family's been for the last couple hundred thousandths of years, whatever, we are all void-born. Yeah, of course we fix this stuff because we had to know how to fix it because everybody dies if you don't.

And I love some of the stories about the voidburn are great because they just assume that other people have this knowledge. So they're like, of course you do this. And they're like, nobody knew this. Yeah. But actually, let's take up, because from the void born, let's go into the Imperial Navy. I think it's a good transit because a lot of the Voidborn are also part of this. Yeah, the Imperial Navy, the imperial, the final thing about this is in the scheme of ships that make up all of the Imperium, the Merchant makes up a 90 to 92% of all ships are under the merchant fleet.

But 5% of that overall 100% is made up by the Imperial Navy. Navy. The Imperial Navy is three to ten times the size of the Imperial Guard. So this is the largest force that the Imperium has by a wide margin is the Imperial Navy. Let's talk about a little bit of why, though, because the casualty rate, for one, is wildly lower. Because yes, we lose ships. Yes, we have space battles. But the Imperium's general modus of operandus is shove Imperial Guardsman into a wood shipper until it jams the wood chipper. We don't do that with ships because, well, ships cost money. arrows cost money. That's why. That's what I was going to say.

The last gun and the quote unquote flak armor, very heavy, quote, unquote, on the armor word there, don't cost very much and the person costs even less. The ship's expensive. Right. So we could wage naval combat where we could keep the ship and lose all the crew. they do that all day every day. But they can't. If they can start firing naval navy as bullets.

Then we're good, but we'll keep this going. So as a result, the Imperial Navy is a lot larger. And also, you know, the ships are a lot bigger, too. They have to carry a lot more stuff. But before we do that, I want to talk a bit more about some of the structure of the Imperial Navy. Because, again, it's broken up into segments in the galaxy. So each segmentum has its own Lord High Admiral. Each High Lord commander commands their battle fleet, which is made up of a hundred vessels.

Asterisk. Yes, big asterisk there. Brad, Brad's correct. There's a big asterisk here. They say 100 vessels. That's 100 vessels of note. It doesn't include all the small little guys on it. So it's 100 battleships, cruisers, and frigates.

That's what they have. And some places there can actually be more than that. And within this structure, their job is to keep their segmentum safe with that. So less than 50% of their battle fleet is around the fortress any time. The rest of it's out on patrol. Depending on what the segmentum is and what the region is, the size that patrol will vary. And this is because they're responsible for pirates. They're responsible for small enemy incursions.

All of this, it has to get handled. It has to get handled quick. If you allow pirates to kind of get a hold of a system, then you're going to have to require a lot more muscle, deal with them later. So they're supposed to nip these in the bud because if you have to radio out, I love that I'm going radio for this, if you have to radio out that you need some help, the larger guys in charge are annoyed that they have to stop pushing the crusade for

to unify the galaxy and come back to deal with the thing that you need help with. And this is a big deal on that. And let's talk about the two biggest ones you're going to have here. It's going to be orcs and Drew Kari. And I kind of want to break this down a little bit so people are saying why these exploratory fleets matter. If you've got a small orc incursion occurring and you just slap it down hard, then it doesn't draw other orcs the battle because the battle is over. There's no problems anymore.

It's the same with Drew Kari. If Drukari raid an area and they don't get a lot of resistance, they'll hit harder and harder each time. And when you finally do want to go deal with them, you may. find yourself with a much larger rating force than the small little encouragement ones. It might be a cabal leading multiple other cabals and covens and which, you know, but if you're, if you make it difficult, they just look for somewhere else to go. They don't bother. And the flip side, though, is you also might encounter an awakening

tomb world or fine, you hit tau space, you know, but or something like, you know, where you do hit like an Eldar craft world. In those scenarios, you're going to get smoked no matter what. So you don't want to have a large force. Because imagine if you have a larger battle group that all of a sudden finds itself above, what's the Stormlords that run to? Yeah, he's the Sautak. Sawtec, yeah. So, yeah, all of a sudden, you said there, it's a Sautac.

