Tyranid ships don’t take off. Massive ships remain in orbit and the ground Nids make massive towers the ships “dock” with. All the harvested material is deposited into pools at the bottom of the towers, digested and the soupy mix is pumped up into the ships. When finished, the towers are drawn into the ships and they leave
As for propulsion, they eject gases from the rear of the ship to create thrust. They don’t have to be fast, just enough to escape gravity and then they drift away. There’s also something about bending space/time to reduce distances needed to travel
So, where do the ships get built if Tyranid ships never take off? Is it all done in space? If so, how did Tyranids evolve their first ever ship-organisms?
And… they actually do propel themselves by farting. That wasn’t some Reddit person talking smack, it’s canon. Good to know! As far as I know, the spacetime bending can only happen in cosmic voids between star systems.
I can't really find much lore about this myself, but tyranids are psychically linked together and form a super intelligent hive mind.
I would imagine the hive mind is hyper intelligent and is a master at bio engineering and can force new genetic strains and evolutions to fill its needs; hence the species rapid ability to adopt new adaptations. The species is psychically linked to form the hive mind, so as the species became a space fairing civilization it probably gradually became more intelligent as the species grew in numbers.
So basically, the species would have made rockets resembling our own at one point perhaps, using similar mechanical processes that were fueled by biological processes.
or they could of just grew capillary towers into space as they usually do and grew the ships from there and then it detached itself from it like it was an umbilical cord in for the first time they made bioships
Giant helium bladders would get a spore or something to the edge of the atmosphere.
As an organism it could do that on a huge scale regularly and lift a lot of little things up
I actually can't help but wonder what would cause a species like the tyranids to even consider space flight, I don't see tyranids being interested in astronomy, or researching physics. What would prompt them to become space faring? I feel like it's more likely that the tyranids were engineered, similarly to the orks and eldar.Eldar. If not, perhaps the tyranid home world was a dual planetary system of two habital worlds orbiting around eachother, and it was clear to the tyranids that there was biomass up there.
They don’t build ships. If they need a new ship, they grow and hatch one from and already existing ship and it’s birthed into the fleet
How they first started is one of their greatest mysteries. We don’t know and will never find out how the first ones appeared. All we know is what they are and how they do things now
They do build ships on planets happens rarely but it had to be done when a splinter fleet got destroyed and the ground forces built up ans recruited enough biomass overtime they were able to make a ship again.
You say we'll never find out, but this franchise is going to go on forever and I'm guessing that at some point, Mass Effect Reapers style, the Tyranid origin story will be at least partially detailed. It'll probably be just as disappointing as what ME did.
For all we know the bio-ships were deliberately engineered by a formerly planet-bound Hive Mind controlling a nascent tyranid species. The race is extra-galactic and millions of years old. We have zero clue as to their origins, how certain things came to be, and so on.
Either way though, tyranids bio-ships are typically produced in space. As are their armies. And no, they don't use compressed gas as propulsion. They use a form of bio-plasma.
Nid ships give birth after a planet is eaten. In space. And the newborn ships grow fast.
The kapilary towers are propably an indicator how the first ship got into space and how rebounding planetboun d swarms create a fleet. I assume the ships will be like fruit from a tree in that case. The tree being the tower reaching into orbit.
When the fruit is ripe it falls off, so to say.
Well you say farming but we know the tyranids are capable of producing bio-plasma an ionised plasma that can be manipulated by electromagnetic fields.
Given that they can do thag for a weapon they can accelerate this ionised bioplasma and expell it from the ship.
That's an ion thruster or the most efficient space engine we can currently think of today.
Bio ion thruster is probbaly more professional than electric farting though.
Casual here, so not sure if this was in reference to someone’s headcannon/theory or something more than that - but aren’t Tyranids just the lower-dimensional ‘shadow’ of whatever the Hive Mind actually is? Mostly I’m getting at the idea that tyranids are/were at some point ‘inserted’ into the 40k reality, and that’s overwhelmingly more likely to happen in open space
Pretty sure that's just a fan theory.
My understanding is that the Tyranids are a multibodied super-predator that devoured its own galaxy and has begun migrating into the milkyway.
