What size ship? [Any]

[golentan]

So, many of us have played a game where the players living space knocked boots with their adventure time and primary mode of transportation. I speak, of course, of ships. Whether the humble wooden sailer, the mighty airship, or a vessel capable of traversing the depths of space, ships and adventurers go together like peanut butter and... something good that goes with peanut butter.

My question is: having given them a ship (or when the PCs buy one) how large do you make it? And how much crew above and beyond the PCs do you require?

Personally, for my Sci Fi games (where I am most likely to have shipboard adventures) I tend towards one of two extremes. I either give them a small ship (just enough rooms with some leftover cargo space, about the size of a mid sized house tops) which requires about half of them to operate (just in case... they are PCs after all and thus tend to score dangerously on Actuarial tables), or give them massive ships (minimum size of RL aircraft carriers) with a required crew in the hundreds.

Secondary question: How do you handle ship to ship combat? Do you focus on the player's individual actions and abstract (read: plot fudge based on what they do) the larger battle or do you abstract it to "PC ships vs. Enemies?" How often does the ship get a Big Damn Gunship type pivotal role in non-ship combat?

[dsmiles]

Ships...*shudder*

Ships are...complicated, at best. As far as what ship do I give the PC's? It depends. If they buy one, whatever they can afford to buy is what they get. It requires a full crew for a vessel of that size. Obviously larger ships require larger crews. If they receive it as a quest reward of some sort, it's usually a two-masted schooner or brig of some sort. Sometimes a single masted sloop, even.

Ship-to-ship combat can be interesting. I use a "hull points" system I found somewhere. 1 hull point = 10 hit points. Ship to ship weapons do hull point damage. Normally, enemy ships will fire one or two cannon volleys and then attempt to board for person-to-person combat. I hate ship-to-ship combat.

[EccentricCircle]

when in space: small ships are better. I generally go for a small but long range scoutship. something that can be crewed by a crew of six (i.e. the players) but will typically have a few NPC's around as technicians, mechanics, medical assistants etc. plus space for passengers and NPC's so probably no more than ten to fifteen people at most.

A big Enterprise sized ship would work for some games but not the sort I generally run. ultimately I find it best not to have more NPC's than are needed, although if the players specifically asked to be the command crew of a massive starship i'd be happy to let them. the game would then follow more of a star trek model complete with redshirts and random bridge crew.

on the open sea you can't have small crews as easily. however the PC's rarely own the ship, they are usually traveling with an existing crew, which may be quite large. but will generally be hired swords of helping passengers.

Airships in my games are generally small prototype machines and so the PC's can easily manage one themselves.

Ship to ship combat is one of those tricky ones. I know of no system that does it really well. for D&D I generally use the more narrative sort of combat described in Storm Wrack.
i'm currently working on a homebrew sci fi game which will heavily feature ship to ship combat. but building something that works well and is easy to use in practice is very difficult.

[Tengu_temp]

I prefer smaller vessels where the number of NPCs won't exceed the number of PCs. For example, in the mecha game I'm currently running the crew of the plane they use as their home and base of operation consists of 7 PCs and 5 NPCs (one of whom is a former PC), and 2 other NPCs are staying aboard as guests.

When it comes to combat, it's a bad idea to make the main pilot and gunner fight while everyone else is twiddling their thumbs. Either focus on boarding, or make the ship carry smaller fighters or mecha in a sci-fi setting, for the players to pilot during fights.

[Telok]

Some time ago I worked up my own version of spaceship combat for a Traveler (classic) game that I set in the Frontier:First Encounter video game. It worked pretty well for us. I wanted something a bit more cinematic than the Traveler setup and would keep at least most of the group engaged.

I'll PM or post it in a spoiler if you would like.

[Yukitsu]

If it's about combat, I'm a fan of BFG, which implies 2 kilometer long ships as a standard requirement for not dying in 1 shot.

[golentan]

Some time ago I worked up my own version of spaceship combat for a Traveler (classic) game that I set in the Frontier:First Encounter video game. It worked pretty well for us. I wanted something a bit more cinematic than the Traveler setup and would keep at least most of the group engaged.

I'll PM or post it in a spoiler if you would like.

That would be awesome. I originally asked because I'm gearing up for a Mongoose Traveller game, and CT rules tend to be pretty compatible...

I guess I'm hearing mostly "small ships are better." Veery Eenteresting...

[Eldan]

Actually, I always wanted to dump something positively huge on the players ever since I read the Revelation Space novels. A three mile long piece of carbon, ice shielding and steel originally intended for thousands of crew members, but now mostly abandoned and automated to the point that a computer and five people can run it at the barest minimum. There's so much you could do with that.