You're done. And that's something where you need to go bring a full crusade into. You don't want to lose a bunch of ships just because you made a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Which does happen to. There's an old reference for Brad. Yes. Thanks, bugs. just trying to turn left.

So that's why these patrols are so important. But they also have to do other tasks, escort duty. So when the Admec exploratory fleets go out, I mean, the Admec make them their ships. So the deal Admec has is we will make you all the battleships. But when our exploratory ships got looking for STCs, in which case, by the way, they always cause problems when they do that, it's the job of the Imperial Navy to escort them and make sure that they get their STCs back home safe. Let's talk about one of the others. when an important person has to go from point A to point B, they have to be escorted.

But also half the time, it's about 50% other things. And 50%, oh, yeah, the lords are terrible. So they're probably trying to kill some of their rivals because they left their fortified base for eight seconds. Another big piece the Imperial Navy has to do is actually escort their own craft, their new craft. So Forge World, for example, as we said earlier, is going to build a battleship.

But a forge world is primarily housed with the end of this Mechanicus, that they don't have a million troops just sitting around waiting to go on it. So they have to then collect it and then bring it back to the fortress. We're at the fortress that will get staffed with people. The problem, obviously, is that, you know, they don't have enough crew on it to fire the guns. We do all that stuff. When they have big Earl in his five, his barbershop quartet trying to get the ship from point A to point B, Not a lot of people are ready to staff these.

The population of some of these giant vessels is crazy to make these things. Very much so. Very, very much. But what I will say is from that, though, I do want to have some fun. Let's transition, because we just talked about Imperial War vessels into the Imperial Navy at war. Because I find this part, and again, it's because I've enjoyed Battlefleet Gothic a lot, but also they have this within Trader and a bunch of other ones.

It's a super fun thing. So let's talk about how the Imperial... Let me put my pinkies out real quick and talk about the Imperium and its theaters of war. We'll be right back

after a quick break. Yeah, so the Imperium has two styles of engagement. Style one is space to space combat. Style two is space to surface combat. One of them is very easy to cover and talk. about. Put ship in orbit, fire guns with gravity at thing. Not complicated. The bigger one, though,

is the ship-to-ship combat. And for those of you, by the way, who play the game and are wondering why I'm so into this, check out Battlefleet Gothic. It's a really cool turn-based style, and it covers as well. Let's talk about the equipment on these ships here, so you imagine how grand a scale this combat is. And we'll start with defense. The first one is what's called, because These actually also come up on the table top a little bit, void shields. I'm going to talk about, you know, what a void shield is. Can we, okay, do the void shields, but I really want to talk about, you know, let me jump in after that. Because I get, I'm all excited.

Johns hold me back. He's basically doing the big brother with the little brother. He's got my, he's got my hand, his hand on my head because I want to talk about how big stuff is. Yeah. Brad likes the offense. I like defense. It actually is why we work well, although not when I play the game because I just run my works forward. Tizzy.

I have strategy. I was just about to say that. I was, I thought they're just, just, orcs go that way. Anyway, what's my deployment zone?

What's my opponent's deployment zone? Cool, I'm going that way. All right. So the first thing I talk about is a void shield. A void shield is, it's the force field of 40K. But they explain how it works.

It's a Geller field in reverse. Whereas a Geller field projects bubble of material around the ship and including the ship itself. A void shield, projects a layer of immaterial all around the ship. And that way, when something from the material, like a shell or a last cannon blast or whatever,

interacts with it, like a matter, anti-matter, it explodes. And it deflects the blow. The thing I like about them a lot is that they require constant energy to keep in place. And the more of these impacts interactions happen, the more energy gets pulled. I love that you're like constant energy. Like you need like a, that diesel, generator you got. No, these are

massive, massive amounts of power because as we'll go into the offense of this, people are shooting some big stuff at each other to make these void shields powered. They have huge amounts of power consumption that are gone into those. Incredible reactors, but the reason

I like it this way is that one cool thing about the void shields, it gets us to where we're going to go next, is that a void shield doesn't actually fail. It's more like a breaker trips. You put enough energy into it and eventually the breaker trips and the void shield turns off. At which point, you can reset the breaker and the void shield will come back on. But there's a period of time between those two things.

