I know that the Imperial Guard is reliant upon the Imperial Navy for transportation, but I'm not entirely clear how the Navy goes about ferrying troops around.

Does the Imperial Navy use dedicated troop transports or do they simply transport troops on various warships?

Other than a Barracks, what components are essential to making a 'complete' troop ship?

If a ship has multiple Barracks components, does the bonus to conducting/defending against H&R/boarding actions stack?

Perhaps extra hull armour might be important, or that church thing, just for fluff.

Here are the Forge World Battlefleet Gothic troop transports. They're clearly bespoke troop transporters, but they are probably built around fairly basic transporter hulls like the vagabond. There also used to be Galaxy Class Transport for carrying troops - there's a picture here towards the bottom of the page.

HappyDaze said:

I suppose each capital ship has "some" room for passengers, but dedicated transports do exist, often commandeered from civilian merchants for this purpose (think WW2 Merchant Navy policies).

Maybe it is one of these vessels that is depicted on the cover of the 5E Guard Codex. I also recommend checking out the "Imperial Transport", "Armed Freighter" and "Heavy Transport" ships, some info on them being accessible on GW's website here and here. Forgeworld has also produced an "Imperial Troop Transport" model for BFG, using the Heavy Transport rules mentioned before.

The best troop transports will have drop-pods and many specialist lighters for getting heavy troops and armoured companies groundside rapidly. The kind of lighter capable of transporting a Baneblade ready to roll out in battle would part of this. 

Thay are still owned by the Navy.

I am not 100% sure, but I think even the Titan legions rely on Navy transports, and these must be highly specialised.

Personally, I would not expect drop pods for anything but Space Marines, Battle Sisters and elite Inquisition kill-teams who all have their own special ships anyways … but that is just what I got from GW's own fluff, which, just like any other source, is not to be treated as binding gospel. However, if you do want to look to GW for inspiration, then the Planetary Empires supplement mentioned vast gravity cone generators which are used by some Navy transports to offload troops from low atmosphere right onto the battlefield - together with a chance for lots of casualties if the ship's position is disturbed by heavy ordonance and the cone swivels away from the descending troops.

Most of the time, troops are sent down either via lander and dropship (see Valkyrie article) or by the transport vessel itself touching down (see BFG rules). Needless to say, the latter is most likely done only when a starport with proper facilities and resilient landing fields (so as to withstand the massive weight of the ship) has already been secured. I don't think you can land something as big as a Galaxy-class transport just "anywhere".

Drop pods are for rapid strike insertion. This is simply not a tactic employed by the Imperial Guard, and hence the Navy does not support it. Going by its Codex introduction, the Guard is the slow but hard-hitting hammer; if you want the quick scalpel you call in the Astartes.

Fresnel said:

 

Actually, the Titan legions are one of the few military forces that aren't reliant on the Imperial Navy for transportation: the Adeptus Mechanicus' military forces are not and have never been part of the Imperial Army, so they never lost their right to own and operate their own starships. You're right in that they are highly specialised- there are titan transports that are little more than drop pods for their massive charges (offhand, I've come across references to them being used for Warlord and Emperor class titans), used when the Legion is intending to deploy straight away, and there are others that are capable of acting as refit, repair and virtual rebuilding depots for even some of the largest titans, which are likely among the largest starships capable of landing and taking off from a planet.

There's actually a pretty good article from Inferno! mag called the Conquest of Obzidion which deals with standard imperial planetary assault tactics (and has pics of troop transports). It was available on the Black Library site for a while, but seems to be gone now, although you can get it here.

I think it's probably stretching it to say the Guard never uses drop pods, as it's a large and varied institution. In all honesty, I suspect Naval hardware support for drop pod assaults is actually more wide-spread than the Guard training and doctrine for their use.
I'm pretty sure I recall drop pods being available to IG armies in one of the old editions of Epic, at least. 'Twas a vaguely Battletech-inspired spherical design, about the size of one of the Baneblade models, iirc, and carried a platoon or so? Something like that. Definitely bigger than the new pods the Astartes get to play with (yes, even the dreadnought pods), though, although at the time I believe they both used the same model.