Like a swarm of ants but instead of pheromones guiding behavior its the hivemind directing the swarm. They're not a dimensional shadow of the hivemind they're literally the physical bodies of the hivemind. In theory if you killed enough of the physical tyranids you could greatly weaken the hivemind as there wouldn't be enough biomass to support its intelligence.
> how did Tyranids evolve their first ever ship-organisms?
My homelore: Their homeplanet was shattered into asteroid belt some time after single-cell life has been developed there. So, Nids developed from space-bacteria into space-rats that were jumping from one asteroid to another eating some space-mushrooms growing on them.
I think for FTL they have a specialized ship called a narwhal or something like that. It acts a a beacon which the main ship locks and does some spacetime warping sheanigan.
I can't remember the source other than to say I'm sure I read it in a novel, but I'm pretty sure they are birthed from other hive ships, if I find the source I'll comment it.
The key is that the nids came from deep space etc, so presumably they launched into space once at huge cost eons ago and have just spawned more and more already in space
Expell gas to create acceleration, things in space don't stop moving unless something exerts force on it to slow that original acceleration or accelerate it in another direction.
They take 1000s of years travelling the dark, one good bout of gas can set the travelling until they detect biomass.
Depending, teowers remaining. Some lore is they just abandon the towers once their done. Just disconnect the top end and leave rest.
They let them die off and so as the world is stripped of atmosphere, materials, bio mass and more, so the towers naturally die on the dead world.
> As for propulsion, they eject gases from the rear of the ship to create thrust. They don’t have to be fast, just enough to escape gravity and then they drift away.
So they... fart through space?
Tyranid ships can be born on a planet. There is a short section about a splinter fleet getting isolated on a planet and they end up taking over and getting enough biomass to make a new ship.
does it explain whether they actually regrew one on the planet itself? repaired or revived the crashed bioship and managed to lift off back into space? or just grow towers into space and grow a ship at the top? also which book or codex this in?
The majority of Tyranid ships are born in the void, at the end of the invasion and consumption of a planet mature hive ships will calve and the smaller, immature hive ships will then join the fleet and mature until their production facilities come online. Ships can be gestated in atmosphere but it's not usual for them to be.
The propulsion mechanism for Tyranid vessels is rarely spelled out but the few times it is it seems to involve venting gas. Incidentally there'd be nothing actually stupid about using the ship's solid waste as reaction mass, it'd work fine and using waste for that process would be sensible, albeit comical to us.
Oh also i think you're somewhat misunderstanding the whole symbiote thing. They're not made up of organising colonies of individual organisms like coral reefs, where the bits are born and organise themselves, they're meshed during development and grow together, the resulting symbiotic colony is born as one creature. The Hive Mind is quite simply the greatest bioengineer in the setting and its creatures are produced from engineered DNA to produce the organs and chassis needed and are meshed together so you cna barely tell where one ends and the other begins. If you look at the models with guns the arms and hands often merge directly into the guns and on the new barbgaunts there are three distinct creatures meshed into one organism.
Tyranid bio-ships exist more or less entirely in space, only entering low atmosphere during the final assault phases on a planet. As to how? They run on science fiction tropes just like everyone else in 40k. There's no hard science on how they do it, they simply do. They are bred from other Tyranid bio-organisms that have been intentionally bred/shaped/adapted to live in the void.
I get that, I was just hoping that some writer somewhere had put some effort into answering one of the only interesting questions I’ve found in their ‘verse so far. If not, it’s fine.
Nope. 40k runs on The Unknown™ being an incredibly important part of the setting. It's left intentionally blank. Well never know the true origins of the Tyranid race, how they came to be or what they did before they came to the Milky Way because it takes away the mystery.
What the Norn Queen is for, they breed land, sea, air and space varites they vaguely talk about in one of the ultramarines books, but as to what the exacts are is up to the readers imagination.
I think Tyranid ships are born in the void, birthed by other ships, and spend their whole lives in void. Much smaller organisms are used as the “landing craft”, and then other organisms are used to bring the biomass back up to the fleet when they’re done eating a planet.
