+++BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC+++

by Erik Setzer

The Tyranids are a vast race that has entered this galaxy from the Great Void beyond the Eastern Fringe.  They are believed to be part of a large race, made of many billions of entities, all functioning together in the Hive Mind as one.   Every creature in this titanic race has a single purpose, a single goal, that it has been fashioned to perform.  A single Tyranid can only perform its duty; it cannot think for itself, it cannot sense a greater purpose, in a sense it has no identity.

The Tyranids travel the stars in colossal hive fleets, made of thousands of separate living ships all led by a single great Hiveship.  It has been recorded in the past that when this Hiveship is destroyed, the rest of the fleet becomes confused and will begin acting on instinct alone.  Within the ships of a hive fleet nest millions of Tyranid Warriors, Genestealers, and other monsters, waiting to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

In the years of the Gothic War, the Gothic Sector was invaded by Hive Fleet Kraken.  Tyranid ships stranded from the rest of the Hive Fleet roamed the sector, causing destruction and confusion in a random pattern.  At Thanet, a small hive fleet was driven back by a Dauntless light cruiser squadron.  Above the fertile planes of Krool a titanic battle ensued between a Tyranid hive fleet and a battlefleet headed by the Retribution class cruiser Imdomitable.  Across the sector, Tyranid hive fleets engaged Imperials, Chaos raiders, and Eldar and Ork pirates.

COMMAND POINTS

Tyranids do not operate as normal ships do.  In order to perform an action, a Tyranid ship must be ordered to do so by the Hiveship commanding its fleet.   To represent this, Tyranid Hiveships generate command points, which are used to issue orders to individual ships and broods in a Tyranid hive fleet.  At the beggining of each turn, roll a D6 for each ship or brood in the hive fleet.  Add the total for all of the dice rolled.  This is the number of command points the hive fleet is allowed to issue to the individual ships or broods in the fleet.  You may issue up to six command points to each ship or brood in the fleet.  In addition, every ship/brood in the fleet automatically gets one command point per turn.  Command points may not be stored and saved for later turns.

Command points can be spent to perform one of the following actions:

Note that broods and individual ships spend the same number of points to perform an action.

LEADERSHIP TESTS

As long as the Hiveship is still "alive" (not destroyed), the other ships in the hive fleet pass all Leadership tests automatically, including special orders, disengaging from combat, etrc.  If the Hiveship is destroyed ("killed"), all Tyranid ships count as having a Leadership value of 6.

SPECIAL COMMANDS

Tyranid ships/broods may spend three command points (as described above) to perform one of the following actions or gain one of the following benefits:

• Regenerate one Critical Wound
• Gain +D6 to the ship/brood's boarding factor for one turn
• Regenerate D3 hull points ("wounds"
• Death Frenzy:  The ship/brood counts as if it had seven command points, but will die at the end of the turn.  Remove the ship/brood from play after it has died.

INSTINCT

If the Hiveship is killed, the remaining ships in a Tyranid hive fleet start acting on instinct.  Depending on the type of ship, it will act differently.  The different instincts that a ship may have are the following:

1. Nest - The ship begins to rest, entering a hibernation-like state.  It will not react to enemy ships, and cannot be detected or fired upon by them.  Remove the ship from play.
2. Rampage - The ship moves its full move toward the nearest enemy ship, firing upon it until the enemy ship is destroyed or is no longer the nearest enemy ship.  It will then select the next nearest enemy ship and will move towards it, firing until it is destroyed or no longer the nearest enemy ship.  The ship will continue to do this until there are either no enemy ships left or it is destroyed.
3. Sulk - The ship becomes confused, feeling its link to the Hive Mind cut off.  It stays where it is, unmoving and firing at any ship or ordnance marked that comes within range of its weaponry.

CRITICAL HITS AND CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE

Tyranid ships do not get critical hits in the conventional sense.  Instead, they get critical wounds.  Whenever a Tyranid ship is hit and a critical hit occurs, count it as a critical wound instead and roll on the following chart:

Critical wounds may only be repaired through the use of a special command (see above).

Tyranid ships do not get catastrophic damage.  When a Tyranid ship is destroyed, it counts as being a lifeless hulk.  Do not roll on the catastrophic damage table.

TYRANID WEAPONRY

Hullgrinders

Hull-grinders are a type of gigantic, ferocious insect-like creature which matures in massive brood chambers before instinctively crawling into firing sphincters.  When the Tyranid ships fires a battery of Hullgrinders a powerful muscle spasm ripples along the flank or length of the vessel as the firing sphincters hurl their deadly cargo through the void at their targets.  If a Hullgrinder hits its target, it quickly exhausts itself in a frenzied attempt to bite, tear, and rend its way through the target vessel, doing untold damage in the process.

