Hi, this is my first post though I've lurked for quite a while on the forum. I GM an Only War game with a group of friends, and recently, I made the mistake of allowing a player to take the trade skill "shipwright". Most of the trade skills are applicable to the game, and are indeed useful. However, he and the other players want to build a ship to escape the planet they are on. I have found nothing in the rules that covers something like this, despite the skill being present in the game. Any suggestions?

I assume that's a Warp capable ship he wants?

Have a look at Rogue Trader. IIRC the smallest ship (found in the Battle Fleet Koronus sourcebook) is just under a kilometer long and requires a crew of about 7500.

Restrictions should be obvious

But really, if he has time for ship building, why aren't his superiors keeping him busy?

Tenebrae is right. Though, i suppose if he wants to try and design and build a ship of his own that would add tech-heresy to desertion, making his death extra painful and his new life as a servitor extra grim.

It would be very difficult to hide something like a shipyard and even more difficult to conceal what you're doing at a munitorum controlled foundry (very difficult as in, nearly impossible).

If they want to escape the planet they're on, it would be easier get to munitorum influence like whoa and "requisition a transfer" *wink-wink* Or just hijack a ship, if they can get their whole regiment (or just enough people) in on the idea.

Miniaturization isn't really something the Imperium of Man does.

All of those are valid points, and I've brought that up to them multiple times. However, they are insistent on building a ship and have asked me to work it into the game somehow. So, I've done a little research and determined that the best they could do is to refurbish or repair an old Arvus or Aquila lander. I've explained to them how difficult it would be to build a ship, they need tools and facilities, yadda yadda yadda. I have included a spaceport with an abandoned and dilapidated hangar so they at least have something to work with in their spare time, despite the difficulty.

I've also explained to them how voidships work, and why they can't pilot one without a Navigator and all that. So I am restricting them to small, subwarp capable ships. I think it's a fair trade off, because it is really the only option they have. Ships in 40k seem to be incredibly massive, or impossibly huge. There seems to be a scarcity of small craft plying the space lanes.

That's the solution I've come up with for my game, and I would welcome any feedback people have on it. However, I am also interested in the skill itself, outside of the current situation I am faced with. Why is Shipwright included in the game? Why would anyone take it? Do any of you use it in your games? It seems as though the trade skills were added as an afterthought, or weren't fleshed out like Tech-Use, which seems to overlap most (if not all) of the skills covered by Trade.

Much of the material on trades seems to be copy-pasta from earlier versions of the game - in particular from DH where crafting worked very differently.

Trades are mostly flavor stuff. Sure, a Trade (armorer) might be able to fix busted armor or a broken gun in the field, but things like scrimshawer, cook and the like are pure flavor.

So in Dark Heresy, the trade skills mentioned actually did something? If that is the case, I might have to check them out.

So in Dark Heresy, the trade skills mentioned actually did something? If that is the case, I might have to check them out.

The system for this is in the Inquisitor's Handbook. About the last pages IIRC.

All Trade Skills in all the books are usable in a variety of ways, but depending on circumstance, usage may differ greatly.

With Trade (Shipwright), for example, he could use that to determine likely locations of certain necessary ship functions when infiltrating or attacking an enemy voidship, or determine structural integrity points, and so on.

Trade skills are really just skills for the profession that a character has. Coming up with ways to apply that profession is up to the GM and the players.

When you say "build a ship", maybe elaborate, because, and I cannot stress this enough, ships are slow-builds. Even whole worlds, devoted to the manufacture of a vessel, with the right themed AdMechs and requisite compliments of Servitors take YEARS to craft a "regular" ship; bigger, more impressive things might take decades or a century. A little guncutter of a thing, something to escape the atmosphere might be one thing, but a real voidship... in a hurry or not, they'd die of old age before the Admech could build it, to say nothing of themselves. The fluff seems to say, anyway.

Which is why I've made the decision to limiting them to a shuttle or lander, as opposed to a voidship, detailed in my second post of this thread. I allowed the player to take shipwright in the interest (poorly judged, I may now say) of throwing him a bone for being a good sport and being a plot device for a mission.