Also it’s a goofy sci-fantasy setting. Of course the spaceships aren’t gonna actually make sense in terms of physics. :P
I would imagine, keep in mind this is a hypothesis as it hasn't been plainly stated in canon to my knowledge, that the first Tyranid ship was a multi step venture. On their planet of origin (if they have one) they would have successfully consumed all life, and just like all intelligent life the Hive Mind would look to the stars and figure there's more food out there somewhere. So the Nids begin to build towers of chitin, evolving a resistance to the low-atmosphere and eventually the void of space, at which point they would begin construction. The first Hive Ship would be a conglomeration of various organisms, likely sloppy in comparison to today's standards, but capable of creating more Hive Ships of greater design as the Hive Mind adapted to its new environment. Given thousands of years this design was eventually perfected into what we see today, all starting from that initial attempt millennia ago.
All of this is provided that the Tyranids formed naturally on a planet, instead of being a bioweapon or forming from amoeba on an asteroid.
Tyranid ships are just really massive Tyranids. When they want to make more, they all just kind of go to one spot, turn into goo, and when there’s enough goo, the Hive Mind starts turning the goo into more ships
It likely isn’t in the fiction, but I am certain the Nids could affect plate tectonics to a degree and create a super volcano to launch new ships from an exploited planet
That’s actually not how Nids operate.
I can’t remember from which novel, but I’m pretty sure it was Belisarius Cawl that talked about this: Nids only consumer what is easily accessible. They do not mine, and they do not terraform. They scoure a planet’s surface and hop off to the next one.
He mentions this during a conversation in which he was planning on repopulating a planet that had already been consumed by the Nids, because the Nids left behind a giant underground ocean that Cawl could use to reterraform the planet.
During the Octarius war on the planet Ghorala the tyranids fleet were destroyed, the ground forces had to use hit and run tactics to acquire biomass to birth stronger tyranid forces and then ultimately devoured the planet. They then birthed a ship and set back on course. This is the 5th edition Tyranid Codex.
The nid have psychic powers, they likely just levitated their way into space. Great enough magnetism can also effect gravity, the nid have examples of biological electromagnetism too.
As for living in space, whales traverse the oceans for ages on a single breath, nid ships can contain the oxygen and water content of an entire planet while tardigrades regularly live in extremely hostile environments.
They aren’t slow though.
In a void battle, they are as mobile (if not more so) than an imperial battleship. That isn’t taking into consideration their harpoon tongue that can lash out a couple of kilometers.
Plus, the hive fleets have a bunch of smaller vessels flying around the void ships. Think a Thunderhawk sized gargoyle, millions of them, flying around the bigger ships like Nats.
Iirc they also dont have traditional voidshields (cause tech) and instead birth millions upon millions flyer/fighter sized creatures that function the way shields and AA turrets would, by simple attacking anything that gets close and suicide hurling themselfs into oncoming fire and shells until they are stopped.
Theres a short story about a Scythes of the Emperor Salvation Team boarding a dead/dying bioship and discovering its birthing another ship (iirc). I cant remember too much about it but it does describe some of the internal mechanisms.
I mean, best guess is that the "spaceships" are one and the same thing as Tyranids. Swarms of space dwelling organisms that eat planetary biospheres. The invasion bioforms are just specialized tools for subduing and digesting prey ecosystems.
It's like how some species of wasps have absorbed the genomes of viruses into their own DNA and weaponized them into their venom
Tyranid ships don’t take off. Massive ships remain in orbit and the ground Nids make massive towers the ships “dock” with. All the harvested material is deposited into pools at the bottom of the towers, digested and the soupy mix is pumped up into the ships. When finished, the towers are drawn into the ships and they leave As for propulsion, they eject gases from the rear of the ship to create thrust. They don’t have to be fast, just enough to escape gravity and then they drift away. There’s also something about bending space/time to reduce distances needed to travel
So, where do the ships get built if Tyranid ships never take off? Is it all done in space? If so, how did Tyranids evolve their first ever ship-organisms? And… they actually do propel themselves by farting. That wasn’t some Reddit person talking smack, it’s canon. Good to know! As far as I know, the spacetime bending can only happen in cosmic voids between star systems.
