Hi Rogue Trader fans!

This week I have another short-but-sweet designer diary featuring the second preview for the Rogue Trader core rulebook . This time, the preview focuses on three pages from Chapter VIII: Starships—enjoy!

Sounds intresting looking forward to seeing what my group can produce. Some people in my group have been looking forward to creating unique looking ships.

Looking good. Can't wait to get my hands on it.

Well, I can't wait till I can give my acolytes a small frigate or so.

But first I need ascension.....and Rogue Trader...Gni

Thoug I do have one quick quistion, I always imagened these ships, including the frigates to have a few rowes of broadside guns besides one or two "hardpoints".
Though these might cost extra SP and cost you precious cargo-space...

Cool. But what about Destroyers (or are these covered by the Frigates as they're both Escorts)? Or heavier ships such as Heavy Cruisers and Battle Cruisers (ignoring the Battleships for a moment), will they be covered in future releases? Actually, Destroyers would be more useful, but still it looks good (so far; we're watching you)...

Until now I've been happy with everything I've seen about Rogue Trader. I was pretty pumped when I read this update and then I got to the accelerations.

Now admittedly Warhammer fiction isn't full of a lot of easily calculatable speeds and acceleration for ships so the number of examples is limited, but there are some and the majority indicate double and triple digit gravities of acceleration ( Flight of the Eisenstien has one of the best examples).

So seeing ship acceleration being measured in single digit gravities didn't make me a happy camper.

Now I realize that I'm seeing only part of the picture on this and I also realize that even if this does turn out to be as bad as it looks its a error that is fairly easy to deal with, but it bothers me.

MDMann said:

My knowledge of naval catagories is hazy but a frigate is smaller then a cruiser class vessel if I remember correctly. After that you're up to capital ships. Of course, Battlefleet Gothic may be using a different system I'm not familiar with in which case everything I just said is completely moot.

Awesome! I'm more and more interested in the Rogue Trader. At first it seemed less interesting than Dark Heresy, but now with these ships the 'sandbox' feeling of this game has caught me. I have great hopes in you, FFG!

Still, there is one odd thing. Jericho class pilgrim vessel is described as huge and hulking at 2,25 km and 9 megatonnes, while Vagabond class merchant vessel is said to be small and agile with 2 km and 8 megatonnes. I hope that the Jericho gets upgraded for the final release to some more formidable size. Also the acceleration rates seem a bit puny. I understand that it's always hard to come up with numbers for 40k, but at least go over the top rather than too small, so that we don't end with things like 2 million Guardsmen defending Armageddon from Waaagh! or population of Scintilla being 25 billion for a world with a continent-spanning hive.

Battle Cruisers? Battleships? I hope not. This is Rogue Trader, not Battlefleet Gothic. Just being able to travel the stars as you please is massively valuable in the Imperium, let alone to do so in ships that take decades to build from Emperor-knows how many mines, factorum and processing plants. I'm quite happy with what I've seen thus far, though I am curious about the rest of the components

Santiago said:

THey probably do, it's just that the broadside guns of Imperial vessels are usually considered to be small ordinance (firing dumb-fire torpedoes, artillery pieces and lascannons etc. etc.), meant primarily to use at really close range. While the hardpoints are meant for the big guns (Lance batteries etc.)

I'm wondering if my current game is going to turn into two seperate games, or if we play RT with Dark Heresy characters. No reason why I cant base the campaign around an Inquisitors ship- perhaps shadowing a Rogue Trader. I do know I can hardly wait for the release! Guess I'll play it by ear as to what my players are interested in.

Psion said:

Battlefleet Gothic has only a few classes of Imperial ships: Destroyers, Frigates (all considered Escorts), Light Cruisers, Cruisers, Battlecruisers and Battleships (all Capital Ships).

The Chaos forces are similar but they have Raiders instead of Frigates, no Light Cruisers and have Heavy Cruisers in place of Battlecruisers; they also have a new class Grand Cruiser between Heavy Cruisers and Battleships.

