Mobile Hiveships
Not to be confused with a Tyranid Hive Ship
Most Imperial planet-bound ships on the surface don't usually approach the size of Voidcrafts from the Imperial Navy. However, due to a combination of either unstable geology, political instability or lost tech from the Dark Age of Technology, a few planets are known to house truly behemothian ground vehicles that could rival naval capital ships. The majority of these vehicles are nothing more than mobile Hive cities, these 'Hiveships' house untold billions within its cramped halls. The technology needed to build these ECKS BAWKS HUEG machines have long been lost during Age of Strife.
Types of Hiveships
Hive City
Zaythan Landship
The much-famed ships of Zayth are gargantuan crawling Hive Cities on treads (pretty much mortal engines in space), with some ranging from the size of space Cruisers while others (if we take descriptions of the size of some Hive Cities at face value) are big enough to act as docks to full-size battleships. The Landships are armed with powerful city-leveling Macrocannons originating from the Dark Age of Technology, virulent bio-agents (Virus Bombs?), Conversion Beam batteries, and squadrons of missile-laden dust gliders. Zayth forgot why it fights, but it somehow maintained the weapons it fights with intact for literally thousands of years of constant use. Good job?
Each Land Ship is unique; like nations who presumably built them, they preserved (in part) the different cultures and civilizations which effectively haven't existed on Zayth since the Age of Strife. Within these city-sized vehicles exists a rigid caste system, similar to that of the Tau. Presumably, this is due to the military or corporate hierarchies, which must have existed for the original crew of the Land Ships, being necessary to keep things ship-shape (heh). The main leaders charged with helming these behemoths are called "Elder-Tacticians", who are essentially Magos' gone tribal. The technology within these obese vessels is a gold mine of STC's, as the technology of Zayth has intact for multiple millennia. That is, assuming it hasn't been replaced with a functional (or sufficiently functional) equivalent or "repaired" into unrecognizable oblivion. This has made the Adeptus Mechanicus a common annoyance for the literal war machines of Zayth, as they tend to love poking things they know absolutely nothing about.
Really, though, the strangest thing about this world is that the Mechanicus hasn't gone ape about the destruction of the landships and just taken them all with stupendously overwhelming force. On the bright side, they probably don't abuse the people on the other side they capture or raid simply because they have no strong feelings attached to the war. It's just...what they do and that's basically it.
- Length: 30-100km; approx
- Height: 6-18km; approx
- Mass: 0.7-8 gigatonnes; approx
- Crew: 50,000-1,370,000 crew and billions of potential passenger capacity; approx
- Acceleration: 0.5-1.8kph; approx
Ambulon
Ambulon is a bizarre machine found only on the planet of Scintilla. A one of a kind marvel, the entire city is mounted on the back of a machine that slowly walks across the unstable rocky regions in the centre of Scintilla's main continent. The machine is extremely old and was almost certainly already on Scintilla when the Imperium conquered the Calixis Sector during the Great Crusade.
Ambulon is navigated via a huge and very complicated control centre, powered by arcane engines of incredibly occult design, in the area corresponding to its 'head'. The Guild Peripatetica, highly superstitious engineers who keep the secrets of how to control the citadel-mechanicus, are constantly scrambling about the intricate controls making tiny adjustments to keep the edifice moving. Unlike normal Hive Cities, the spires on Ambulon's 'spine' is much shorter than usual. This is to prevent putting much structural stress on the spires as the ship walks and waddles from side-to-side.
Ambulon stalks the wastelands of Scintilla, mining and harvesting the planet's natural resources, supplying the manufactoria of Hive Sibellus and the foundries of Gunmetal City. Neither could function without Ambulon's natural resources. Ambulon tours the steppe wastes once every twenty-eight standard months, slowing to minute speeds in order to dock with Sibellus and Gunmetal City for a few days to offload ore and mineral resources. Between these celebrated ceremonial times of docking, Ambulon supplies Sibellus and Gunmetal City by way of regular land trains: ore-cargo crawler pods many kilometres long.
Scintilla isn't the only world with a walking city like Ambulon. Terra itself has something similar called simply, The Walking City, which is a mobile industrial city that perpetually walks across the equator of the planet.
- Length: 15+km approx
- Mass: 81 megatonnes; approx
- Crew: 190,000 crew and 500,000 potential passenger capacity; approx
- Acceleration: 2.6kph; approx
Fortress-Monastery
Land-Behemoth
Land-Behemoths, also known as a Hall of Conquest are ancient massive mobile fortresses used by the Iron Hands Chapter. Each of the Iron Hands Clan-Companies operates a single Land Behemoth on Medusa, which serves as their respective Fortress-Monastery. They were given to the Iron Hands after the Heresy by the Mechanicus, officially in exchange for the use of one the Medusa systems outer planets as a testing base but in actuality as part of their scheme to keep the chapter under their thumb. What the Legion used pre heresy is unknown.
A Land Behemoth serves as the Clan's barracks and armoury, though it lacks a training chamber as the Iron Hands instead use the unpredictable and unstable mountain ranges of Medusa for such purposes. The Land-Behemoth are maintained by Servitors and priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Their size varies, but usually, they are over a kilometre long and are armed enough to threaten orbiting naval vessels and rival the weapons of a Ordinatus.
During the 13th Black Crusade, all ten Land-Behemoths were deployed against the Chaos invaders of Medusa. It ended as well as you would expect.
- Length: 5-8km approx
- Mass: 44-60 megatonnes; approx
- Crew: 32,000-50,000 crew, including 100 Iron Hands and 1,000-2,000 Chapter Serfs; approx
- Acceleration: 0.9kph; approx