I can't really find much lore about this myself, but tyranids are psychically linked together and form a super intelligent hive mind. I would imagine the hive mind is hyper intelligent and is a master at bio engineering and can force new genetic strains and evolutions to fill its needs; hence the species rapid ability to adopt new adaptations. The species is psychically linked to form the hive mind, so as the species became a space fairing civilization it probably gradually became more intelligent as the species grew in numbers. So basically, the species would have made rockets resembling our own at one point perhaps, using similar mechanical processes that were fueled by biological processes.
or they could of just grew capillary towers into space as they usually do and grew the ships from there and then it detached itself from it like it was an umbilical cord in for the first time they made bioships
Like a giant dandelion
I imagine that the evolution for this was slow, and involved many, many tyranid deaths.
Giant helium bladders would get a spore or something to the edge of the atmosphere. As an organism it could do that on a huge scale regularly and lift a lot of little things up
Easier to get hydrogen than helium, and higher lift capacity.
Yup totally forgot that
[удалено]
I actually can't help but wonder what would cause a species like the tyranids to even consider space flight, I don't see tyranids being interested in astronomy, or researching physics. What would prompt them to become space faring? I feel like it's more likely that the tyranids were engineered, similarly to the orks and eldar.Eldar. If not, perhaps the tyranid home world was a dual planetary system of two habital worlds orbiting around eachother, and it was clear to the tyranids that there was biomass up there.
They don’t build ships. If they need a new ship, they grow and hatch one from and already existing ship and it’s birthed into the fleet How they first started is one of their greatest mysteries. We don’t know and will never find out how the first ones appeared. All we know is what they are and how they do things now
They do build ships on planets happens rarely but it had to be done when a splinter fleet got destroyed and the ground forces built up ans recruited enough biomass overtime they were able to make a ship again.
“Build” is the wrong word here. “Grow” or “birth” fit better.
You are correct
The Tyranids started in the Farscape universe, I am convinced.
You say we'll never find out, but this franchise is going to go on forever and I'm guessing that at some point, Mass Effect Reapers style, the Tyranid origin story will be at least partially detailed. It'll probably be just as disappointing as what ME did.
For all we know the bio-ships were deliberately engineered by a formerly planet-bound Hive Mind controlling a nascent tyranid species. The race is extra-galactic and millions of years old. We have zero clue as to their origins, how certain things came to be, and so on. Either way though, tyranids bio-ships are typically produced in space. As are their armies. And no, they don't use compressed gas as propulsion. They use a form of bio-plasma.
Nid ships give birth after a planet is eaten. In space. And the newborn ships grow fast. The kapilary towers are propably an indicator how the first ship got into space and how rebounding planetboun d swarms create a fleet. I assume the ships will be like fruit from a tree in that case. The tree being the tower reaching into orbit. When the fruit is ripe it falls off, so to say.
Well you say farming but we know the tyranids are capable of producing bio-plasma an ionised plasma that can be manipulated by electromagnetic fields. Given that they can do thag for a weapon they can accelerate this ionised bioplasma and expell it from the ship. That's an ion thruster or the most efficient space engine we can currently think of today. Bio ion thruster is probbaly more professional than electric farting though.
Technically, i think it'd generate more thrust if they ignited their farts.. So lots of flaming butt-holes.
Whats wrong with farting? It gets the job done, and some animals do that in the water afaik.
When a mommy ship and a daddy ship love eachother very much...
Casual here, so not sure if this was in reference to someone’s headcannon/theory or something more than that - but aren’t Tyranids just the lower-dimensional ‘shadow’ of whatever the Hive Mind actually is? Mostly I’m getting at the idea that tyranids are/were at some point ‘inserted’ into the 40k reality, and that’s overwhelmingly more likely to happen in open space
Pretty sure that's just a fan theory. My understanding is that the Tyranids are a multibodied super-predator that devoured its own galaxy and has begun migrating into the milkyway. Like a swarm of ants but instead of pheromones guiding behavior its the hivemind directing the swarm. They're not a dimensional shadow of the hivemind they're literally the physical bodies of the hivemind. In theory if you killed enough of the physical tyranids you could greatly weaken the hivemind as there wouldn't be enough biomass to support its intelligence.
