Best ship combat rules/system?

[TyGuy]

Ship to ship combat. As something so important to some settings and systems, it's been botched so badly so many times for ttrpg's.

So what system/rules-set is worthy of lifting out and using regardless of the campaign's overall system?

Criteria of "best"
* Easy enough for beer-and-pretzel casual players to learn the basics within 15ish minutes and to get a good handle within 2ish combats.
* Enough depth to be interesting and provide meaningful choices for each PC.
* Combats resolved in a pace similar to D&D 5e (15-45 min for efficient players, 45-90 min for casuals)

[NichG]

I have yet to see one I've liked. I think the reason comes down to blobbing the PCs all together into a single 'unit' makes the individual decision-making much less interesting. There's also the factor that interactions between ship-scale and individual-scale are tricky to get right in a way that makes ship-scale stuff either not just strictly better than individual-scale stuff so the best thing to do is try to use your ship all the time, or strictly worse so the best thing to do is to fight enemy ships as if they were just another large monster on the field.

In a modern aircraft/watercraft/etc kind of setup I'd try to write things that encourage the PCs to either play individual fighter pilots or each play the captain of their own crewed vessel. In a fantasy naval setting, I'd similarly want to have each PC be captaining their own vessel if you're going to do an actual ship vs ship battlemat style of combat. Or have rules that actually do expect the PCs to individually be boarding/doing flyby attacks/etc enemy crews or vessels at person-scale, rather than just manning stations in a single shared ship.

As far as the individual/ship scale issue, I do have some preferences cobbled together on how to do that. The most important thing is to avoid treating ships as single entities - even a small ship should have, say, 4 sections each of which takes damage independently. You then add an extra rule on top that a ship which has lost a certain number of sections is wrecked/scuttled/etc. So that threshold need not necessarily be a strict proportion of how many it has in total - something like, if the ship is 4x bigger then it has 4x as many sections but the number of sections that need to be destroyed to scuttle the ship should only go up by 2x. Each ship function also has a particular section or set of sections which contain it, so when you do precision damage to a specific area you might knock out piloting or weapons or life-support or whatnot before you actually fully wreck the ship. Then design it such that individual-scale actions (including the average 'small' AoE size that individuals deploy) tend to only be able to impact one or two sections at a time at most, whereas ship-scale weapons maybe do less damage than individual-scale stuff but they do it to many sections at once.

To simplify tracking, I might do something like using a damage threshold rather than a hitpoint track for sections and say e.g. 'an attack that does at least DR advances this from intact to damaged or damaged to destroyed; an attack that does double DR goes straight to destroyed'. Then different kinds of attack could either preferentially damage intact sections (for large corrosive clouds or other highly un-aimed effects), damage sections randomly (concentrated fire weapons that are hard to precisely aim), preferentially damage already damaged sections (for very precise ship-scale weapons), etc. You could also have a special state for sections that are damaged in a way that the damage spreads (e.g. 'on fire - unless extinguished by crew action, next round this section will either advance one damage category or will set another random section on fire').

So characters can board and bee-line to specific important sections (weapons, mobility, etc); or they can artillery strike using ship weapons; or...

[Notafish]

I have yet to see one I've liked. I think the reason comes down to blobbing the PCs all together into a single 'unit' makes the individual decision-making much less interesting. There's also the factor that interactions between ship-scale and individual-scale are tricky to get right in a way that makes ship-scale stuff either not just strictly better than individual-scale stuff so the best thing to do is try to use your ship all the time, or strictly worse so the best thing to do is to fight enemy ships as if they were just another large monster on the field.


I agree with this - most of what I've seen has characters running "stations" where they roll for different ship actions. Which means that you either have to learn a whole new character sheet for your ship-related powers or to have character actions in vehicle combat be limited and boring. For a seafaring-oriented campaign, though, (where players might be more interested in learning new systems), this looks interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/bjv3sx/the_naval_code_build_seafaring_campaigns_and_run/

For mostly-land campaigns with some shipboard segments, I think the best options are either to go the 5e Saltmarsh route where ship-to-ship combat is mostly standard combat with some additional options depending on where you're standing, or to abstract the ship-to-ship battle and focus on the character-scale effects of hull breaches, crew injuries, etc.


