Ok my PCs have stolen a ship.

They may want to keep it. What steps do you think they would need to take to make it look like they legitimately own it? How would they do it? How much would fake "papers" for the ship cost?

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

As a general rule this is the sort of thing you should make very, very difficult for your players. Otherwise you risk having your campaign turn into GTA VI: A Galaxy Far, Far Away. Starships are worth a ton of credits, and if stealing them was easy everyone would be doing it.

The sad fact (for your players) is that all starship registrations are kept by the Bureau of Ships and Services (BoSS), a galaxy-spanning independent bureaucracy that keeps track of all ships, owners and captains in the galaxy. Their databases are considered slicer-proof, which means that anyone who wants to tamper with ship records needs someone on the inside. Finding people like this is extremely difficult and cost exorbitant amounts of money.

A cheaper solution would be for them to find out who the captain/owner of the stolen ship is and then manufacture a fake ID in that person's name and have one of the PCs impersonate him. Of course, if the fake ID falls through some day then they're screwed - piracy is a very serious offence.

The BoSS in my interpretation is not really slicer-proof.

They are hard to hack/slice, but they rely on their own system of organisation that is tens of thousands of years old and simply require years of experience to get a hang of.

So manipulation is done easier by bribing a worker/technician there or hiring a rare specialist that does this for a living with years/decades of experience (such people tend to have good contacts to syndicates).

Otherwise you can set up a fake contract of sale and claim ownership. If the previous owner is dead/missing (we know our players) you can get away with that too.

Fly Casual has information on changing or getting forged transponder codes. This would probably be very applicable.

I'd imagine you would have several options.

Cloning an written off or destroyed ship, and claim its been repaired.

Or convincing them that you had legal justification to kill everyone on board (they were pirates honest), then seeing if you can purchase it from them (or whoever has it).

For me, i would allow it if the group did not have a ship to start off with, or were in dire need of a new one. They could then use some of the above examples to make it "legal", and acquire about 10 points worth of obligation. This is something that I would never just let players do themselves. Stealing ships is one thing, and a chop shop to do all the changing of the info is another. Just like here, you have the guys with the knowledge and skills and dare we say, cojones to go steal the ships (cars), and then the guys with the real estate, equipment and and skills to do all the work to change the VIN, or BoSS ID number.

I guess if the Group as a whole wanted a more GTA feel to the game, I guess I could do that for about a 5-6 session campaign. Unlike the video game, I don't do saves and spawn points.

There's an entire section in Fly Casual on just this kind of thing. In short, there's a lot of very difficult Computers and Mechanics checks as well as needing to get physical access to 'secure' data locations in Imperial Customs.

It's truly an entire adventure if the players want to make it rock-solid.

Fly Casual has information on changing or getting forged transponder codes. This would probably be very applicable.

My copy should be arriving via brown truck this afternoon.

I hope they made it difficult to achieve. I would think that you could quickly spoof a legal ShipID to pass a cursory glance, but any kind of closer inspection would reveal that it had been tampered with - unless great quantities of money/obligation had been spent/acquired. It should cost less than a new ship, obviously, otherwise what's the point? But I hope it's more than just a few thousand credits, and obviously you'd have to set up backroom deal with seedy and suspicious underworlders.

I see it like licence plates here in the US. Could I grab a plate from another vehicle and put it on mine? Certainly. Would a passing police officer be suspicious? Hardly. However, if I were illegally parked, and the officer started writing the ticket and the plate came back registered to a white passenger van while sitting on a bright yellow corvette stingray - that would raise flags. Now, if I managed to steal another bright yellow stingray's plates that would get me further, but at some level the jig would be up. (the VINs don't match, for instance).

EDIT (ninja'd!):

This!

As a general rule this is the sort of thing you should make very, very difficult for your players. Otherwise you risk having your campaign turn into GTA VI: A Galaxy Far, Far Away. Starships are worth a ton of credits, and if stealing them was easy everyone would be doing it.

I agree with this. In my games, if the players need a new ship (theirs got destroyed or something) then I don't make a big deal about stealing/acquiring a new one. If they want to keep stealing ships and turn the game into GTA: Starship, then I kindly remind them that anything they do to NPC ships can happen to their ship(s). If they start stealing ships then their ship(s) will start being stolen, along with all of their gear inside.

My players ended up with the Kryat Fang from the beginning adventure. Once they did a mission for the Alliance and the payment was a registration and rework of the ship in the BoSS systems by an Alliance agent inside one of their regional offices. No money, just a re-registration of the ship, and they considered it a fabulous payment.

We sold both of our "acquired" ships to a no-questions-asked chopshop for the money to buy a new(ish) clean, legal, starship. But we also knew it was a set-up kind of situation, not something we'd expect to do on a regular bases. Well, most of us, I think there's one player in our group who continues to think we should freely jack every ship we come across...

We sold both of our "acquired" ships to a no-questions-asked chopshop for the money to buy a new(ish) clean, legal, starship. But we also knew it was a set-up kind of situation, not something we'd expect to do on a regular bases. Well, most of us, I think there's one player in our group who continues to think we should freely jack every ship we come across...

...and then the previous owner came knocking, and justified the party Laywer missing a session in the following legal wrangle...

With the krayt fang from the beginner game my players had baffles put on the engine to alter the transponder, and forged papers to take to the BoSS branch. Cost an easy 10k (from the 50k they got from the reward of exposing Teemo), and the rest was smoothed over by the Criminal organizations on Tatooine who wanted the group gone, especially since they were able to take down Teemo. The rest of their reward money was used as collateral on insurance to get the milk run cargo from Tatooine to the Minos cluster.

Good question:

I ran the beginner game with my players today. They made their own characters and dropped in with the beginner game. They steal the first ship-- off of Trex per the module. I have them a Dynamic Class Freighter instead for plot reasons. It happens to be called the Krayte Fang but a long time ago it was given another name...the Ebon Hawk. They will find out later of course down the road...especially when the disrepair droid is found...T3 M4 and the personality matrix of Hk47

But I'm sure they will want to change the tags from Krayte Fang to their own...most likely legally or illegally.

The Krayt Fang should be registered to Jabba's family so for a hefty obligation I'm sure Jabba could take care of the legal issues. Owing Jabba is usually an adventure in of itself of course if they killed Teemo then Jabba probably will make things worse for the party...

Nici the Specialist is probably one of the few people who can get your ship reregistered with little difficulty he how ever probably charges an arm and a leg for the service likely almost as much as the ship unless of course the pcs do him a favor.