You didn't get it. Back then without precious prow they issued the lance-ban. With the prow they will even enforce that ban harder!
Horizon: Where are you getting the lance ban? I do not see a rule that 'And they shall know no lances.'
I DO see 'Inevitably, the wrangling over interpretation of a ship's 'primary role' leads to some chapters possessing rather more versatile fleets then the Imperial Navy is entirely comfortable with.' Which suggests that A) this is written in the Codex Astartes, and B) even some codex chapters are playing fast and loose with this rule, never mind what non-codex chapters are doing.
In the nova fluff, it talks about how the high speed and F/P/S lance make it a potent gunboat (by the standards of both the current and Heresy Era, as it is faster then almost any other Imperial or chaos ship). I don't notice anyone suggesting that all space marine vessels but it must have a move of only 15 cm, because planetary landers have no need for the ability to move at high speeds.
The Nova and Hunter are both specifically designed from the keel up as ship killers, to take on and take out ships outside their displacement class. It's not the fact that it carries a lance. It's the fact that it's an absurdly efficient at eliminating ships while having no use either as a boarding platform or an ability to land marines. It's not just the lance, it's the whole package.
A lance variant SC is actually far LESS fluff breaking then, say, a str 6 torpedo variant, as a lance has uses for fire support for a landing.
And at the time, the fleet contained Murders, Carnages, Devastations, Slaughters, Acheron, Hades, Styx, Repulsives, Vengeances, Avengers, Exorcists, Executors, Retaliators, the Desolators, Emperors and Oberons and a smattering of the Apocalypse and Retribution as well as the Vengeful Spirit variants. What do you think would would be removed from SM hands?
Well, you left out Swords, which were a new class in M31, and
Uh huh and just how limited is the damage that a lance can do when it targets said Titan? The area around the Titan is what we're talking about. Targeting is different from doing damage.
I may be wrong, since I don't play epic, but reading the pdf, as it's a pinpoint attack, it sound like it doesn't hit much other then the target, since no template is named in the rules I'm looking at. In 40k it can scatter twice a d6 on a miss, and a single d6 on a hit, and uses the ord template. In practical terms, it would probably devastate a fair sized building.
I think you may have it confused with a torpedo strike, which does do tremendous property damage in fluff. (See
Storm of Iron)
And you need to figure out what I was saying before making an ass of yourself further. PRECISELY that's what I meant, that even 30 cm on a Slaughter is deadly. You seem to be implying that 30 cm range lances are weak. Well those 30 cm lances on the Slaughter can hurt. And did you notice which among the cruisers at the time had 30 cm lances? Why only the Slaughter and the Executor which are not weak cruisers on any given day. Even gaming shows Slaughters being effective even against its Chaos siblings, which the IN would have been at the time which were the Murders, Devastations, Acheron, Hades and Styx'. So in short, what I am saying is don't pooh pooh 30 cm lances.
D'Art, you still arn't getting what I was talking about. At all. You're off on a tangent here.
My point was: At the time, they would have looked at what the SM had and asked: is this stronger then IN? Is it a threat?
Answer: No, IN has Slaughter (at the time), which is faster, and more heavily armed. A Strike Cruiser has average speed for a cruiser (of the period), and while heavily armored, has inferior firepower compared to the IN equivalent (of the period) even with a lance.
Thus, a Strike Cruiser with a lance turret would not be seen as a threat to IN superiority in space
at the time the codex was written.