To simplify tracking, I might do something like using a damage threshold rather than a hitpoint track for sections and say e.g. 'an attack that does at least DR advances this from intact to damaged or damaged to destroyed; an attack that does double DR goes straight to destroyed'. Then different kinds of attack could either preferentially damage intact sections (for large corrosive clouds or other highly un-aimed effects), damage sections randomly (concentrated fire weapons that are hard to precisely aim), preferentially damage already damaged sections (for very precise ship-scale weapons), etc. You could also have a special state for sections that are damaged in a way that the damage spreads (e.g. 'on fire - unless extinguished by crew action, next round this section will either advance one damage category or will set another random section on fire').

Also broadly agreed here. I've never liked tracking structural hitpoints on the same scale as character hit points, or judging attacks on structures/vehicles in the same way as attacks at the "creature" scale. I probably wouldn't go the damage threshhold route, but rather designate certain attacks and other actions as capable of dealing massive structural damage, while having a damage "clock" for different ship segments (similar to what NichG describes, but potentially giving harder materials more resilience).


I also think it's very important to consider what the stakes are in ship-to-ship combat, especially if you don't plan for an eventual boarding attempt. If the players' ship is damaged, what happens? if it sinks, what happens? if sinking in the middle of the ocean is as bad in the game world as it is in the real world, and you are outside of shouting distance of the enemy, is there a way to signal surrender?

[Telok]

Ship... space, ground, installations too, character tie-ins, character independent, big/little/no crew, has a party size minimum or maximum beyond whick it stops working?

Because honestly what works for any one of "giant future space battleship", "modern naval over-the-horizon + subs combat", and "age of sail with cannons", just isn't likely to work for anything else.

[Pauly]

If you’re talking fighter sized craft
Silent Death, originally by I.C.E.

For full sized capital ships.
Full Thrust, although to get that down to playable in the times you”re looking for you’ll want only 1 or 2 ships per side, or restrict combat to the smallest corvettes and frigates.

[TyGuy]

If you’re talking fighter sized craft
Silent Death, originally by I.C.E.

For full sized capital ships.
Full Thrust, although to get that down to playable in the times you”re looking for you’ll want only 1 or 2 ships per side, or restrict combat to the smallest corvettes and frigates.
By fighter size you mean 1-2 person, like a fighter jet?

I was thinking more like something suitable for an adventuring party. Crew of 5-20 with the PCs as the focus.

[Quertus]

By fighter size you mean 1-2 person, like a fighter jet?

I was thinking more like something suitable for an adventuring party. Crew of 5-20 with the PCs as the focus.

Yeah, that’s just… not something where I’ve ever enjoyed the gameplay.

No, that’s not true: playing the homebrew Paradox (think Rifts, but good), I had fun playing, effectively, a Star Trek transporter chief.

Granted, my character’s preference was to play “ship” and “away” missions the same way: in the transporter room, on the comms, reading the scanner data, teleporting bombs to foes, or allies out of danger. He liked playing “control”.

And I’ve had a few characters (mostly D&D) that… “kept things at the individual scale” (boarding actions and the like) that were fun.

Each PC running their own ship can be fun.

But (in effect) “there’s only one PC (the ship), and between you, you will take its action for the turn”? That’s just… really hard to make that an enjoyable minigame, IME.

Part of that is, “cookie cutter party” is all but mandated. If the system divides tasks into navigation, weapons, shields, and sensors, well, there’s your party. If, instead, it divides it into “weapons and navigation”, “sensors and shields”, “power and repairs”, “morale and security”, well, there’s your party.

And if, instead, you’re running a tactically inept academia mage? Well, I guess you’re reading a book, asking, “you guys got this?”. Not that that isn’t what he’d do anyway, of course. :smalltongue:

But, yeah, pigeonholing your character into taking, not just samey actions, but samey partial actions every turn? It’s a really hard sell. Unless every minigame has great variety and tactical depth, and is siloed such that your actions aren’t effectively controlled by the other players (meaning that you’re just rolling the dice rather than making decisions = you’re no longer playing the game), I don’t see that being a fun game.