And that period of time, horrible things can happen. One other note about void shields, though, is that void shields have varying levels of power and you can actually find yourselves in a little bit of an issue with them. If you turn the void shield up to an 11, the problem you have is that the immaterial around your ship becomes so dense and thick that you can no longer use Vox communication in ship to ship. This would usually only happen with a battleship or something at that size could find itself actually silenced in battle if it wanted to bring its defenses all the way up,

which is a cool, and there's some stories of this happens. It creates a weird dichotomy for a captain where he's now got to fly and effectively blind, because he surround himself with imitarium. He can shoot out of it, but that's about it. The next piece down in this is, of course, how all the ships are constructed. And they're constructed of two materials. One of them is the plastial, and that's just the 40K version of metal. This is your basic structure.

But they're also covered in a layer of wolverine. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're saying layer. Don't say it like they're gold plating things. these are meters thick adamantium on ships that are kilometers long. These guys went in and got all of the different versions of Wolverine, which if you haven't seen the latest Deadpool, you're missing out, and then melted them all down and then coated their ships in them.

And the adamantium of this course is, of course, the bigger the ship, the more the adamantium. The thing about this, though, is GW does do a kind of a clever thing here in the writing. they don't just say, well, these ships are covered in dense armor, because you can still crack armor. They added something else, and it's called a field brace. Layers. I love the field brace. This is so cool because, okay, the Imperium is not the highest levels of tech in the 40K world.

However, we build the biggest stuff. And when we build, we redundancy everything. And I love this with the field braces because you have layers upon layers of fortifications, but structural force fields. You have these ships that can just go into it. But I love it an example of when you see it, especially in the games of the writing, there's ships that are almost cut completely in half that are fully functional, still fighting in a battle.

Yeah. And that's what a field brace does. The field brace is a energy weave that goes throughout the entire hull of the ship. So should the ship get hit with someone that actually could crack it and put a seam through it? Remember, you are in outer space. There's inverse of gravity. So if the inside of a ship is pressurized and a crack appears, the ship will actually explode outwards.

That's how the laws of physics work. What the field braces do is even if that crack is there, it forces the pieces back together and holds them there, which allows the ship to almost bend with impact should the void shields be down. This also has come up later, we're talking about Nova cannons and helping the ship fire some of the biggest guns. But the field braces are really cool. So your void shield goes down, but the breaker's tripped. You go to reset the breaker. As the void shields are coming up, you're going to be taken. We're about to talk about some of the guns. You're going to take some hits. And those hits are going to be centralized to crack your hull. But even if your hull cracks, the field braces may

allow it to stay intact. So then when your voyage shields come back up, you're still as able to fight and maneuver, maybe a little bit slower as you were before. But I've held Brad back long enough. Let's talk about guns. Boom, boom, big guns. They have, I love my Imperium ships,

but while my Eldar ships are sleek and look cool, and they probably make more sense. The Imperium packs more guns per square inch than anyone else in the game. The gun and fifth element is basically how the Imperium makes everything. That's how this has to go. And it's amazing. We'll start off with the biggest,

what's actually not the biggest guns. That's the biggest. It's the most. Yeah, is the side batteries. And the side batteries use something called macro cannons. Because GW were under a time restriction to write something down really quickly. They say, hey, what's a big gun?

Macro. It's a macro cannon. All right. So now that's what we have. We have macro cannons. These, I like that these side cannons, they do vary a little bit, but effectively, it's the same gun they used for orbital bombardment. They use for ship to ship bombardment. This is a man of wars, battleships, all the stuff from the, you know, like, the British Navy, actually, anyone's Navy in the 17th, 18th, 19th century.

Bring the ship alongside, stick every gun out of every hole. Fire all of them. Some of it's going to hit. And when it does, it's going to suck. Because the ordinance that are firing is bananas. It is so crazy on this. Well, and they've got, because they've got, and it is just like, you know, you expect, they have a varying level difference of shells they can put in there depending on the opposition.