And, well, I tend to operate under the assumption that every spaceship is a huge, glowing target in space. The only thing protecting you is distance. If you get a handful of lightminute or two away, the enemy will have problems targeting you no matter how big you are.

[Malfunctioned]

Most games I run tend to feature ships quite a bit, though that's a massive case of author appeal. I tend to have them running the gamut of size.

When playing Traveller the crew tends to have a bare bones Fast Trader or such except for one occasion where they were crew members and V.I.Ps on board a Tigress-class Dreadnaught ship. Of course that was a Star Trek: Voyager style game so most the action actually took place on board the ship.

When playing Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies the characters had a mid-size ship known as 'Ophelia', it worked well and they ended up thinking of it as a character in itself.

And then in a diesel-punk setting based on SotC rules I invented my own kind of airship, basically a cross between zeppelins, helicopters and immense jet planes. The crew had two vehicles, the Ark of Hope, that being a standard, if a bit small, airship and 'The Lucky Bastard' a very small, one man, jet that they kept for emergencies. Though as the game went on the ship ended up growing larger and larger to due to constant improvements allow some epic scenes with one character piloting the one man jet, chasing an enemy airship and the giant Ark of Hope bursting through the clouds in order to maintain the chase.

[Telok]

Google Documents, first time using them and it works. I like.

Space combat

Space combat short list

The setting was 3150 AD so there are fewer fancy bits for the ships. Plus FFE had a much more reasonable engine/fuel/distance metric. Which I needed because a goodly number of stars in the game mapped realistically to the area near Sol and classic Traveler ships with less than jump 3 just can't handle realistic interstellar distances.

[Squally!]

Rogue Trader!

5km long ships, 90+k crewmen. 5 PC's leading the whole thing.

It really depends on the setting and goal of the vessel. I prefer small ships with cramped space. My party in my 3.5 game currently has a 3 mast ship, and a 2 mast ship. It works great, for them. Its a large party trying to survive on a newly colonized continent, so they have to frequently make trips back to "civilization" to bring in settlers and supplies.

[lightningcat]

The only ship based game I've been involved with is a d20 starwars game. We have a space transport that has grown some since we started, it is our primary transportation, and it acts as a carrier for our fighters. We had the opertunity to upgrade to a capital ship, but decided against it, too many crew to deal with.

[FelixG]

I am fond of capital ships and fleets.

Good way to avoid a pilot and a gunner having all the fun in ship combat? Give each of the PCs their own frigate to command as they see fit!

I really enjoy frigates as they are fast, they can do some serious damage and they are still big enough to fight in the major leagues.

[Toliudar]

I'm currently very happy to be part of a D&D 3.5 game that is stealing liberally from Firefly, and am loving it. We have an airship that's small enough for the PC's to act as the crew, so no need to track a dozen NPC's. It's got a tiny bit of combat capability, but is fragile enough to make us not want to risk it, so most of the action will, I hope, continue to be on land, where everyone is contributing.

[Hawriel]

The best example for a ship that is the best size for a gaming group is the Millenium Falcon or Serenety.

If the PCs are not military this is a perfect size. The ship has an actual fungtion out side blowing stuff up and getting to point A to B. It can house all PCs with room for passangers. This size ship also has room for an emergincy transport of about a 100 peaple. Not for very long but when you have to rescue crew from another ship or transport refugies it will do.

For age of sail like ships look to ships like yats, scooners, sloops, brigs and some times small frigates. Depending on weather the characters are Navy or independant. As long as the ship is safe for traveling an Atlantic sized ocean I think your good.

Combat does not have to be boring for 4/6 of the party eather. Ships usualy have more than one gun. Other systems are used, such as sencorse, shields, sails, and damage controle. Once the ship starts taking damage any character with repair skills will have plenty to do.

[LansXero]

Or you could go to the other extreme and give them things like a Craftworld and set the adventure in it. They are on a ship, technically.

[Telasi]

On the rare occasions it comes up, my PCs tend to be aboard a starship in the 5+ kilometer size range. Bearing in mind that the game is usually Dark Heresy, and the PCs wouldn't know what to do with the ship even if they had any meaningful influence on the crew, this works very well.

If, for some reason, PCs actually need a personal starship, something on the Serenity or Millenium Falcon scale works wonderfully.

Sailing ships almost never come up, in my experience as a player, and they usually just serve as a plot device to get the PCs from A to B. Few groups are self-motivated enough to plan out a voyage or manage a ship of their own.

[hamishspence]

If, for some reason, PCs actually need a personal starship, something on the Serenity or Millenium Falcon scale works wonderfully.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing in the 40K setting- even the smallest interstellar transports are pretty hefty-

the 2km long Vagabond-class transports seem to be the normal "Serenity-equivalent" in 40K.

