So the most common ship in EotE is a light freighter. My group has 5 PCs so smaller would not work well. I would like to be able to carry my own ground transport with me from planet to planet. Some things I want from a ground transport is at least one armor a place to mount a weapon and decent speed and handling. I am thinking 3 speed and no negatives for handling. It also needs to hold the entire crew with our gear and fun things we find. Every ground vehicle that I have seen that meets these specs has a silhouette of 3 or more. This is a bit of a problem fitting it into a silhouette 4 ship.

I know the E9 says that it has room for a transport but does not give any details. There is also the ship addition of a docking bay but it has restrictions on silhouette size.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Wayfarer is probably the one you want. If you look in the right places you can find a deck plan for it. It can be modified to be able to hold 2 fighters.

I looked at the Wayfarer. It takes ten people to crew it. We only have five.

reread the description. 1 pilot. 1 copilot. 1 engineer. This is the flight crew and what you need to actually fly the ship.

1 cargomaster - Their job is to supervise securing the cargo. You don't need one in flight and often can be a secondary job. They are not involved in flying the ship. Crew - These are the guys who do the actual loading. Also not actually needed for flying the ship.

So the most common ship in EotE is a light freighter. My group has 5 PCs so smaller would not work well. I would like to be able to carry my own ground transport with me from planet to planet. Some things I want from a ground transport is at least one armor a place to mount a weapon and decent speed and handling. I am thinking 3 speed and no negatives for handling. It also needs to hold the entire crew with our gear and fun things we find. Every ground vehicle that I have seen that meets these specs has a silhouette of 3 or more. This is a bit of a problem fitting it into a silhouette 4 ship.

Let’s look at the list at http://swrpg.viluppo.net/transportation/vehicles/?order_by=silhoutte&flattened=true.

The Arrow-7 Airspeeder, Customized (Jewel of Yavin) is Sil 2, handling 0, 2 hard points, 1 crew and up to six passengers, but it doesn’t have any armor. I guess you could replace one of the hard points with armor, though.

The Jawa Salvage Skiff is worse, because it’s slower, has worse handling, and fewer hard points.

The MSP100 Pteropter Hover Pod (Onslaught at Arda 1) is handling -1, 3 crew (pilot plus two gunners), 3 passengers, but doesn’t have much cargo capacity.

The Ord Radama Landspeeder (Onslaught at Arda 1) is handling -1, no armor, no built-in weapons, only one hard point, but it can carry up to 6 passengers and 30 encumbrance of cargo.

The Panther Police Interceptor (Far Horizons) doesn’t have any armor and can only carry 3 passengers, but it does carry up to 20 encumbrance of cargo, and with 3 hard points you might be able to modify it to carry more passengers and have armor and have a weapon. Or the Civilian variant (which is not detailed in any of the books that I know of) might be a better starting point.

For the criteria you specified, the Guardian 5E Personal Defense Speeder and the Invader AA-9 Assault Airspeeder (both from Dangerous Covenants) are better matches, although they are Sil 3.

I know the E9 says that it has room for a transport but does not give any details. There is also the ship addition of a docking bay but it has restrictions on silhouette size.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So, the RAW say that you can only add a hangar bay to a ship that is Sil 5 or larger. And with the appropriate mods, you can carry a fair number of Sil 3 vehicles in that Sil 5 ship, although you can’t carry anything larger than -2 Silhouette below the ship size.

Note that some Sil 4 freighters have been modified to dock and fly with smaller vehicles, although they’re not contained within a hangar bay. Both the YT-1300 Millennium Falcon and the VCX-100 Ghost have been modified to carry smaller vehicles, and so you could presumably make similar mods to other Sil 4 ships.

That said, there are some very nice Sil 5 freighters out there, and that would allow you to carry your choice of Sil 3 vehicles inside the hangar bay of your Sil 5 ship.

I looked at the Wayfarer. It takes ten people to crew it. We only have five.

Note that you can always pick up NPC crew members, or droids. You don’t have to restrict yourself to using only PCs.

Oh, and as for handling — you can always get upgrades there, too. Again, you’d have to take up hard points to do it, but with modifications you can increase both speed and handling, as well as armor and weapons.

So, depending on how you’re willing to outfit the vehicle, you may have more options than I mentioned.

