I'm planning on having my PCs fly into a nebula to get to a little base that's hidden inside. The nebula is full of electrical storms that will damage and mess with the ship. As well, visibility and sensors will be limited while inside of the nebula.

I'm looking for ideas on some check worthy events that can happen during this time. I'd like to avoid a simple piloting check that just maps to damage or something like that. I'd like to at least give the illusion of control to the players. Some kind of decision making or problem solving would be preferred.

Any suggestions?

The electrical storms could play havoc with the guidance systems, and knock them out. So, if you want to go anywhere, you would have to fly manually using good old Mark 2 Eyeballs. But then the gas outside could be really dense and totally obscure your vision, so that you really are flying completely blindly.

Maybe the electrical storms could knock out a different random system each round — life support, weapons, shields, artificial gravity, lighting, propulsion, computers, and/or whatever else you can think of. Just as one system is repaired, another is taken out. And systems that aren’t repaired immediately, if they should get hit again, maybe they’re really seriously damaged on the second hit? So even if you don’t need weapons right now, you really do need to keep repairing them every time they get taken out, if you ever want to have weapons work again.

Or maybe the electrical storms don’t always just take down systems, maybe they make them act weird? What if all the toilets on the ship suddenly reversed the direction of their flow, so that they started pumping sewage out of the bilge, back into the rest of the ship? What if the air refreshers started dumping accumulated toxins back into the air?

Or maybe the life support systems are designed to also make atmospheres for exotic species, on demand? So, in one room the system is trying to make it suitable for a Kel Dor to live there without their special breath masks but which would then be toxic to humans and many other less-exotic species, and then maybe some other room is being flooded and made suitable for an underwater-only species? What if that other room had a lot of electronics in it that was sensitive to becoming wet?

Maybe there are a lot of Mynocks who live in this nebula, and further sap the electrical power of the ship systems.

Maybe there are other space-based lifeforms out there who could cause problems. Ever run into a space whale while flying through a nebula? What if you hit a space whale baby, just how pissed would the space whale momma be?

If you do have to defend yourself while you’re in the nebula, what happens to the fuel-heavy gases when you fire into them? Do they ignite and maybe blow up your entire ship? Are there maybe some weapons you could use safely to defend yourself and not others, but do you know which types of weapons are safe to use where?

What about space pirates that like to hide inside the nebula? Maybe they’ve got some special navigation gear that lets them see what is where, and maybe they have some special insulation against the electrical storms, so that none of their systems get damaged while they’re inside?

There’s lots of things I can imagine happening.

Dont forget nebula's are not just gas... They are actually dense particulate matter.. From Billions of miles away we see them as giant gas clouds, but if we were in one.. there might be massive asteroids of forming matter simply lingering within the nebula.

A place where sensors don't work well is a great place to find a mysteriously-abandoned and long-missing ship.

Just as a side note for curiosity if you want. Nebulas in reality are very very sparse. If you would be inside one with your starship it won't oppose any difficulty for vision, radars or anything similar.

Although nebulas are between 100 and 10000 times more dense than interstellar medium, nebulas are around 10000000000000000 less dense than earth atmospheric air! And just to have another idea to compare with, clouds on the sky have a density between 2 and 100 times more dense than atmospheric air.

Luckily for you SW is space fantasy and not sci-fi.

Have fun!

Just as a side note for curiosity if you want. Nebulas in reality are very very sparse. If you would be inside one with your starship it won't oppose any difficulty for vision, radars or anything similar.

I like your explanation here and of course I won't argue it. If we wanted to provide the same sort of setting with our science hats on, would a protoplanetary cloud - the likes of which are around a newly-formed star - be a sufficiently violent and sensor-obscuring setting? Or would we still be motes in the cosmic medium?

You know, you should get a peek at Stay On Target. I havent read that section yet, but they had a bit about dog-fighting in shipyards and asteroid fields - and they specifically call out Nebulas. It may not be exactly what you want, but it might have a couple of good ideas in it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have a look if I get a copy of it.