There can be void weapons, plasma, melta, whatever we're dealing with. For example, Tyrannids don't have void shields. So you don't need to fire anti-void weapons at Tyrannids. You have to fire things that melt organic material. But necrons have their own style of force field. You have to go to shoot into. So the ordinance can be changed out, obviously. But the main goal of the side battery is to pull up alongside.

The problem with that, though, is when you pull up alongside something, it also has guns all along the side of it, if it's the imperial vessels. So you've got a little bit of a challenge in how you want to use them, which leads to the Imperium and everyone else using little these small, little kind of smaller craft that are designed to go quick so you can never get alongside of them and they stay in better areas. And they just kind of heck at you with their smaller. Well, they're trying to put down a lot of your weaponry. Or they're trying to put a lot of times they focus on your weaponry on certain parts of the ship, effectively creating blind spots. And to deal with this, they have 360 mounted laser weapons.

And these are called a lance battery. This is the lance. This is the lance. battery that you'll see. It is 360 degree mounted, and it is designed to do two things. One, screw up small craft, but also it can be used to what Brad was describing really well, kind of pinpoint certain parts of enemy vessel, maybe take out their engines, take out, you know, a communications tower. It's going to, because it's much more likely. These side batteries are just almost blind fire. You just get along close, fire them all, what hits, hits and what misses. sucks to be somewhere else in the galaxy, whatever it gets there. But these ones are designed

for their shields are low enough. We can get through them. Let's pick at them. So the Lance batteries will umph. But Lance batteries are for little pupaeum. Let's talk about when you mount a gun to the prowess chef. And then go, well, how big is the gun?

This weapon is over 200 meters long. So that's two non-American football fields. To an American, this is two Costco's back to back. You know, anybody doesn't say, I love you when you go past it. These cannons are Gauss cannons. It's just, and they fire a warhead that can be 50 meters wide, which for an American, that's two basketball courts wide. It's, which by the way, when you read that, you go, yeah, no one needs no one shoots anything that big. I mean, that would probably do enough damage to a planet, let alone for ship the ship. And there are some of planet killers on that because the Don, Avedon, brought his original

planet killers out. And that's what they were just four shooting. But one of the biggest things of this, see, three for one, is that when you mount something gigantic that you have to go, hey, if we push a ton of force back, we probably need some force forward. So this is actually one of my favorite things because every now and then GW does, I can tell sometimes there's someone writing the rules

who has a degree in physics. And I can tell when I read in the rules. This is one of the good ones. They realize there's a recoil. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The use of the Nova Canon causes two big problems. First is the vibration and second is the counterforce. And for this reason,

the Nova cannons can only be mounted on battleship or higher vessels. We should mention also that the Nova Canon can crack a cruiser with one shot with its void shields up. It'll go right through the void shields and blow the cruiser in half. So these things can sit at the back of a battle and just pick off enemy craft. Now, the reason it has to be on a battleship is, as we talked about earlier, the field braces, this requires a level of field braces that are so powerful. that only a battleship would have them, because as this gun fires, it's going to effectively shake the

entire ship, and it would actually shake the ship apart if you didn't have a strong enough field braces. But the funnier one is firing this projectile that's two basketball courts wide out the front makes the ship want to go in the other direction. And if you put this on something, it could actually fire the ship. I mean, it wouldn't be a light year, but it might be a couple miles backwards where there might be other ships in the way. So instead, in order to fire the Nova cannons, you have to take

your battleship and turn it to full forward force so that when you fire, the ship doesn't shoot backwards. The other part I love about these is that the Nova Canon, this is how messed up this weapon is, was never used until the Horace heresy. It was actually Petarabo,

who was, when he was chasing Korax, fired it at him. And even Korax went, what the hell was that? He goes, he missed because it's Petarabo, because of course he missed. And after the shell went past, Corax went, what the hell was that? And it was after that moment that the loyalists and the traders began using them, and they're still used to this day. This would cause a lot of collateral because you miss and you're like, oh, something behind me is going to get ruined.