They will be entering a shelled out city of a Dominate planet that they have a lot of leave time and garrison duty on; a city with a spaceport and an old hangar with a couple beat up Aquila landers nobody has paid much attention to in a while. This will give them the opportunity to use Shipwright as well as a vehicle to mostly call their own. How they end up using it (or learning how to, for that matter) will be an interesting sight.

I am well aware of the scale of even the smallest voidships in canon and lore, I am not really using this to transition my squad of guardsmen into wannabe Rogue Traders. It obviously would be impossible given the nature of the two games, not to mention the lore involved.

My main question now is exactly what have other people used Shipwright for. Using the search function on this forum has left me wanting, as it seems I might be the only one to come to this board with this issue.

Apologies, I was reading fast/typing before work. It might cover knowledge of the mechanics, like what you'd need to know to sell the beast to someone, or to cover minor repairs/maintenance. Otherwise, I'd think it's ship design, but the Imperium doesn't design, so much as repurpose; invention is heresy, apparently (how dare you try to do better than the Omnissiah!)

That's a very good point about the inventions. A shipwright is literally a ship builder; so it would be knowledge of the systems, repair process, and the actual building of Imperial ships - not the design of them. I will have to use all that in the game.

Adding my two thrones worth...

Ships are indeed slow builds. If I'm remembering the old Battlefleet Gothic fluff correctly, the very best Imperial worlds (i.e. Forge Worlds with massive orbital docks and many, many spacedocks for building new hulls) can turn out an escort class ship in a year or so... Cruisers take about a decade. Battleships can take a century or three. They also can have 20 - 30 ships under construction at any one time. One of the reasons the Imperial navy uses the Lunar as its main ship of the line is that the Lunar is a relatively easy build and can be built by planets that otherwise couldn't make a capital ship.

As for shipbuilding skill, that would help with repairing a ship as well as moving about. (Where's the plasma generatorium? Where's the nearest shuttle bay? These questions can be important in combat, and the guy who knows how to build ships should have a much easier time figuring out the answer.)

Cheers,

- V.

Thanks for all the assistance. I think I will direct him more towards using it as a basis for ship layout knowledge, as well as general repairs.

That being said, are there any players out there that use Trade skills besides armorer or chemyst?? I would be interested to see what sort of uses players and GMs have for Scrimshawer or Remembrancer, or the other more vague skills.

Hi, this is my first post though I've lurked for quite a while on the forum. I GM an Only War game with a group of friends, and recently, I made the mistake of allowing a player to take the trade skill "shipwright". Most of the trade skills are applicable to the game, and are indeed useful. However, he and the other players want to build a ship to escape the planet they are on. I have found nothing in the rules that covers something like this, despite the skill being present in the game. Any suggestions?

They might be able to repair a downed shuttle, dropship or other aeronautica to get into orbit. But building a warp capable ship - or even repairing one - is well beyond the realm of what Trade (Shipwright) gets the player.

Suggestion? Laugh and say "no."

NASA some of the most forward thinking creative brilliant minds in an age of invention take months and years planning building and executing space flights with billions of dollars behind them and they still make the occassional tragic error.

Your PCs are trying to build a shuttle during a warzone in a hanger with no testing facilities and no sure supply line based on one random guardsman having once read the 'Big Book of Space Craft'......

His Trade (Shipwright) skill can be put to good use telling him why it won't work.

Put it another way Scholastic Lore (Adeptus Astartes) doesn't allow you to raise a Space Marine Chapter.

In terms of using the Trade skills, it can be useful for intelligence gathering. say the PCs are involved in a mission to attack Naval yards belonging to the enemy. The characters see lots of charts of the cross sections of ships. Nothing odd about that. However Trade (Shipwright) might allow the PC to realise the ships are being refitted with extra armour or the hanger bays are being re-jigged to allow more gun batteries etc. Obviously all of this would be useful information for the PCs.

Trade skills are excellent alternative or complement to Disguise as well. Disguise is all about concealing your identity but the appropriate Trade skill can effectively allow you to bluff.

I think Trade also allows for flair and application.

So for example Chemistry might allow toxins to be produced Trade (Cook) would mean their application in food would be hidden.

Tech Use might tell you how how a macro battery cannon works Trade (Ship Wright) would give you an idea of conventional wisom of where to deploy that weapon on a ship.

Literacy might allow you to write a report explaining what happend Trade (Story Teller) might twist the facts to make the squad look better.