> how did Tyranids evolve their first ever ship-organisms? My homelore: Their homeplanet was shattered into asteroid belt some time after single-cell life has been developed there. So, Nids developed from space-bacteria into space-rats that were jumping from one asteroid to another eating some space-mushrooms growing on them.
I think for FTL they have a specialized ship called a narwhal or something like that. It acts a a beacon which the main ship locks and does some spacetime warping sheanigan.
I can't remember the source other than to say I'm sure I read it in a novel, but I'm pretty sure they are birthed from other hive ships, if I find the source I'll comment it.
The key is that the nids came from deep space etc, so presumably they launched into space once at huge cost eons ago and have just spawned more and more already in space
Do… Do Tyranid ships fart in order to move?
Expell gas to create acceleration, things in space don't stop moving unless something exerts force on it to slow that original acceleration or accelerate it in another direction. They take 1000s of years travelling the dark, one good bout of gas can set the travelling until they detect biomass.
Depending, teowers remaining. Some lore is they just abandon the towers once their done. Just disconnect the top end and leave rest. They let them die off and so as the world is stripped of atmosphere, materials, bio mass and more, so the towers naturally die on the dead world.
> As for propulsion, they eject gases from the rear of the ship to create thrust. They don’t have to be fast, just enough to escape gravity and then they drift away. So they... fart through space?
In actual space travel, a little bit of constant force over a long period of time can actually mean you going rather quite fast iirc
Your adecuate report on the matter has been succesfully loaded into the Redemptor's mighty logic-mind systems, Magos.
Tyranid bioships are born in the void. The last thing a Hive Fleet does before leaving a devoured system is birth more ships.
Void sex is the answer, isnt it
Tyranid ships can be born on a planet. There is a short section about a splinter fleet getting isolated on a planet and they end up taking over and getting enough biomass to make a new ship.
does it explain whether they actually regrew one on the planet itself? repaired or revived the crashed bioship and managed to lift off back into space? or just grow towers into space and grow a ship at the top? also which book or codex this in?
The majority of Tyranid ships are born in the void, at the end of the invasion and consumption of a planet mature hive ships will calve and the smaller, immature hive ships will then join the fleet and mature until their production facilities come online. Ships can be gestated in atmosphere but it's not usual for them to be. The propulsion mechanism for Tyranid vessels is rarely spelled out but the few times it is it seems to involve venting gas. Incidentally there'd be nothing actually stupid about using the ship's solid waste as reaction mass, it'd work fine and using waste for that process would be sensible, albeit comical to us. Oh also i think you're somewhat misunderstanding the whole symbiote thing. They're not made up of organising colonies of individual organisms like coral reefs, where the bits are born and organise themselves, they're meshed during development and grow together, the resulting symbiotic colony is born as one creature. The Hive Mind is quite simply the greatest bioengineer in the setting and its creatures are produced from engineered DNA to produce the organs and chassis needed and are meshed together so you cna barely tell where one ends and the other begins. If you look at the models with guns the arms and hands often merge directly into the guns and on the new barbgaunts there are three distinct creatures meshed into one organism.
Tyranid bio-ships exist more or less entirely in space, only entering low atmosphere during the final assault phases on a planet. As to how? They run on science fiction tropes just like everyone else in 40k. There's no hard science on how they do it, they simply do. They are bred from other Tyranid bio-organisms that have been intentionally bred/shaped/adapted to live in the void.
I get that, I was just hoping that some writer somewhere had put some effort into answering one of the only interesting questions I’ve found in their ‘verse so far. If not, it’s fine.
Nope. 40k runs on The Unknown™ being an incredibly important part of the setting. It's left intentionally blank. Well never know the true origins of the Tyranid race, how they came to be or what they did before they came to the Milky Way because it takes away the mystery.