Oh, yeah. Again, it is, it's space. So it's got to get slowed down by gravity. Or if it doesn't, it might just slam into a planet and then they have a dinosaur extinction event. Hoops and Dixie. Exactly. Let's talk about the ones that are probably, are they the most used?

Torpedoes. So each side, each all, actually factions in 40K, have different torpedo types between plasma void, melt up. They've got... Space Wolf.

Literally space wolf. Not type of torpedo, just a space wolf. Yeah. We've got everything from boarding to damaging. And I like this a lot because they have tons of different. And this is the catch-all. Torpedoes are a lot of the things that they use in the stories to do something specific for the... Yes. It's a concept of the torpedoes to independent projectile. But in the

40K universe, they have void torpedoes, plasma tributos, they've got all those ones, but they also have hollow ones. And they're primarily used to either board a ship or put something on a ship that the ship doesn't want on it. And my favorite example of this with the boarding torpedoes is They're used by all different groups, but if you watch the very first Astardis video ever made, that's a boarding torpedo where they come in, they go into the ship, and the space marines pop out and begin fighting. There's been a few animations around this. I don't know why I love these animations of guys just riding a ship into another ship

and then jumping out and blasting their way through. What they'll do is once they're inside, because this is a cool way to take a ship out. If you're thinking about a cruiser or a battleship-style vessel, you want to do one or two things. in combat. You want to blow it up or take it over. And trying to fire through all the armor to blow it up is actually pretty hard to do. So the best thing to do is actually just get onto the ship and go to the reactor and flip the overload switch and jump out. But if it's not that scenario, you want to capture the ship, let's say it's a Blackstone Fortress, for example, you can't just shoot at it and expect that the chaos Marines inside will say, fair enough, guys, we surrender,

head and have the ship. No, they're going to crash it in Decadia. So maybe next time, instead of doing that, board the ship and stab Abadon. And this is- Don't get out there. This is such a cool thing, though, for the games in the lore, though, because of the fact that this is where you get these heroic boarding parties by the Marines that come in and just fight against all odds and fight their way out of the bridge and or blow the ship up. It's funny because the Marines go to the bridge more often. and like naval breaches and stuff almost always go somewhere to put explosives leave. Yeah, we're just going to blow this thing up.

We're good, guys. This thing's, like, I don't, this ship's full of space marines. I wasn't going to go well for me or chaos cultists. So I'd say we'd just blow it up. It actually makes more sense. From there, though, let's talk really quickly about some of the ships. Again, the goal here is if you want to know more about this, by the way, guys, I said before, you can download the PDF of the Imperial Fleet Gothic rules.

It's 20 years old now. You're not really stealing anything. There's so much lore in there. But what I do want to do is the goal of this cast was to kind of gives people some interest, something they don't know a lot about, but also for people who play the game and read the novels to know when they say something with what it is. Because I know when I read the books, I had to go Google stuff where it's like, wait, this is a frigate or this is a corsair.

Like, what is this? So real quickly, I just want to kind of run through some of these and explain what they are. So the largest, obviously, are the phalanx in those ones. So skipping them, things that are actually pretext. The largest is the battleship collapse. And the class has goes in size all but from the apocalypse down to the Grya and the adjudicators. Those are names of ships. Those are sizes of ships.

These things are huge. So eight kilometers long. So which is about the distance, it's one and a half times the distance that someone goes for a run and it tells you about. And you have to pretend you're impressed. Yeah. You know what I am impressed about is the crew size. We were talking before. some of these are in the millions.