DW

Traveller61 said:

Thank you, although that being said I second Tullio's counterpoint. This is (more often then note) just a captain and his ship trying to improve his wealth and reputation, not some admiral leading legions of ships into battle.

So, I did some further studying:

Detection:
Ships senses, add to some percentile rolls, equals Skill Test

Manouverablity:
Added or subtracted from Pilot (Space Craft) skill test

Armour:
Armour Point against Large Weapons (I doubt a Las Pistol would penetrate a hull)

Turret Rating:
Would these be the Broadside weapons and weapons used against small craft, fighters/bombers?

Any thoughts?

Cynical Cat said:

Well the larger ones the acceleration value is the maximum sustainable acceleration so I would guess that things like all ahead full maneuvers would be able to produce much higher accelerations. What was the Flight of the Eisenstien value again because I cant remember. Most of the hulls so far are actually cargo vessels and so not designed for rapid acceleration and deceleration.

@ MDMann - I would guess that maybe destroyers like the cobra are too given over to weapons to be an effective cargo ship and so may not have been included. Of course they may appear in a future supliment, I can easily imagine the Rogue Trader version of the Inquisitors Handbook containing loads of different hull types. Maybe the main rulebook only contains a few of each type on the basis that more will be supplied in subsequent books.

I really like the look of this and am glad for some more solid crew numbers, a whole bunch of people in my area have just gotten in to Gothic and it is great fun to play. I might need to buy some Imperial ships to use for this.

Kaihlik

I don not think they have shown us all ships, so the Cobra might still be in there...

I've just downloaded the preview, and it makes me really happy to see where things are going, I'm looking forward to integrating Rogue Trader stuff in with Dark Heresy, as well as hopefully launching brave boarding actions, power cutlass in hand!

I also can't express how awesome the artwork is I've seen so far, I'm a sucker for pretty pictures, particularly of space craft.

Rules wise, I'm hesitant to comment without full context for obvious reasons, but my first thought after a quick look was where are the shields ?

It might be the BFGer in me talking here, but shields are rather important, even for normal activity in space. I'm also left wondering about how the weapons capacity system is going to work. The Sword Class has two dorsal hardpoints, which the picture on the page shows is fairly...um, not exactly accurate, but I've noticed no actual axial or broadside notations, so I'm wondering is this some sort of catchall hardpoint , or are generic broadside armaments considered "as standard" ?

I'd also have to agree that the acceleration figures made me wince a little, its very difficult to accelerate up to 75% of lightspeed, or indeed slow down from such a speed, in any useful time frame when you've got a measly 4.5 gees to play with. (I'm assumign this was the Flight of the Eisenstein number someone referenced , since I can't think of anything else from the novel)

In fact, generally speaking, combat velocities in 40k fiction tend change rapidly enough that we are looking at thousands of gees to rationalise it.

Mass is also an issue, 6 million tonnes sounds a lot, until you are talking about a 1.5km long starship, made up of dense, heavy armour plating and bulkheads. Given that 40k starships appear to propel themselves by belching out vast plumes of accelerated plasma (i.e. a giant reaction engine), there is a requirement for a significant mass of fuel as well!

@ Kaihlik: I could see that. A supplement detailing ships or the Imperial Navy could cover Cobra Destroyers.

@ Thrudd: The masses could be unloaded (including fuel). Fuel (loaded or not) could be treated seperately from cargo capicity too. We'll see.

Kaihlik said:

Flight of the Eisenstien doesn't directly produce a number, but it has a very handy example of having a mobile space fortrress undergo a velocity change of .75C over the distance between Earth and Pluto. Now the exact distance is unknown (because the alignment of Earth and Pluto isn't), so we have a range of comparatively close numbers between maximum and minimum distance (because the biggest number by far is getting from Pluto to the inner system). The numbers are in hundreds of gees. To repeat, that's a space fortress pulling those gees, not a destroyer.