So, for example:
Player 1 controls the captain’s choice of maneuvers, the engineer’s choice of power distribution, the tactical officer’s choice of targets, and rolls the weapons (and related sensor rolls).

Player 2 controls the officers’ general orders / speeches, and rolls morale (and morale attacks).

Player 3 controls the captain’s choice of destination, and rolls for the navigator (and related sensor rolls).

Or “ship power” could be a shared resource, “sitting in the middle”, that players pull from the shared pool. That’s probably a fun minigame.

Note how you’re no longer roleplaying your own character.

So, one could make a fun ship tactical combat minigame, but it wouldn’t be what I’d call a roleplaying game anymore.

[Pauly]

By fighter size you mean 1-2 person, like a fighter jet?

I was thinking more like something suitable for an adventuring party. Crew of 5-20 with the PCs as the focus.

I know Traveller does it, but I’ve never played ship combat in that system. I think Seth Skorkowski has a video on that part of the system.

I have played ship combat in a variety of Star Wars games and that gets old fast for anyone who isn’t the pilot. If you’re not the pilot you roll a dice to see if you succeed in the one task you can do and that’s your turn. I’ve tried ship combat in an old Star Trek game but that take a 4 hour session to resolve one ship -v- ship combat.

Space 1889 had a fun gunship sized game “Ironclads and Ether Flyers”. But its so long since I played it that I’ve forgotten most of its mechanics. However it was derived from the RPG and was sold as a fast play version of their ship encounters and was recommended for use as an add on to the RPG if there was going to be a lot of ship to ship combat in the campaign.

[Telok]

Part of that is, “cookie cutter party” is all but mandated. If the system divides tasks into navigation, weapons, shields, and sensors, well, there’s your party. If, instead, it divides it into “weapons and navigation”, “sensors and shields”, “power and repairs”, “morale and security”, well, there’s your party.

And if, instead, you’re running a tactically inept academia mage? Well, I guess you’re reading a book, asking, “you guys got this?”. Not that that isn’t what he’d do anyway, of course. :smalltongue:

But, yeah, pigeonholing your character into taking, not just samey actions, but samey partial actions every turn? It’s a really hard sell. Unless every minigame has great variety and tactical depth, and is siloed such that your actions aren’t effectively controlled by the other players (meaning that you’re just rolling the dice rather than making decisions = you’re no longer playing the game), I don’t see that being a fun game....

...So, one could make a fun ship tactical combat minigame, but it wouldn’t be what I’d call a roleplaying game anymore.

DtD40k7e does something decent, I'm not sure I'd call space combat a roleplaying bit unless you're trying to engage social combat at the same time (doable).

Ships have a crew amount that the PCs allocate among themselves as officers. Roll dice equal to crew and keep either crew quality (costs ship building points & not having to replace half of them every port) or PC/officer skill. Piloting skill did moves & fighter squadrons, ballistics skill did shooting but you need an officer per cannon/guns array/torpedo tube or the rest of them use crew quality, tech did repair & damage control & shields, medical did crew repair & damage control, arcana was for sensors (magic > physics for lightspeed & jamming crap), melee ability did boarding & drfending from boarding (really really good way to de-crew & debuff an enemy ship), and command skill was assorted boosts or the social combat on the other leaders. Or of course you can just pack the PCs into a shuttle, get close, board with the PCs & a few mooks, and have a massive slaughter through the enemy ship.

DtD40k7e though lets you start a character out as really highly skilled in several things (if thats what you want), so there's none of this stuff where PCs have to start as incompetent 65% success rate mooks & end up as semi-competent 70% success rate "experts". You can be crushing tech/arcana/whatever checks right out of the gate if you want to really focus on that.

[Quertus]

Babylon 5… wars? That was probably the most fun I’ve had with ship to ship combat. But, in that system, each player is running a fleet, so it’s “ships per player” rather than “players per ship”.


