I feel so honored for these contributions! Like I announced in the first post, my players have now won their mothballed Venator during a Sabacc game. I've more or less taken every piece of advice here and applied it to the game. The players were delighted, and when I showed them the forum posts (briefly, to avoid spoilers!), they were very happy people helped design the ship. Thank you so much everyone! I'll update y'all on how it goes from "Tier 1" and up!

(The Tuma and Hurna Gootha brother, nemoidian used ship dealers, were reaaallly happy to get rid of this ol' piece of junk! They gave 'em all the paperwork, including a list of spare parts the ship was stripped of, and up-to-date "usage" history. If you can call having it sit idle at discreet hyperspace coordinates "usage". Tehehe!)

I've looked into LibrariaNPC's write-up, and made some slight modifications.

It seems all turbolaser batteries (medium or heavy) are twinned, thus Linked 1. Their firing arc also seems to be wider, including Forward and --presuming symetrical design-- Aft too. They are distinctively seem firing all 8 batteries directly ahead during engagements.

I count only 40 point defense cannons on his write-up, divided into 4 groups of 10. According to Wookieepedia, the point defense cannons are either twin laser cannons, or (strangely) turbolasers. Since I didn't want to get into the question of dealing with "point defense turbolasers" (whatever that may mean...), I've rounded to 13 each group of the four groups of 10, addind up to 52 twinned laser cannons.

Is there a profile for Heavy proton torpedoes in the AoR/EotE books I haven't noticed yet?

If anyone is interested, I could upload the XML file for the ship, usable in OggDude's excellent Character Generator. I also have a ****-ton of images, graphics, blueprints related to the Venator and all its likely complements, be they AT-TE, V19 or as weird as SPHA. Most are easy to find on Google, but a few of them are screenshots I've taken from The Clone Wars, especially close-ups of various hangar bays for reference.

Now, time to get some sleep.

OK, I'm very exited by what Ghostofman just posted. I think you got a Triumph on your check! Could you explain the tiers progression a little bit more?

Sure!

You said you wanted a project for the players. Something they could invest credits into. Nothing like a big honking battlecruiser to suck up money.

The players start in the card game (or whatever) you mentioned. Bets get going higher and higher. Finally the other guy drops the deed to a starship on the table.

My little mental backstoy goes kinda like this:

Turns out he is/was the owner of a salvage operation. He bought the Deliverance from the Republic-turned-Empire for pennies under a "salvage and strategic reserve" contract with KDY. He took it, towed it to an orbital yard somewhere, and mothballed it. As KDY (or other customers) needed parts for refits and such to other craft, they came to him and he pulled the parts off the Deliverance, and sold em back for a tidy profit (Mk XII turbolaser capacitors don't grow on trees you know). Now the old ship is teeters on the point of no return. Too much more get's pulled, and the owner will have do a full break down. Doesn't seem that big a deal, until you look at the cost of disposal of all the various hazmat a ship that size has. So now he's shopping around in every way possible to unload the thing while he's still got the profits to retire on. Lucky for the players it's on this side of the point of no return... so if they are willing to invest they can eventually get it working again.

And that's where we see the tiers.

Tier I is the condition of the ship when the players get it. It's less of a what and more of a where. A poor man's space station, and not much else. As the players complete adventures, invest capital, and pass time, the ship get's more and more serviceable. So each tier represents improvements and repairs. After a while, they get to II, now she's still a hulk, but at least she's mobile. So she can be relocated and worked on some more. Maybe they can keep refitting, maybe they decide to turn her into a shadowport... what ever. If they keep up the refit, then next up they get Tier III. She's now a semi-functional combat ship. No threat to a Star Destroyer, but a nasty surprise for a rebel base, or some pirates, or a corporation that hasn't been paying it's taxes. And so on...

Plus, as a former salvage yard queen, there's all kinds of fun to be had. Who knows what "junk" has been stashed in her hanger bays or cargo holds over time. Maybe a spice ring set up a lab in the forward torpedo room. Maybe a failed stealthship prototype is sitting in the main hanger, long forgotten, but hung onto for safe keeping. Maybe a Hutt has quietly refitted the flight bridge to be a safehouse for himself and he suddenly shows up to take residence for a few decades while some Hutt scale heat blows over...

All kinds of fun to be had....

Tiers could be equivalent to Duty ranks, where each party member has a duty to the ship.

I've actually done something similar with Obligation equivalent and an amount of "raw credits", making this the biggest cash sink ever seen.

25     152,500     1      705,000   Tier 1, stationary rustbucket
100    610,000     4    2,185,000   Tier 2, semi-mobile cask-sink
400    2,440,000  16    7,065,000   Tier 3, half-decent heavy carrier
1600   9,760,000  64   26,585,000   Tier 4, fully operational battle station!

First column is the necessary "Obligation equivalent" they must "spend" into the project. It accounts of all sorts of potential favors.

Second column is raw cash, often from the sale of other starships, treasure troves they find, gambling (which they do a lot of), rewards, donations, etc. In fact, most of it comes from selling captured starships on the Black Market. Even a fraction of a freshly-stolen "hot ship" is still quite a few tens of thousands. I didn't want the players to drown in credits with every adventure.

Third column is only for reference, it's the approximate ratio I've used between Tiers, with constants thrown in. A messy formula.

Fourth column is an estimate of how far they are if all this was converted to a credit value (given that a Venator is around 59M in mint condition). I've taken into account that they need to hire a full time quartermaster to manage the everyday economics of the ship's repair, which accounts to the cost reduction he obtains for them (25% off, but he adds his own salary on top).

The whole venture amounts to almost a campaign in and of itself, including adapting the Perlemian Haul adventure to the game, since the player's WILL want to steal that freighter and the repair parts / hypermatter fuel that it ferries. I've planned for them to rent a docking spot on the Kwenn Space station, since it's one of the rare privately owned places that has the equipment to work on a ship the size of a Star Destroyer.

From a grumpy old man perspective:

WEG listed crew, gunners, and skeleton crews. While it made a certain amount of sense, it also limited adventure options. Hard to run a "steal the cruiser" adventure when you need 800 people to make it move.

By comprison, look at Trek tng. The enterprise needed a crew of thousands, but could be crewed by only one person in a pinch. Probably not for more then a day or so before one too many things would blow, and solo combat would be insane. But it allowed for adventures where it was needed.

One other thing to consider? A crew capacity of 37,000 is assuming a round the clock staffing - assuming full shifts, one on duty, two off duty. You could probably get away with a LOT fewer crew members in a pinch, at least for the short term.

More likely two on duty to one off duty, working overlapping 12 hour shifts, and they all probably share the same bunk

More likely two on duty to one off duty, working overlapping 12 hour shifts, and they all probably share the same bunk

Manpower numbers are probably roughly correct. For a fully operational ship you're probably looking at roughly 1/3 of the crew actually on duty at any given time. I suspect there's probably some kind of running cycle of "off duty assignments" like cleaning, minor preventive maintenance, laundry, and so on that require a working hand or two, but minimal brainpower, though some of these positions are probably droid slots too...

Any squids out there care to comment?

To run a ship I agree with Ghostofman. you could get away with a skeleton crew to get the ship running but you'll need more to keep the ship running without overworking people. unless more of the crew are astromechs, i.e. like when anakin and R2 piloted a venator into a trade fed ship.

Piloting isn't running. Particularly if the ship is already fully maintained and running with all it's systems checked out.

Oh! There's a cannon example!

Does anybody else feel the Venator is a bit heavy on fighters (420 available), and really light on Turbolasers (8 Dual HTL, and 2 Dual MTL).