Yeah, you can have the battleships can be upwards of three million people sitting on them. That these are, they create their own gravity, this size. These are incredible. Now, there were not very many of them. Every segment only has a few of them. However, the return of Gilliman has shifted that a little bit. Gilliman and Call are now overdriving the admec, and they're realizing that they need, especially after the fall of Cady,

Kedia would not have fallen had the Imperium had more battleships able to handle something like a Blackstone Fortress coming in. It was only because the Blackstone Fortress was so large and only the phalanx got there in time, but they needed more firepower. So this is shifting, but for now the battleships are very rare. And so in battle, what they do is they tend to keep the battleships a bit further back so that it can then deploy its Nova cannon and all those things. and just try to rip apart an enemy fleet. But what are the things you go to the next sizes? Because battleships can't be deployed so low. They need all their auxiliary escort ships to handle all of the nonsense

because while they're awesomely powerful and huge, you could just stick and move them for a long time. They're so slow. They are so slow. I mean, and it's just like we do today in modern era, we have carrier groups, not battleships anymore. Same concept as a carrier group. The aircraft carrier itself can level a city.

But a bunch of small little BS craft, it's kind of a pain in the ass for the carrier to handle it. So we have to bring down the next class. The next class down is called the cruisers, which is actually four different classes. You have grand cruisers, battle cruisers, heavy cruisers, and light cruisers. The cruisers used to make up about 80% of the Imperial Neville fleet.

Like I said, that's diminishing now because it's more of a focus on battleships. they were so common because the cruiser is the rhino tank of the Imperial Navy. It's one basic chassis that they just tweak a little bit and add some extra crap to. And everybody had, I mean, this is actually an STC. That's right. It is an STC. The core of the cruiser is an STC.

And they make fast maneuverable firing platforms, the kind that you deploy against other cruisers or as battleships to kind of maybe go after their engine compartments. to stay out of range of their big guns. They'd have heavy platforms that would actually, you know, they couldn't handle a battleship, but they could blow up other cruisers really easily. They also have ones that are just stripped troop transports. Like, hey, we, you know, we have to get the Imperial Guard into conflict.

We're going to have to land this ship on a planet. That's going to be firing orbital cannons at us. Let's just, you know, load it up. And more. Of the group, though, interestingly enough, the light cruiser is the most produced, which is the smallest. I mean, it's all basic chassis, but they've put the least amount of crap on it. This is a dauntalist and the endeavors fall into this, and they're called a scout class.

That's because what they do is they tend to the scout out at the front of the formation to start harassing the enemies, designed more to kind of get the enemies to focus on them while the big, heavy hitters get into position. Which is funny because they actually have crap for weapons, but they actually have fairly decent defenses besides being super fast. if you read about them. Yeah, they're fast with good void shields and good, you know, anti-torpedo technology, all that stuff. But the goal of them is to basically harass a little bit. And then things like, you know, the Armageddon and Mars pattern, Grand Cruisers then

are behind putting themselves in position to then wreck the enemy force. Which I love these because these are exactly the opposite, where you're like, how are your fortifications? but I have a truckload of guns. I also just want to think this moment to point something out. The Imperial Navy's tactics are so much better than the Imperial Guard tactics. I mean, like, it's an insane difference versus the Imperial Guard of, hey, how many more regiments do we have? 50? No, key.

Next one up. Let's see what happens. Beyond the cruisers, though, there is one more class down, which is the frigates. Now, the frigate class, these are destroyers, corvettes. these guys are never alone. They're usually only used for small patrols. So as we said before, the Imperial Navy's job is to also patrol the segmentum,

do small escorting duties, those types of stuff. That's where you're going to see more of your cruisers. Your cruisers are going to come along with maybe a couple frigates, you know, somewhere in that range. And they're going to be handling, you know, oh, hey, we heard there was a disturbance on World 47325. They'll go out there because it's probably, a pirate incursion, and there's more than enough firepower here to deal with a pirate incursion.

But if they get there and it's a Necron Tomb World, there'll be an astrapath message back. That's all that's coming back, but there'll be an astrapath message back. I think if you like the stuff that, that's kind of a, you know, we just kind of lightly touched the surface there of this. Again, Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 is available on Steam right now. I do have it. You can download, if you just want the book, Google Battlefleet Gothic Rules. PDF. You will find it. It's available out there. I don't feel like we're stealing.