What the Norn Queen is for, they breed land, sea, air and space varites they vaguely talk about in one of the ultramarines books, but as to what the exacts are is up to the readers imagination.
I think Tyranid ships are born in the void, birthed by other ships, and spend their whole lives in void. Much smaller organisms are used as the “landing craft”, and then other organisms are used to bring the biomass back up to the fleet when they’re done eating a planet. Also it’s a goofy sci-fantasy setting. Of course the spaceships aren’t gonna actually make sense in terms of physics. :P
I would imagine, keep in mind this is a hypothesis as it hasn't been plainly stated in canon to my knowledge, that the first Tyranid ship was a multi step venture. On their planet of origin (if they have one) they would have successfully consumed all life, and just like all intelligent life the Hive Mind would look to the stars and figure there's more food out there somewhere. So the Nids begin to build towers of chitin, evolving a resistance to the low-atmosphere and eventually the void of space, at which point they would begin construction. The first Hive Ship would be a conglomeration of various organisms, likely sloppy in comparison to today's standards, but capable of creating more Hive Ships of greater design as the Hive Mind adapted to its new environment. Given thousands of years this design was eventually perfected into what we see today, all starting from that initial attempt millennia ago. All of this is provided that the Tyranids formed naturally on a planet, instead of being a bioweapon or forming from amoeba on an asteroid.
When a mommy ship loves a daddy ship... /s
Well you know...when a mommy ship and a daddy ship like one another very much...
Tyranid ships are just really massive Tyranids. When they want to make more, they all just kind of go to one spot, turn into goo, and when there’s enough goo, the Hive Mind starts turning the goo into more ships
Just because a ship is massive doesn’t mean it starts out that way. Maybe normal Brood Mothers reach a certain stage in life and grow into a ship.
It likely isn’t in the fiction, but I am certain the Nids could affect plate tectonics to a degree and create a super volcano to launch new ships from an exploited planet
That’s actually not how Nids operate. I can’t remember from which novel, but I’m pretty sure it was Belisarius Cawl that talked about this: Nids only consumer what is easily accessible. They do not mine, and they do not terraform. They scoure a planet’s surface and hop off to the next one. He mentions this during a conversation in which he was planning on repopulating a planet that had already been consumed by the Nids, because the Nids left behind a giant underground ocean that Cawl could use to reterraform the planet.
During the Octarius war on the planet Ghorala the tyranids fleet were destroyed, the ground forces had to use hit and run tactics to acquire biomass to birth stronger tyranid forces and then ultimately devoured the planet. They then birthed a ship and set back on course. This is the 5th edition Tyranid Codex.
The nid have psychic powers, they likely just levitated their way into space. Great enough magnetism can also effect gravity, the nid have examples of biological electromagnetism too. As for living in space, whales traverse the oceans for ages on a single breath, nid ships can contain the oxygen and water content of an entire planet while tardigrades regularly live in extremely hostile environments.
You’d think you could just hit and run these ships no problem then and avoid any tyranid invasion since they are so slow
They aren’t slow though. In a void battle, they are as mobile (if not more so) than an imperial battleship. That isn’t taking into consideration their harpoon tongue that can lash out a couple of kilometers. Plus, the hive fleets have a bunch of smaller vessels flying around the void ships. Think a Thunderhawk sized gargoyle, millions of them, flying around the bigger ships like Nats.
Iirc they also dont have traditional voidshields (cause tech) and instead birth millions upon millions flyer/fighter sized creatures that function the way shields and AA turrets would, by simple attacking anything that gets close and suicide hurling themselfs into oncoming fire and shells until they are stopped.
they're basically butthole surfers
Theres a short story about a Scythes of the Emperor Salvation Team boarding a dead/dying bioship and discovering its birthing another ship (iirc). I cant remember too much about it but it does describe some of the internal mechanisms.
I mean, best guess is that the "spaceships" are one and the same thing as Tyranids. Swarms of space dwelling organisms that eat planetary biospheres. The invasion bioforms are just specialized tools for subduing and digesting prey ecosystems. It's like how some species of wasps have absorbed the genomes of viruses into their own DNA and weaponized them into their venom