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Tyranid "Hive Fleets", massive living space vessels, transport the Tyranids from location to location. Not only do the "Hive Fleets" take a significant role in the background and fiction of the Warhammer 40,000 universe¹, but have been given their own models for use in the "Specialist Game" Battlefleet Gothic[^2]. This page details the status and aspects of the Tyranids' Hive Fleets. For information concerning the history of invasions, see the Tyranids page. For more information concerning how the Tyranids and their ships devour worlds and then reproduce, see the Tyranid Genetics page.

Of the 3 major Hive Fleet invasions, two come from the Eastern fringe, but one is moving up from below the galactic plane. The ships contain everything required to sustain the fleet; some ships being purely for crushing resistance, the larger ships contain birthing pools to create the huge land armies of the Tyranids and even more ships when the need arises.⁴³

By the nature of the hive fleets, fierce resistance on a planet will only make the fleet stronger in the end; for this reason only a few tactics have been found to work. The first is to draw the Tyranids into a large ground battle, forceing the fleet to deploy as large a ground force as possible. Once this is achieved, evacuate the planet as much as possible and perform [[Exterminatus]]. This means that the Hive Fleet will have lost all of the bio-material in the ground forces and by the nature of Exterminatus will not be able to recover any from the planet. This tactic is very successful, but at the cost of destroying a habitable planet every time, it is not a tactic that can be counted upon⁴. It has been projected that there may not even be enough habitable planets in the galaxy to stop the tyranid threat, especially if more Tyranid fleets arrive from outside the galaxy.

*²[http://ukwww.specialist-games-workshop.com/tyranids/forgotten-fleets/1battlefleetgothic/ rulebook.asp Gothic Fleet Downloads/Rulebook]