History TabletopGame / BattlefleetGothic

* Schizotech: Imperial ships use warp cores of impossibly old, forgotten technology from before the founding of the Imperium more than 10,000 years ago. Maybe that's why they prefer to use teams of hundreds of slave laborers for simple things like loading a main battery gun. An Imperial ship's engineering spaces form a hermetic society of Adeptus Mechanicus Enginseers, and its navigation is handled by a spire which the genetically mutated navigator never leaves. But its crew also includes tens of thousands of menial laborers, whose only occupation in life is to haul on chains to load macro-cannons or torpedo rounds.

* SpaceIsAnOcean: Taken to unbelievable levels. Some series call spaceships "boats", BFG has masts, sails and ''space shanties''.
** That said, the physics of space are at least ''acknowledged''. Mostly.

* CoolShip: Every ship. Because of 40K's love of huge scales, the implications of operating 5,000-meter-long cruisers and 9,000-meter-long battleships are taken seriously. (Unlike [[Franchise/StarWars other franchises]]) Each ship is built over decades or even generations and then operated for hundreds or thousands of years. A BFG ship absorbs as big a proportion of a world's resources as building a medieval cathedral, and it is the focus of just as much cultural activity. Ships invariably accumulate their own traditions, legends, mechanical quirks and even hereditary shipboard societies.

The rulebook focuses on one campaign in particular, the twenty-year Gothic War, [[EvilOverlord Abaddon the Despoiler's]] 12th Black Crusade against the Imperium. This scheme involves the Gothic Sector being cut off from the rest of the Imperium by warp storms, a ''lot'' of spiky warships, and six ancient space stations known as the Blackstone Fortresses. As with all of Games Workshop's {{Gaiden Game}}s, ''Battlefleet Gothic'' enjoyed several months of publicity in stores and ''Magazine/WhiteDwarf'' magazine before essentially dropping off the radar, new rules and models only occasionally being brought out. A supplement entitled ''Battlefleet Gothic: Armada''[[note]]not to be confused with the later computer game of the same name[[/note]] was released in 2003 that collated rules published in various official magazines and introduced a number of new factions, such as the Tau and the Dark Eldar, as well as a number of new ships for the existing factions. The supplement also included background and scenarios for fighting battles during the Third Armageddon War and the 13th Black Crusade. The game was published by Games Workshop's Specialist Games division until it, along with the rest of the Specialist Games line, was discontinued in 2013.

* TheDreadedDreadnought: Averted. Dreadnoughts are conspicuous by their absence, with ships being grouped into Escorts, Light Cruisers, Cruisers, Battlecruisers, the odd Grand Cruiser, and Battleships. Unique and powerful vessels like Abbadon's ''[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Planet Killer]]'' could qualify as Dreadnoughts, but are not named as such.

''Battlefleet Gothic'' takes everything [[RuleOfCool cool]] about [[StandardStarshipScuffle naval combat]] [[AnachronismStew throughout history]], and mixes it with the gothic aesthetic and unending, chaotic [[MemeticMutation grimdarkness]] of the ''Warhammer 40,000'' universe. Joyfully embracing SpaceIsAnOcean in every way possible, the game throws together vast hypertech spaceships, Napoleonic line tactics and broadsides, torpedoes and torpedo boats, sailing, [[EarthShatteringKaboom planet-splitting]] weapons, ramming and boarding actions, {{Old School Dogfight}}s, sea shanties and alien monsters.

The Imperial Navy, the focus of much of the game's art and background, is the very definition of CoolButInefficient. Imperial capital ships are millennia-old vessels resembling kilometres-long Gothic cathedrals, with spikes and spires for sensor masts, covered with pointless bling in the form of giant skulls or mile-high statues of eagles made of solid gold. They are filled with millions of press-ganged ratings and chanting priest-mechanics, loading gigantic shells by the back-breaking labour of thousands and unloading broadsides from gun decks the size of towns. Maintenance is ritualised, tech-adepts praying to machines they don't understand, anointing them with sacred unguents and beating them with holy wrenches. Warships are so old, so vast and so complex they develop their own cultures; entire societies of feral humans, the descendents of lost crewmen, lurk in forgotten decks.