Hullgrinders count as weapon batteries, and act in the same manner as weapon batteries.

Acid streams

Some Tyranid vessels have huge firing chambers which are connected to sacs containing acid.  When a Tyranid ship fires these weapons, a large stream of burning acid is hurled at its target, burning a hole through the target's hull and eating its way into the inner sanctums of a ship.

Acid streams count as lances, and work in the same manner as lances.

Deathburner

The deathburner is the closest the Tyranids come to a conventional missile weapon.   Deep in the arming chamber of the weapon the skin is flayed off a giant acidic bio-construct creature.  The resulting corrosive glob is propelled at the target vessel by a long muscular tracvt.  When the Deathburner hits its target, it impacts against the hull or shields, showering corrosive bile for miles in all directions.

A deathburner counts as a nova cannon and uses all rules for the nova cannon.

Ordnance

Tyranids do not have conventional ordnance, and so do not have torpedoes, fighters, or bombers, or the equivalent of such.  Therefore, they do not use any kind of ordnance in their fleets.

BOARDING

Tyranids gain a +3 to all boarding actions.  Tyranid ships may not make teleport attacks.

SPECIAL ORDERS

Due to the special nature of Tyranid ships, they may not use any of the following special orders:  All Ahead Full, Come to New Heading, Reload Ordnance, or Burn Retros.

CLOSE ASSAULT

Tyranid ships can close assault enemy ships, biting, tearing, or slashing at them until they are destroyed.  Any Tyranid ship that is allowed to close assault a ship will have "Close Assault" listed in ins Armament.  To assault an enemy ship, the Tyranid ship must move into base contact with it.  For each point of Strength a Tyranid ship has in Close Assault, it may make one attack.  Roll a D6 versus the target ship's armour.  If a hit is scored, roll another D6.  On a roll of 4+ a critical hit has also been scored.  Toll on the Critical Hits chart as normal.   The target ship may break away from the Tyranid ship at any time by simply moving away.

RAMMING

Tyranid ships cannot generally ran, as they are living beings.  The only exception to this is the Ramsmiter Kraken, which has a built-in bone ram.

ATTACK RATING

The Tyranid Hive Fleet has an Attack Rating of 2.

Each Hiveship is a vast living organism, armoured with a leathery hide and chitinous plates hundreds of feet thick.  The deep layers of fibroud dead tissue afford excellent protection from the inhospitable conditions of deep space and the warp, as twell as from the weapons of hostile vessels.  Constantly regenerating, repairing and growing, the Hiveships of a Tyranid fleet are almost impossible to destroy for all but the most powerful Imperial battleships.

Deep within the pulsing interior of the Hiveships are the vital organs that keep the great vessels functioning, incessantly attended to by thousands of Tyranid bio-constructs and mind slaves.  Within the twisting, fleshy corridors of the Hiveship lurk massive armies of Genestealers, Tyranid warriors and worse.  At the very heart of each Hiveship is the throne chamber of the Norn Queen, without whose guidance the whole fleet would founder, wither and perish.  The Norn Queen's owen markings appear on all her Tyranid warriors, bio-constructs and the vessels in her fleet.  The bigger Tyranid fleets may display the markings of several Norn Queens.

Deathburner Kraken are the most graceful-looking Kraken in the hive fleet.  The fight of their great, spined wings lazily catching the solar wind as they turn towards their prey is breathtaking.  The entire body dection of the Kraken is a vast Deathburner cannon over a mile in length.  The Deathburner Kraken is able to propel great gobbets of coorosive bile over vast reaches of space, disabling targets at a very long range, before finishing them off at its leisure.

Ramsmiter Kraken are huge brilliantly coloured space beasts that have been observed and recorded by the exo-biologists of the Adeptus Mechanicus for many centuries.   Although little is actually known about them, they appear to propel themselves across the void of deep space by using their vast cloak-like wings to draw energy from the solar wind.  In the course of their evolution, the mouth and snout of these creatures has developed into an enormous iron-hard proboscises hundreds of feet long.  In their natural state they gain sustenance by ramming their snouts deep into the surface crust of asteroids or moons, probing for and extracting rich deposits of minerals and ice.

Thought their intelligence is questionable, Ramsmiter Kraken seem to have learned that space going vessels and isolated colonies are particularly rich sources of sustenance.   Their determined assaults on human colonies are extremely rare, but devastating when they take place.