I looked at the Wayfarer. It takes ten people to crew it. We only have five.

Note that you can always pick up NPC crew members, or droids. You don’t have to restrict yourself to using only PCs.

And 7 of those crew are for handling Cargo as i said. You could hire day laborers to do the loading and unloading. They are not involved in the actual flying. Think of it like how Semi trucks work. It takes several guys to load and unload one and have them running at peak efficiency. But for the driving you only really need one guy.

Oh, and as for handling — you can always get upgrades there, too. Again, you’d have to take up hard points to do it, but with modifications you can increase both speed and handling, as well as armor and weapons.

So, depending on how you’re willing to outfit the vehicle, you may have more options than I mentioned.

Um I just looked, what mod increases handling?

I'd go with the E-9 Explorer. It's got a big cargo bay. I look at it as something like the Firefly class, which has that big cargo hold which can carry their "mule" transport as well as all its cargo.

The FFG version of the E-9 doesn't have a large cargo bay (EC 60).

EC 60?

Um I just looked, what mod increases handling?

For vehicles, Jewel of Yavin introduced a number of new attachments/modifications, one of which is "Maneuvering Thrusters". So far as I can tell, this is applicable only to atmospheric vehicles of Sil 3 or smaller, and not to space ships, etc….

But check out JoY for a number of vehicle-specific attachments/modifications.

I'll have to look at JoY, as far as freighters are concerned all freighters at sil 5 are at handling -1 through -3 so unless you build one of your own I don't think you will get what you are looking for. I suggest the wayfarer like Daeglan stated, its a good looking ship with a hanger basically automatically and JoY may be able to help with handling.

I'll have to look at JoY, as far as freighters are concerned all freighters at sil 5 are at handling -1 through -3 so unless you build one of your own I don't think you will get what you are looking for. I suggest the wayfarer like Daeglan stated, its a good looking ship with a hanger basically automatically and JoY may be able to help with handling.

When I talked about JoY, I was specifically talking about just the vehicle attachments & modifications. I wasn’t suggesting that you necessarily have to go with the ships from JoY, because they may or may not be any better than what you can get elsewhere.

Figured you were talking about mods and attachments, I have Oggdug's char builder and waas looking at all of the freighter's at sil 5 when i said what i said above.

Figured you were talking about mods and attachments, I have Oggdug's char builder and waas looking at all of the freighter's at sil 5 when i said what i said above.

Whereas I was thinking only about the attachments & mods to the Sil 2 & 3 speeders.

If you want a Sil 5 ship with handling 0, check out the Marauder Class Corvette at http://swrpg.viluppo.net/transportation/starships/448/. Of course, it does require a lot of crew, so you’d either need a lot of droids or some other solution.

As written, the vehicle mods and attachments in JoY can’t be applied to larger ships, but your GM could certainly allow it. There are a number of Sil 5 freighters that could potentially be modified to suit your parameters, and with low crew requirements.

The description of the Explorer E-9 in the book and the map I found online seemed to support the idea that it would have a cargo bay big enough to carry some kind of speeder at least, as well as some cargo. Why have a "loadmaster" position if you don't have room for cargo? I haven't looked specifically at the encumbrance in a while, but in our campaign that value doesn't really come up.

The description of the Explorer E-9 in the book and the map I found online seemed to support the idea that it would have a cargo bay big enough to carry some kind of speeder at least, as well as some cargo. Why have a "loadmaster" position if you don't have room for cargo? I haven't looked specifically at the encumbrance in a while, but in our campaign that value doesn't really come up.

What I read was "space enough for a small repulsor lift vehicle" sounds like one speeder bike to me.

The description of the Explorer E-9 in the book and the map I found online seemed to support the idea that it would have a cargo bay big enough to carry some kind of speeder at least, as well as some cargo. Why have a "loadmaster" position if you don't have room for cargo? I haven't looked specifically at the encumbrance in a while, but in our campaign that value doesn't really come up.

What I read was "space enough for a small repulsor lift vehicle" sounds like one speeder bike to me.

Yeah, I just had another look at the long description of the ship, and I hadn't quite been thinking of it the same way. We've been playing for a while and I hadn't re-read that description so I had a different image in my head.

Confusing though, it says the Explorer has 3 levels for cargo.