Well, drop pods are available as a ship component in RT… I doubt many Rogue Traders have space marines to fill them.

Drop pods would be for opening/securing a beachhead while the main force is inbound. Elite Stormtroopers squads would the ones to deploy via drop pod. Of course, insertion by Valkyrie is an option too, but drop pods can land through AA defences that would destroy normal aircraft.

Imperial Guard would have these imo. Yes, the IG is often depicted as all about meatgrinding attrition, but such a vision doesn't bear much weight if applied as dogma. They are not space marines but they are sophisticated militrary machine. If the IG dumbly flew wave after wave of landing craft at massed AA batteries, the Imperium would not have lasted 10,000 years.

Reading the Gaunt's Ghosts series I note that Blood Pact forces use drop pods. Is the Archenemy employing more sophisticated tactics than the IG?

Interesting that the Titan legions are still independently mobile - part of my brain told me that Mechanicus forces were independent…

Alasseo said:

The latter is precisely why I don't think the Navy would sport such equipment. Surely, there is some variation throughout the Imperium when it comes to ship classes, but I would not expect this to extend to something as basic as "drop pods y/n" - and I cannot think of why the Navy would build an entire class of ships just on the slim chance that some day far in the future they get to use them if it's not a standard tactic (which it does not seem to be, from all I've read about planetary invasions so far).

As for Epic … phew, that's getting tricky. I know that some editions of that game are even older than 2E of 40k's main game, and a lot of stuff has changed in there. At the same time, I wouldn't want to discount the possibility.

Since this is 40k and we don't actually have a true canon anyways, I'd thus propose to go with what you think fits best to your personal interpretation of the 'verse.

 

Fresnel said:

Rogue Traders seem prone to do a lot of customisation - this includes fitting their ship with equipment that the Navy or the Guard would never use, because it is deemed inefficient or a waste of resources. In case of drop pods, it could be because the Rogue Trader in question thinks this is a good strategy, regardless of whether this is actually the case or how practical this is. Normally, the users of drop pods seem to wear power armour, which would surely take a lot of shock out of the harsh landing. If the RT doesn't manage to equip his entire landing force with power armour, he may well have to find alternatives (shock dampening gravity fields?), harder troops (Ogryns may not mind), or simply shrug off the potential casualties.

IF that is how one interprets the stress of a drop, anyways.

Fresnel said:

That's why the IG/Navy does not (usually) practice such landings and either bombards the hell out of these batteries or deploys in sufficient distance and then has ground troops advance in a traditional way. If you want to get straight into the heat … that's exactly what the Space Marines are meant for. All a matter of specialisation.

Fresnel said:

This might simply be a question of an individual author having his own idea how the setting works. It doesn't quite fit with the Blood Pact article published in WD #292. At the same time, Chaos warships aren't standard Navy models anyways, so all bets are off on that topic. :D

As you say, true canon is thin on the ground.

As a Dan Abnett fan, for me his vision is as good as it gets for a well realised IG. Within this context I think it highly plausible that the Sabbat Crusader forces have a number of drop pod equipped transports for Stormtrooper deployment. Often a space marine force will not be available and the IG will have to deploy their own special forces teams - via drop pod if the mission calls for it. Ymmv.

 

*nods* That also touches upon the question of how many Storm Troopers we think there actually are - personally, I'm sticking to GW's numbers, but most people I talked to do prefer a larger quantity, be it because it conflicts with their idea that Space Marines should always remain the fewest Imperial troops, or because they want to see ST's in action more often.

There are also the much more numerous Imperial Guard Grenadiers in addition to the Storm Troopers, of course, but those lack the Deepstrike rule on principle, which to me implies that they are way less mobile. And, also going by GW's fluff, even the Storm Troopers seem to rely on Valkyries as the default means of transportation, at least as much as this Strike Force article would seem to imply.

For my own interpretation of the 'verse, I have adopted a "pick and choose" approach as well. My basis will always remain the studio's own material, but as you say, some novels and other licensed products can add some fairly cool details.