When a game is 27 years old and hasn't had enough thing. It's good to go. It's a really cool game. I like it a lot, especially if you like turn-based. The last bit I want to get into, and this is to tie into the lore and the books, is the rankings and the people within the Imperial Navy. Because when you're reading Gaunt's Ghost, you're reading Eisenhorn, you're reading Kaiface-Cain. You're reading any book where they're in they tend to interact with the imperial navy a lot and they just throw out like they reference people quite a bit yeah yeah but they never explain what they are so i'm gonna do that now can i do that now so we'll start off with the imperial navy the very top you have the lord high admiral

and the lord high admiral is as we said this is a lord of terror this person is completely a figment of lore yeah i don't think they they have a name but it doesn't matter who they are this guy means as much for the average person is Santa Claus. He just as probably can't. Exactly. He exists. His job is to make sure that the admec provides ships, the Lords of Terra approved funding, the Imperial Guard, the ecclesiarchy, whatever major crusades that they have to agree to.

That's their job. That's the, that's it. Now, they are, the next group down, though, is more interesting. And that's where we get to the Lord High Admiral's. These are the guys that run the segmentum. These ones are more interesting to me because they actually do have. interaction more because these are the ones who will decide the size of the battle fleet. They will decide what goes where, how much goes there.

So they start actually getting more involved in the planning and the structure. They may even have a vested interest in a certain crusade that is going on because perhaps it was even their idea to launch said crusade. They reference these guys quite a bit on this in some of the codices, especially when you talk about the guard, got to some of that, which is they kind of just go, which ones are good, which ones are bad because if you have a great Lord High Admiral, he probably kept and is proactive on keeping the peace and putting things down. And then you have the bad ones. Things happen. Yeah. And then beyond them, you have admirals, vice admirals, rear admirals.

All of these are the people who run the ships. And so these are sometimes you'll have an interaction with them. You'll, sorry, sometimes you'll read about an interaction with them from the main character of the book who's having an issue on the ship. I think the same. I think the second God's Ghost book, I'm not mistaken, where he has to go to the Lord and say, hey, we're having a war inside of your own ship. Is that cool? No? Okay. It's still happening. Yeah. The next tier down are what are called the warrant officers. The warrant officer has a title, a shipmaster, gun captain, sergeant at arms. These are the things that they're in charge of. And the warrant officer's job is to oversee a critical part and function of the ship.

But what I love by the warrant officers is that function that they're overseeing is always handled by the enlisted class. And the warrant officer comes from the enlisted class. I love this because every warrant officer only has their warrant because they rose up within the enlisted class to really show themselves to be experienced and knowledgeable. But it also means that whatever they're assigned to as a warrant officer is what they were as an enlisted class. So if you are the gun captain of the ship, that means you were a gunnery soldier. Or if you're the sergeant-at-arms, you were security. If you're a shipmaster, you were in navigation. And so this does two things.

One, it greatly improves the efficacy of whatever they're controlling, but also makes for cool stories. Because now this is someone where, hey, this gun is failing and the warrant officer is the one who runs over and fixes it and gets it moving. I just think it's a cooler narrative when the guy in charge is like, yeah, I'm also the best mechanic you guys have ever scene. Check this out. Now you get it going. Below them, though, we move into what it called the ratings. And these are just the general troops of the ship. And the ratings do. You mean everyone else, the entire crew? Exactly. They are the workforce of the Navy. They drive the ship. They fire the guns. They cook, they clean. They also fight. I'll get to the voidsmen in a second. Cool thing on them before I jump in is these guys are almost all volunteers.

It actually means really being on these imperial vessels comparatively. You got to think a lot of these, again, life, and we've did this before, life in the Imperium for a lot of these worlds is a nightmare. And being on a ship for this is considered wildly better than what you're doing right now. Oh, yeah. That's not even close. You're going to live longer. You're probably going to have, you actually have, believe it in it on this ship, you'll have a larger space to live in. Yeah.

You know, your quarters are probably better. Everything's better. But yeah, they're well paid. They're well compensated. It's actually a pretty good gig. So they actually do very well. That's why there's so many of these ratings. They tend to be easy to find because every planet's like, yeah, I'd like to leave now if I could go there.

