Among the countless terrors of the 41st Millennium, there is perhaps no greater threat to the
survival of mankind than the Tyranid Hive Fleets, gigantic swarms of bioorganic starships
and spacefaring creatures, capable of traversing the intergalactic void to strip worlds of
all biological matter, augmenting their own evolution, and leaving entire galaxies desolate
in their wake.
Hive fleets are comprised of a nearly endless variety of vessels, with each hive’s aesthetic
differing wildly based on lifeforms it has consumed.
At the heart of the fleet are the Tyranid Hive Ships, enormous starships which act as
control nodes for the entire swarm.
Each single Hive ship features miles upon miles of spawning pits, producing vast numbers
of Tyranids and smaller Bioships at all times to maintain and expand the hive fleet.
Though generally slow and ungainly, Hive Ships are nevertheless extremely powerful in battle,
boasting hundreds of densely-clustered weapon growths along their surface, and featuring
thick layers of stony, chitinous armor, capable of absorbing massive amounts of damage.
The individual ships which make up Tyranid hive fleets are not capable of reaching faster-than-light
velocities, with the fleet instead relying on a spacefaring creature known as a Narvhal
to effectuate interstellar and intergalactic travel.
The Narvhal is a unarmed and poorly armoured bioship which is capable of sensing the gravity
well of a solar system from pangalactic distances, when the hive mind decides upon a particular
system to attack, the Narvhal creates a corridor of compressed space, which harnesses and amplifies
the natural gravity of the system’s celestial bodies to pull the entire fleet through the
compression field to reach their target.
Though this method is slower than the warp travel employed by the Imperium, it is far
more reliable, and features an interesting side effect which is highly advantageous to
the hive, when the Narvhal anchors itself to a solar system’s gravity, that system’s
worlds begin to suffer catastrophic natural disasters and anomalies, weakening and disorganising
their populations on the advent of a Tyranid invasion.
Aside from the Hive Ships and Narvhal, a Tyranid Hive fleet’s most vital assets are its cruisers.
Most Tyranid cruisers are either undeveloped Hive ships, or escort drones that have grown
to a far greater size.
Cruisers do not serve as synaptic nodes in the greater hive mind, affording them a degree
of expendability in battle, and the ships are equipped with large hull-crushing claws
and arrays of pyro-acid batteries to assist in defending the hive from outside threats.
Tyranid cruisers are employed in large numbers to surround and overwhelm the enemy, a tactic
which has proven brutally effective on many occasions, but the ships are capable only
of engaging at the shortest of ranges, as they require periodic return trips to the
hive to receive nourishment and synaptic reconnection.
The threat represented by Tyranid Hive Fleet is nothing short of apocalyptic, due to their
adaptive nature, a powerful resistance fought against the fleet will only serve to strengthen
the hive in the long-term, and as a result, only the most extreme measures have proven
consistently effective against them.
One such tactic employed by the Imperium of Man, is to draw a Hive Fleet into an extensive
planetside battle, forcing them to deploy as many ground forces as possible, before
rapidly evacuating the world and executing an Exterminatus from high orbit, obliterating
all organic material on the planet, and rendering it permanently lifeless.
Though this desolates the world in much the same way that the Tyranid forces intended,
it robs the hive of the biological energy it hoped to absorb from the planet, and which
the fleet relies to recover the energy spent in it’s attack.
Only through such brutal tactics can a hive fleet be deprived of it’s sustenance, and
ultimately prevented from carrying it’s devastation further across the galaxy.