DtD40k7e does something decent, I'm not sure I'd call space combat a roleplaying bit unless you're trying to engage social combat at the same time (doable).

Ships have a crew amount that the PCs allocate among themselves as officers. Roll dice equal to crew and keep either crew quality (costs ship building points & not having to replace half of them every port) or PC/officer skill. Piloting skill did moves & fighter squadrons, ballistics skill did shooting but you need an officer per cannon/guns array/torpedo tube or the rest of them use crew quality, tech did repair & damage control & shields, medical did crew repair & damage control, arcana was for sensors (magic > physics for lightspeed & jamming crap), melee ability did boarding & drfending from boarding (really really good way to de-crew & debuff an enemy ship), and command skill was assorted boosts or the social combat on the other leaders. Or of course you can just pack the PCs into a shuttle, get close, board with the PCs & a few mooks, and have a massive slaughter through the enemy ship.

DtD40k7e though lets you start a character out as really highly skilled in several things (if thats what you want), so there's none of this stuff where PCs have to start as incompetent 65% success rate mooks & end up as semi-competent 70% success rate "experts". You can be crushing tech/arcana/whatever checks right out of the gate if you want to really focus on that.

Ah, we’re running into definition issues. When I say “roleplaying”, I don’t mean “talky bits”, I mean “making decisions for the character, as the character”. So, although there are some people who switch off the roleplaying when the dice come out / for tactical minigames, I am not one of them. Thus, Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, reading books, making sketches, or taking tactically suboptimal choices in combat. For example, he might bend time, and give the Weapons crew twice as many actions. And, while that might be a powerful play on a naval vessel firing cannons, for a Space ship, most weapons are still limited by Power, and it would have been much more useful to do that to the ship’s power core.

My point was, if you break it down by tactical minigame, while it might be fun that way, you’re no longer breaking it down by character, and therefore you’re no longer roleplaying.

Anyway, regarding DtD40k7e, which I love… I’ll admit, I haven’t done much ship combat, but afaict, I still have the same issues here. In fact, the party very much… built “away team” characters, and left “running the ship” to a(n in)competent crew.

I haven’t convinced them to join the “boarding party” hero yet, but I think that that would be the optimal play. Instead, I just pre-roll any ship combats, and then mostly just narrate past them, as the PCs have more important things to worry about.

Yeah, not how the system was intended to be played, but for a group of roleplayers whose character concepts don’t map to the “ship’s crew tactical minigame”, and who are more concerned with setting up and negotiating trade and construction rights than playing through ship to ship combat, it seems to work.

——-

For fear of losing the forest for the trees, “multiple players, one ship” ship minigames I could see me enjoying cross character lines / boundaries, into “everything involved in dealing damage”, “everything involved in moving”, “everything involved in (boarding and?) morale”, “everything involved in (repairs and) creating the ‘Power’ pool”.

So, for the “Power pool” minigame… maybe engineering has the option to run the systems “in the red”, which produces more power, but has a chance to roll on a mishap table. And how far in the red on what ship with what modifications determines what chance of rolling on what mishap table. And where “in the red” is varies as the ship takes damage… which sometimes isn’t obvious / the damage happens after the decision of how far in the red to push. And they have to allocate engineering resources to repairs, and to “squeezing more out of systems” (all of them, not just “Power”). And a few of their actions might involve them taking Power from the pool (setting up emergency force fields to keep damaged areas from venting air (or crew)), for example (or maybe just “to keep from venting air (so we can continue to do repairs without wasting turns to get space suits on “, whereas “force fields to keep from venting crew” is under the Medical minigame, alongside “transport injured/endangered crew”, and “slower” ways that *don’t* cost precious Power).

That’s kinda the minimum complexity / tactical mechanics necessary for me to find such minigames engaging. And not only have I not seen such in RPGs, it’s no longer roleplaying, as “the Decisions the captain makes” is controlled by every minigame.

(Also, fair is fair, if we move “engineers” to a shared pool, where the “deals damage” player takes from that pool and makes rolls to improve weapons systems, for example, then the decisions that the engineer makes are also controlled by every minigame. So, totally not what I call “roleplaying” anymore.)

