Hey guys,

The Explorator in my group is always tinkering with different equipment, trying to upgrade it's quality. That's fairly okay with me; since he enjoys doing it and the others wouldn't mind having better gear.

But the thing is...are there rules for that kinda stuff or do I have to houserule it?

For now I thought about having him roll Trade (Armourer) with a modification based on the quality he wants to reach: -10 for Good, -30 for Best. But how many successes? How much time should it cost? Do you think it'll break the game if I allow him to upgrade starship components?

The rules for it are somewhere in the DH books. It's limited to one degree of upgrades, so you can upgrade poor to common, common to good, or good to best. There's no cost. Money is no object in RT. Starship components should be ok, just keep in mind that it takes weeks and that piece of equipment is probably offline in the meantime. Sucks going into combat with your shields borked due to "upgrades."

Weeks? I'd assume months for a starship component, your talking about upgrading something at least the size of an office building. Depending on the complexity and initial quality of the item in question I've also required previous experience with a superior quality item or plans. It depends if 'better' involved superior machining/materials or actually reworking the operating structure.

I agree with your assessment, but given that it takes weeks to install something the size of an office building, it just didn't make sense to make it take longer to simply tweak it.

It makes perfect sense to me - think of modern day and why so many things are replaced rather than repaired or updated. Upgrading something after it's made is often more work and more expensive than just making a higher quality one in the first place.

For example, take a car, like a well used 1960's mustang. You want to get more speed out of the engine. You could tune the ever-living crap out of the engine, clean everything up, replace a few choice parts with better material options, etc. Or you could unbolt it from the cassis and put a 2014 mustang engine in and gain 200 horsepower a lot quicker.

I like referring to [Dark Heresy - The Inquisitor's Handbook] for all of my crafting needs. While considerably outdated, this book has the most detailed crafting rules I've seen. Upping an existing piece of equipment's quality can be as easy as tailoring a standard-issue carapace chestplate to more properly fit an individual. Narratively, this could be hammering out the armour's shape to accomodate for a character's large girth, muscles, or even skinniness. A gun could have its weight redistributed to make it more comfortable for a character to hold (separate from a Custom Grip). The possibilities are endless.

I am not confident enough to throw out a ruling on any item bigger than personnel-scale, though.