A Hive Fleet Leviathan Hive Ship, starboard view.
A Hive Ship is the impossibly massive, biomechanical organic bioship that forms the heart of all Tyranid hive fleets.
They are critical to the success of any hive fleet's advance, acting as telepathic synapse nodes for the bioships around them and serving as massive bio-factories that churn out the endless swarms of bio-forms that characterise the forces of the Tyranids.
Despite their seemingly impossible size, Hive Ships are actually living creatures incorporating millions of bioengineered organisms.
Each is a biological factory capable of creating millions of Tyranid organisms, of replicating genomes and splicing together new creatures perfectly adapted for each new world and environment encountered.
A Tyranid Hive Ship, port view.
Tens of thousands of Tyranid Warriors are carried aboard Hive Ships, the cocooned officers of nightmare hordes yet to be born.
In addition to their roles away from the battlefield, Hive Ships are fearsome enemies in combat. Though there is a vast amount of morphological diversity among Hive Ships, stone-like armour plating and plentiful weapon growths are common to nearly all of them.
A Tyranid Hive Ship begins drawing biomass from a Capillary Tower in low orbit of a target world.
Protected by thick clouds of defensive spores and armed with Pyro-acid batteries, Bio-plasma spines, launch bays, and even gigantic claws, Hive Ships are a force that are a match for even the mightiest Imperial and xenos battleships.
While little is definitively known of Tyranid vessels, most Ordo Xenos analysts agree that within a given Tyranid hive fleet there is a single mature Hive Ship which serves to coordinate the Hive Mind across the fleet. It is also theorised that many of this Hive Ship's escort vessels may be immature specimens of the same bioform. The substantial morphological differences among Hive Ship and the challenges involved in obtaining a comprehensive genetic sampling leave this fact debated amongst Tech-priests of the Divisionis Biologis of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
A Tyranid Hive Ship of a different strain.
However, there is limited evidence to support this theory. In three battles where a particular Hive Ship was destroyed, elements of the Tyranid fleets split off from the battle and fled, rather than reverting to an animalistic and uncoordinated assault. Some members of the Adeptus Mechanicus have theorised that the death of a Hive Ship Hive Mind node may catalyse the rapid maturation of other Hive Mind nodes in the system. This may turn a bravely fought victory into a longer-term problem as additional smaller splinter fleets created from this process proceed to attack more vulnerable targets.
Sources[]
- Battlefleet Gothic Armada, pp. 80-94
- Battlefleet Gothic Resources - "The Harvest Fleets: Necron Vessels", pp. 80, 87
- White Dwarf 146 (UK)
- Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 (PC Game)
- Deathwatch: The Achilus Assault (RPG), pp. 47, 50