[Telok]

I think one issue is most rpgs are focused on a small set of individuals doing stuff next to each other. Cynically I'll say people call it teamwork when stuff one person does helps another in some minor way. This means the majority of our roleplaying experience & expectations focus on being individuals. Ironically the closest you get to real teamwork is mmo style tank-heals-dps type stuff where the individual doesn't matter as long as they're able to do the job.

"Ship" type activities however really are a team effort and the teams on ships aren't (for excellent reasons) five random people picked up off the street. Thus any reasonable & logical rule set modelling such activities does conflict with the general rpg experience & style of five random people doing stuff next to each other. There's no way I've seen to mesh a reasonable "the engines guy does engine stuff and nothing else" portion of beliveable ship combat with "of these PCs with assorted semi-random murder hobo skills which one has any ability in engine stuff and do they want to just roll the same thing over & over & over".

So I'm not sure you really can marry any "small squad of random murder hobos" type roleplaying to an actual team effort "ship stuff" scenario. Best bet may be simply giving everyone their own ship to command and having the function of the ships be completely divorced from the PC character sheet. At that point your rp may well simply be like a minis tactical map combat where the rp is all quips & talk because the combat system doesn't do rp based actions & bonuses & stuff.

[bramblefoot]

fate does combat really well, so thats my pick

[Duff]

How "Crunch" oriented is your table?
I'd be a bit inclined to use a narrative approach unless it was going to be an ongoing game at a crunchy table

[Quertus]

EDIT: I hope this post makes sense - I fell asleep (and dropped my phone, waking myself up) almost immediately after posting this.


I think one issue is most rpgs are focused on a small set of individuals doing stuff next to each other. Cynically I'll say people call it teamwork when stuff one person does helps another in some minor way. This means the majority of our roleplaying experience & expectations focus on being individuals. Ironically the closest you get to real teamwork is mmo style tank-heals-dps type stuff where the individual doesn't matter as long as they're able to do the job.

"Ship" type activities however really are a team effort and the teams on ships aren't (for excellent reasons) five random people picked up off the street. Thus any reasonable & logical rule set modelling such activities does conflict with the general rpg experience & style of five random people doing stuff next to each other. There's no way I've seen to mesh a reasonable "the engines guy does engine stuff and nothing else" portion of beliveable ship combat with "of these PCs with assorted semi-random murder hobo skills which one has any ability in engine stuff and do they want to just roll the same thing over & over & over".

So I'm not sure you really can marry any "small squad of random murder hobos" type roleplaying to an actual team effort "ship stuff" scenario. Best bet may be simply giving everyone their own ship to command and having the function of the ships be completely divorced from the PC character sheet. At that point your rp may well simply be like a minis tactical map combat where the rp is all quips & talk because the combat system doesn't do rp based actions & bonuses & stuff.

From Space ships to teamwork theory? Yup, that’s the Playground! :smallbiggrin:

So, you’re not wrong about RPG teamwork generally being suboptimal; however, your specific examples of “playing beside one another” (“doing stuff next to each other”) does not match my experiences.

To match the classic “children playing beside one another” (as a classic step before children playing with one another), the players’ / PCs’ actions would need to be silos, non-interactive. Whereas, in a typical RPG, the PCs interact with the same set of toys (ie, the same shared reality), and have the same general objective (like “kill the BBEG” or “earn fame”). Even 4 dumb Fighters with only a single “stab thing” move each are engaged in teamwork so long as they’re stabbing enemies (and not allies, or each other).

Now, this gets a little complicated when you talk about me in particular, as I love to have different objectives, to be playing high school romance drama while others are playing tactical basketball simulator. But if we’re working together to make a cake, and I’m working to make it tasty, while you’re working to make it look good, that’s still teamwork - unless you’re making it look good by smothering it in disgusting fondant, or we’re otherwise ruining each other’s efforts with our choices.