Because like, wait a second. Do I want to leave my nightmare world? Yeah, yeah. Whatever you're offering, I'm good. Now, within the ratings, there are really 90% of them are just the workers in the ship. but the last 10% have models in the game, and I own a bunch of those models. Those are voidsmen.

Imperial Navy breaches and voidsmen. Actually, I have both of them and a good number of them. Because I build weird armies. So many of them. I build weird armies. But the voidsmen, Brad now we're discussing earlier, about when we fire boarding torpedoes into a ship and space marines pop out or Imperial Navy breaches,

voidsmen do. That's this other group. And so these guys are masters that ship-to-ship combat. And they do two things. They defend the ship against invaders, and they invade other ships to blow them up from the inside. Big fan. They're also the security force in the ship, but that's the lazy part who cares about that. They're actually really good saboteurs.

Yeah. Now, there is one other class, though. Remember how I just said that it pays really well to be there? It does. But there are some jobs you can't pay someone to do. And that's what the indentured workers are for. The indentured workers are taken in via press gangs off penal colonies. So you did something bad on your world or were accused of doing something bad and got convicted

of it, but either way, you're there and a big ship lands and you think, hey, that's kind of interesting. And then all of a sudden you find yourself in the bowels of said big ship working on their engines while they're still running. Or they're super toxic guns. sometimes we fire crazy things that are supposed to break up the ship and everything else. Hey, welcome to rad guns, ad back, thanks. But also remember, you know, I'm giving this.

I did this on our first one that didn't get out, and I'm doing it again now, which is one of my favorites is, yes, they get the penal colonies. But like, if they've taken heavy losses or people who died, they need to replace, don't go out to eat or go for a drink near the docks when the big. ship show up. Oh, yeah, no. They'll grab anybody because once they're off world, come find me. Exactly. The cool thing about these indentured workers, though, is in the

lore, they do come up a lot. They're coming in two areas. First off, they become really good knowledge centers for, like, the Inquisition and whatnot, because they know what's going on in the bowels of the ship. Because the endangered workers work in places that the rest of the ship doesn't want to go.

Yeah, like the void, the guard, the voidsman guards basically stand outside of the section that the indentured workers work in. And they'll go in if they have to, but they tend to just hang out on the outside. Let's talk about another reason why they come up in the stories quite a bit, because this is also just a prime breeding ground for chaos cultists. Yeah, this is why the voidsman had to stand just on the outside, because everything they have to go in there and deal with a chaos cult that just formed on the inside of a ship.

Or the Gene Steeler cult, where a prime mark shows up and goes, so no one's going to come down here and I can just infect everybody. All right. This seems fun. So the indentured workers are kind of, again, they're super messed up, but they get used in the lore a lot, so I want to bring them up. But I think that's

probably a good enough coverage here. I hope all of you did find this interesting, because as you can tell, I like it a lot. It's the goal as hell to me. But the goal here was just to kind of cover space travel enough and explain some enough so we can do everything we've been doing over the course of the cast. We've realized,

always building towards more stuff we can cover. Every piece of information we give you means it's something that we don't have to recover again later when telling a bigger story. And next week, we're going to do just that. Next week, we're going to begin our coverage of the War of the Beast. Probably about three casts. I haven't written them all yet, so I never know how long it's going to go. The idea is to start from the very beginning, actually the pre-the-history of the War of the Beast, all the way up through the conclusion of it and the way that it just completely changed the Imperium. Great story. But you know what it also includes a lot of

Lords of Terra. Plural, because we're going to have to cover some changes to the Lords of Parra. That's true. As a result of it. Yeah. There's a lot of... Good news.

A lot of dies. I mean, I'm cool. All of them, Brad. Yeah, but they know. All of them died, and then they got put back in. And they got new ones. And then they got new ones. And then some more died.

It's very fun. We lost 150% of the Lords of Terra at one point down there. Yeah. Yeah. And we're still at 100%. So we're okay. So next week, Brad's going to complain a lot, and that'll be fun. But this has been John Barsadie and Brad Chester.

This guy. We'll see you guys next week.