I believe the Blood Pact was entirely Abnett's idea, too - GW just liked it so much that they adopted most of it into their own vision, hence the WD article and accompanying TT rules. By now they even showed up as miniatures on some Codex photos, usually accompanied by CSM, so someone at GW must have done an army with them.

Alasseo said:

That was very helpful. I really like the Minotaur Tug and would like to make it for RT. I think that using a transport hull and giving it a special rule that allows it to use a Combat Bridge (since I don't see a Commerce Bridge being particularly appropriate for a troop ship) would be adequate. Another transport with a Hold Landing Bay could stand-in for the Whales.

Lynata said:

Now Lynata, we've sparred over this before. And my point of contention was that you interpret the term "Regiment" too literaly, and in terms outside of the correct cultural context.

Namely that "Regiment" in US military terminology is a direct synonym for "Division" (a military unit comprising 10,000 soldiers total).

But GW is a British company, and the British Regimental system doesn't assign any fixed size to a "Regiment". In fact, in practise a "Regiment" is only about the size of a Batallion, up to a Brigade (here in Canada, one of the countries that uses the same system, or a close derivative of it). If we were to continue to apply your very literal observations, then it would in fact mean there's even less than 10,000 of them running around the galaxy (a situation that is already stretching the bounds of disbelief, with a setting like 40K).

There's also direct connotations between the Storm Troopers, who are the special forces of the Imperial Guard, and the SAS, when they're being referred to as "The Regiment", since that is a common nickname for the SAS (who don't even total a Batallion in numbers). And it wouldn't be out of line for GW to make that kind of connection.

While Grenadiers are a seperate force that seem to pad out the numbers, they're more traditional heavy infantry, as opposed to the Guard version of special forces.

 

Fresnel said:

The nice thing is that Dan seems to be falling more in line with 'traditional' 40K interpretations, as he gets more and more books under his belt. It's clearest to long time readers like me, that none of his newer novels are going to feature anything so… unlikely as one of the stories in the 2nd Gaunt's Ghosts novels, where Gaunt a Platoon of his men counter-ambush 10-20 KHORNE BERZERKERS (as in the Space Marine kind) and win with hardly any losses.

While several novels later in Traitor General, the fight against 5 Chaos Terminators is rightly described as a titanic battle that they barely survive. Like it should be.

Blood Pact said:

I agree that the Storm Troopers can be all of one regiment since "the Regiment" is never fielded in its entirety and really exists only as an administrative division. Storm Troopers are really more defined by their company (the largest groupings that they are deployed in), and it's quite possible that there are thousands of ST companies all under the the single ST regiment.

Blood Pact said:

Ah, but unlike with all other Guard formations, GW has assigned a fixed number to the Storm Trooper regiment. It says it right in the old 2E Codex.

You are free to dismiss it, and indeed saying that the numbers GW provided are bollocks is just as okay an opinion to have as me stating that I'm sticking to them. Neither of us can be "wrong" on this. But at the end of the day, that's just something that we all have to decide for ourselves. Which is what I meant when I typed that sentence about it being a question (since it only is a question when you compare the conflicting material, and you have to pick a single answer).

We have sparred over this before, but whilst my understanding of this IP's supposed canonicity has changed since that time, and I have become much more liberal about "alternate" takes on the setting, my personal preferences have not.

But I will add for clarification that FFG's material seems to use a much higher number of Storm Troopers as well; at least I recall one of the freelance writers posting here that he likes to use Storm Troopers more often, which is why they pop up more regularly than Codex fluff might imply. So for anyone who operates on a preference for FFG's interpretation of the 'verse, I suppose this overrides the numbers we were given so far .. just like the Storm Troopers here can "now" be detached as individuals to a normal IG squad, Vostroyan regiments "now" include female Guardsmen, the Deathwatch is "now" not a part of the Ordo Xenos, and so on.

Peace!

Lynata said:

GW has rewritten the universe so many times since then that nothing 2E could possibly be cannon. That being said I use whatever version of the universe I prefer too.