Thus, I’d say that “teamwork” with multiple objectives involves taking others’ objectives into consideration when pursuing your own. Which is something my “shared Pool of Power” (and subsequent “shared pool of engineers”) alluded to. Whereas some people are bad at teamwork, and can only think in terms of optimizing their own actions, without regard to the impact that they have on others.

——-

The “5 random people” bit is similarly tricky. Not just anyone can _______ (or do so well) can be filled in with a NI number of things, from “kill dragons” to “run a planet” to “seduce people to the dark side with cookies” to “negotiate for trade and mining rights” to, yes, “operate a Space ship”. And expecting the same people to excel at all of these, let alone to excel at all of these in such a way as to promote optimal teamwork in performing each objectives? It’s simply unreasonable, unless we’re playing something akin to omnicompetent gods.

Thus, my players have chosen what is important to them in the DtD40k7e game, and that wasn’t “run a ship”.

——-

Wrt roleplaying… if I were playing a ship tactical combat simulator, a sufficiently savvy observer, knowledgeable in the personalities of my characters, could probably guess which character I was roleplaying as based on my ship’s actions . Especially if they knew what my “baseline” behavior in such a system when I’m not roleplaying a PC looks like, such an observer should notice trends in deviation from the norm sufficient to ascertain which PC I am roleplaying.

So I’m disinclined to believe that “each player runs a ship” is devoid of roleplaying beyond the occasional quip - making decisions for the character, as the character, doesn’t have to end when the dice come out.

for example, the closest of the enemy ships gets disabled. With different captains in the same scenario, you might find that I scan / destroy / board / hide behind / ignore the disabled ship.

[Telok]

To match the classic “children playing beside one another” (as a classic step before children playing with one another), the players’ / PCs’ actions would need to be silos, non-interactive. Whereas, in a typical RPG, the PCs interact with the same set of toys (ie, the same shared reality), and have the same general objective (like “kill the BBEG” or “earn fame”). Even 4 dumb Fighters with only a single “stab thing” move each are engaged in teamwork so long as they’re stabbing enemies (and not allies, or each other).

Your 4 fighters are basically the level of "team" I expect from D&D. Healing your allies is a minor/bonus action because you have real stuff to do or its mostly irrelevant, its all dps because taking a hit for an ally or setting up for their attack isn't really a thing*. Its teamwork in the sense of everyone on the map has the same overall final goal, like players in baseball where the at bat side doesn't really interact with their team mates, or maybe pairs tennis where its just the closer person hitting the ball back.

But crewed ship teams are... let me stick to age of sail for this example... your team has a bunch of people whose only job is to fire a gun on command and another bunch who only do rope things with the sails. The style of rpgs we see today is geared towards everyone doing a bunch of stuff and feeling like they're contributing. Putting players in control of the sails team is basically "roll your teams sailing check not even every turn to do what the captain wants". We just aren't conditioned by rpgs to wait until the one important moment to do something (if you've liked playing a 1st level AD&D one spell wizard take a drink), or to spend all our combat time just enabling someone else to function.

So what you really probably want to keep up with player's expectations set by small squad combat where "teamwork" is anything better than literal pvp & sabotage, is something that looks like the combat situations they're used to but with "ship of the line" instead of "elf" and "broadside" instead of "short bow".


* yeah yeah, advantage whining will happen because someone can't read all the way to the end of the sentence before replying. No. Engaging them in a bind or grabbing their shield so they can't respond, counter, or evade while your buddy puts a pick in their skull is what I'm talking about. D&D combat just doesn't work that way to really reward teamwork like that. You get a little bonus to hit a goblin mook or something instead.

[warty goblin]

I think the difficulty of many PCs, one ship is that most of the rules I see reduce each station to very general actions, generally resolved using a straight forwards skill check. So Engineering can roll to get Steering enough power to make a slightly better maneuver, but it's always the same roll. It's not even a one-dimensional problem space, it's basically a point mass.

Contrast with combat, where even simple games make where you are, where the enemy is, who you can hit, and who can hit you all matter. There's a lot of options in that space.