The Ramsmiter Kraken used by the Tyranids have been bio-engineered to be even more destructive than their wild cousins.  They are closely controlled by the hive mind, and have been hideously altered.

Their proboscis-like rams penetrate the hulls of target vessels in search of food, and they bring a deadly trade-off in exchange for the mineral and human material sucked into the Ramsmiter's digestive tract.  Each time a Ramsmiter attacks, it delivers a boarding party of Genestealers and Tyranids into the very heart of the target vessel.

The Tyranid Dark Prowler is a manta-shaped creature with leathery thick wings attached to a central cavity.  The Dark Prowler's central cavity contains two powerful acid-firing chambers, and hullgrinders line its wings.  The Dark Prowler glides among its prey, the light of nearby suns reflecting from its chitinous central body plates.   Though the Dark Prowler is very beautiful, it is also extremely deadly.

The Tyranid Void Fiend was once a wild space creature that roamed the void between the stars, searching for consumption in the form of minerals and various vegetation.  It has been changed by the Tyranids into a bio-construct to serve in their fleets, though even the complex sciences of Tyranid bio-engineering could not break the Void Fiends entirely of their wild ways.  Without a direct link to the Hive Mind, Void Fiends will often go on a rampage, destroying anything in their path until they feel they are in a safe place or they are killed.  The Void Fiend's body represents a sort of long organic spike, with digestive tubes and firing chambers running along its sleek body.

Hellblaster Kraken are thought to actually be Tyranid bio-constructs, as nothing employing such a destructive acidic weapon has been reported occuring naturally.   Indeed, no Hellblasters have been seen at all without the appearance of Tyranids shortly after.  The Hellblaster Kraken seem to be able to recognize Tyranid vessels, as they nimbly avoid them on their headlong rush toward the enemy fleet.

Being largely made up of a huge shielded carapace, the Hellblaster is virtually unstoppable when attacking an enemy vessel.  The sole objective of a Hellblaster Kraken is to contact with the hull or shields of an enemy ship and discharge a massive buildup of acid at short range.  The parts of the Hellblaster which are not made up of the carapace are almost entirely comprised of immense sacs of acid and titanic firing chambers.

Doomripper Kraken close with their prey before viciously attacking with grinding jaws and rending teeth.  In some ways the Doomripper is even more dangerous than the Ramsmiter, as once it has successfully attached itself to its prey, it will die rather than let go.  The Doomripper wraps itself around its prey, preventing the target's guns from firing at it.  Unless the Doomripper loses its grip, the target vessel is unable to rid itself of the parasite.

Tyranid wardrones are bio-contructs designed solely to fight and protect the Norn-Queen.  Wardrones are designed to take specific orders from the Norn-Queen, and cannot operate independently of the influence of the Hive Mind.  Wardrones usually fight in swarms, using weight of numbers to perform their tasks.  Wardrones vary in shape and size, and so are often hard to recognize.

The Hiveship of the Norn Queen is closely defended by a large number of drone vessels: bio-engineered defence ships which dart around the mother vessel, reacting immediately to any threat to the Hiveship.  They are so frenzied in their defence of the queen that they always beat off an attack or are destroyed totally in the attempt.

As such, no drone ships have ever been successfully boarded and the scholars of the Imperium can only guess as to what type of creatures crew them, if indeed they are crewed at all.

The Hiveship is capable of encouraging damaged drones to repair themselves almost instantaneously, and hideously damaged drones have been known to re-enter battle in a completely combat worthy state within minutes of being hit.  The Hiveship can create replacement vessels by absorbing and re-forming the ruined tissue of 'dead' drones.

Hellslashers are small Tyranid ships that have a central spherical core and four scythe-like claws that they use to latch onto enemy ships and slash away with.   Hellslashers head toward enemy ships with immense speed, and will attack as soon as they can reach the enemy ship.

The harbinger of an approaching Tyranid fleet is usally the appearance in a planetary system of thousands of huge, floating pod-like spores.  These are deadly mines, drifting in a seemingly random fashion before exploding and inflicting massive physical damage by the impact of jagged pieces of chitinous shell casing hundreds of feet across.

They also have a more insidious effect, showering their targets with a variety of virulent viruses, acids, algae, and infectious parasites.

Once hit even ships caught by the very edge of the blast are almost certainly doomed as the cancerous infections quickly take hold and rapidly destroy the vessel.  Spore mines are often found drifting with the Tyranid fleet, protecting the Hivefleets or breaking up enemy attacks.

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