[LansXero]

I'm not sure if there is such a thing in the 40K setting- even the smallest interstellar transports are pretty hefty-

the 2km long Vagabond-class transports seem to be the normal "Serenity-equivalent" in 40K.

Thunderhawks? :S

[Telasi]

In 40k, there isn't something that scale. The smallest human-made starships capable of warp travel is in the 1 kilometer size bracket. I was referring to general purposes at that point.

[hamishspence]

They also tend to have large crews.

The smallest ship I've seen statted out, is a "scout sloop" in the Battlefleet Koronus expansion to Rogue Trader, and it's 0.95 km long with a crew of 7500.

That said, in the novel Eye of Terror, there is a very small warp-capable starship that appears to be crewable by just the (extremely down on his luck) Rogue Trader and his navigator. But that's partly because his crew eventually left him as his luck ran out.

[Eldan]

Why exactly are the ships that big? I mean, apart from 40ks usual bigger is better approach.

Do they need to be that big for the engines, shields, gellar fields and so on? Are they biult that big for other reasons? Could they theoretically be smaller?

[hamishspence]

I think the engines would be the main reason (the Viper-class sloop has a disproportionately large back half).

Tau FTL engines started huge but got smaller, till even the Falcon-sized Manta Missile Destroyer has one (albiet a much slower, more short-ranged one).

[Yukitsu]

Why exactly are the ships that big? I mean, apart from 40ks usual bigger is better approach.

Do they need to be that big for the engines, shields, gellar fields and so on? Are they biult that big for other reasons? Could they theoretically be smaller?

Because they don't want to have a massive amount of cargo going from one end of the sector to the other, surviving the warp only barely, just to have a bunch of soccer hooligans in red airplanes that shouldn't even move in space steal their cargo. Massive ships make it less likely that the cargo can be jacked by anything short of a full scale military assault.

Beyond that, getting enough astropaths for a fleet of say, 100 smaller trade vessels would be grossly impractical.

I don't think it's the engine size. IIRC, Eisenhorn's ship is considerably smaller than a typical vessel meaning it's possible for small, personal size ships, but I could be wrong about this. I think escorts have larger engines by proportion because they require more engine by mass to have their increased manueverability and thrust as compared to the larger cruisers.

Edit: Wrong black ship. Astropath black ships are the ones I was thinking of.

[Soylent Dave]

Why exactly are the ships that big? I mean, apart from 40ks usual bigger is better approach.

Do they need to be that big for the engines, shields, gellar fields and so on? Are they biult that big for other reasons? Could they theoretically be smaller?

I don't think it's the engine size. IIRC, Eisenhorn's ship is considerably smaller than a typical vessel meaning it's possible for small, personal size ships

Eisenhorn's gun cutter is his 'personal size' ship - but it isn't capable of warp travel.

He uses a Rogue Trader for that (a relatively small one, but I think it's still 'cathedral in space' size).

It's a combination of everything that makes Imperial ships so big - plasma reactors, warp engines, geller field generators... and all the crew needed to run it. Just running a lance battery needs upwards of 3,000 crew (according to some of the descriptions in Battlefleet Gothic) - and they all need somewhere to live (not necessarily somewhere comfortable or spacious, obviously. They're only ratings... but it'll still take up a fair bit of room).

But, as with anything Imperial, the older ships are always better - so it's perfectly feasibly to imagine a much smaller ship with higher tech. reactors and weaponry (i.e. older machinery, stuff dating back to the Dark Age of Technology etc.) which requires fewer crew to run.

There's definitely wiggle room, especially if you're talking about a Rogue Trader (Tobias Maxila - Eisenhorn's pet Rogue - keeps the crew numbers down by using servitors) - but going too small with a warp capable ship might be a bit of a stretch (unless it's Xenos or otherwise heretical)

[hamishspence]

This article by Andy Chambers, one of the writers of Battlefleet Gothic:

http://www.inisfail.com/bfg/bfg-lances.html

suggests up to around 500 crew to a lance turret.

[FelixG]

so 500 to crew the lance, but then roughly another 1k of people to keep the thing working and to support those 500 who handle the weapon ^.^

The greater portion of most forces are support personnel and families.

Thats were most of the voidborn folk fit in. A lot of them can be born, live then die of old age on a ship without ever touching a toe onto a planet.

[hamishspence]

Crew size estimates are given here:

http://www.inisfail.com/bfg/bfg-andy-crew-sizes.html

however, since then, in Rogue Trader, sizes have gone up considerably- usually more than 10,000 crew on an escort ship alone, and a lot more on a cruiser.

[Leon]

What size ship?

[Gavinfoxx]

So has anyone houseruled something so you can PLAY Xenos (Tau, Eldar) in a PnP RPG in 40k-verse? They would have smaller FTL ships, though using a different movement system, right?