In some cases this hints at a solution, just borrow things from normal combat. Damage control is an easy example, you have specific components of the ship in specific locations. Hits cause debris, which can block access, fires, which block access, hurt you, and can damage the ship and spread. Flooding for watergoing vessels, or vacuum breaches in space combat can be added to this pretty easily.

Now when your ship gets hit, you need to both protect undamaged components from speading fire, gain access to damaged areas to repair them, and protect yourself from the hazards of having parts of your ship exploding. So Engine 2 is knocked out, there's debris blocking the fastest route, and a progressive fire in the alternative route. Somebody needs to get the engine back online, and the fastest way is through the debris, but that fire could spread to Engine 3.... You could literally play it out on a battlemap if you wanted. Location and specificity now matter, because you have to overcome these obstacles to solve that problem.

I'd almost think the this suggests one player is the captain, who handles shop movements and targeting, and everyone else is the head of a damage control party. If the ship has a lot of weapons systems, with trade offs between using one or another, maybe split Captain into Helm and Fire Control. Point being is that now every player has to care about movement and positioning, and figuring out how to solve dynamic problems that crop up throughout the combat.

This also suggests a lot of ship specific things, e.g. instead of hitpoints you have crew members. You can lose crew, and therefore damage control capability, from fire, getting hit, and so on. You could have different DCP specializations, like fires, repairs, medical (keep your DCP in the game!) or diver/vacsuit teams for underwater/vacuum problems.

And of course the tactical layer interfaces with the DCP layer. Captain Bob needs the rudder fixed, so he can bring his full broadside to bear. The Flooding DCP needs the ship to slow down so they can control the flooding in Engine 1. That last evasive maneuver saved the ship from another hit, which is good because damage control is nearly overwhelmed already.

Not to mention boarding parties...

[MaryPoppinsYall]

Haven't found a good one. If you're doing DND, just make it boarding parties where the player's crew if there is one goes hiding.

[TyGuy]

Haven't found a good one. If you're doing DND, just make it boarding parties where the player's crew if there is one goes hiding.

I played that way. I don't like it. I want the combat vehicle to do combat things. And I want the crew to be sidelined a bit, but not hand waved out of existence like a video game.

[Grod_The_Giant]

So fun story, I actually wrote a pretty comprehensive set of rules for spaceship combat, although they're for the system I also wrote, STaRS (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/268061/STaRS-The-Simple-Tabletop-Roleplaying-System). To cover a few quick bullet points,

STaRS is a generic rules-light ruleset where the players do all the die rolling. It's also low-key built for players that don't know the rules-- as long as the GM keeps things straight on their side, the players only need to make ability checks.
Dogfighting rules are heavily based on Warbirds--every round, you roll to see who's got who in their sights at that moment. If you have the advantageous position, you can use all the normal offensive combat maneuvers; if you're being attacked, you roll to dodge and pick a strategy for your maneuvering check next turn.
Capital ships get broken down into individual "compartments"; guns, engines, generators, and other tech are assigned to specific compartments. When the ship gets damaged, semi-random compartments are knocked off-line, and the engineer needs to hustle over to fix them. And if the bridge gets hit, everyone needs to hustle to specific weapon or sensor array they want to use. There are three inherent roles for players-- helmsman, gunner, and engineer--and you can have multiple gunners or whatnot; they just split the ship's weaponry between them. Very much inspired by the early Honor Harrington books.

This (https://www.dropbox.com/s/lik0dwjpkkhel15/Illuminated%20Worlds.pdf?dl=0)is the setting document I never got a chance to use, with full rules for spaceships and other scifi stuff and a quick overview of the base system rules.

[Mutazoia]

My top two picks would be, in no particular order, Star Warriors (the starship combat system for WEGs Star Wars D6 rules) or Renegade Legion.

[farothel]

The Last Unicorn Star Trek space combat system worked quite well. As all players are assumed to be starfleet officer and all starfleet officers have shipboard systems (specialization) in their template, they can all operate all the stations, so every person can do something (even if it's not their specialization).

For sea combat, 7th Sea is not that bad (it's sort of in the name of the system to have a sea combat system).