And it's not a outlyer. Execution Hour has a hundred plus gee acceleration for the Planet Killer of all things, Sabbat Martyr has ships crossing multiple AUs fairly quickly and still being able to maneuver (which would require massive accelerations), there's instances in the Grey Knights books as ships crossing systems in hours and pulling into orbit (again massive accelerations required to brake into orbit against those speeds), and so on.

As for the speeds of ships in the older fluff sublight travel is a lot slower - in Imperial Armour III it takes 3 days to reach the system's sun (approx 1AU); in Execution Hour it takes Imperial ships days to reach the safe distance for warp entry.

With so much contradictory information out there it will be very interesting to see what the RT figures are.

DW

I'm steering well clear of this "G-acceleration" debate, as my scientific skills are so feeble that I'm ill placed to comment.

However, this preview is really really exciting, in my view. FFG have used a similar system for their ship design to White Wolf's Chantry design for Mage: the Ascension and FASA's magical group design system. I thought they might use a system like this, and I'm pleased to see it executed so elegantly.

First off, it's clear that the vessels we're talking about here are not the same scale as top-level Imperial Battlefleet ships. The Sword class Frigate is the second smallest Imperial fleet vessel mentioned in Battlefleet Gothic, and it's in the medium size range of vessels presented here. (People have already commented on the missing Cobra Destroyer: perhaps it crops up beyond page 3 of this chapter. Personally, I would have thought that it wouldn't make a great rogue trader vessel, as its storage space is probably fairly limited.) This size range and displacement seems absolutely spot on for RPG play: players vessels will be well equipped and powerful, but not able to go toe-to-toe with hardened battlefleets of any race. However, they can dominate primitive worlds, take on pirates, travel the galaxy, transport armies...

Secondly, I love the little details here. I loved Battlefleet Gothic, but the trainspotter in me was always a little disappointed that GW never set out the specific SIZES of Imperial vessels. I was constantly shouted down on Black Libray's forums for mentioning this niggle, on the basis that it was enough to bombastically rave on about how huuuuuge Imperial ships were rather than constrict the fan's imagination. My view was...what's the HARM in presenting this stuff? It's fun, it adds colour and detail...and clearly FFG agree. Though they may now be regretting presenting their views about G-acceleration to all the other trainspotters out there!

I think the size of these vessels has been really well thought out. A lot of effort's been put into this. This is (apart from a couple of contradictory references in BL books, with apologetic clarifications from authors on the BL forums) the first time that anyone has ever attempted to set out the size of Imperial ships. And the scales seem spot on to me: huge, but not so huge as to be ridiculous.

I REALLY like the fact that the Sword Frigate - as I say, one of the smallest vessels in the Imperial fleet - is exactly the same size as a Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer. A sneaky little dig at the Star Wars universe, I reckon: "Anything you can do, we can do better..."

The crew sizes also seem large, but not gigantic. Someone's already pointed out that the crew sizes produce quite a lot of space for each crewman: looking at my BFG Sword class frigate right now, I reckon both the prow and engine compartment would be largely empty, with most of the crew in the central gun chamber and control tower. The "civilian" ships of a rogue trader fleet probably wouldn't be as heavily manned as Battlefleet ships. I base this on the old "Aubrey/Maturin golden age of sail" contrast between the hugely overmanned and crowded royal naval vessels and the comparatively empty whalers and East India Co. ships of the era. Military vessels need a huge crew to be able to operate broadsides in two directions and soak up casualties for the hours a battle may take to win. I think given the design of Imperial ships, the crew sizes presented here would produce a vessel that's extremely crowded in places, but with many echoing corridors, mysterious empty holds and vast cathedral like engine rooms.

Very very good stuff, the most exciting stuff I've seen for this game so far!

It's also possible that the figures for the Gs pulled could be 'gravities of acceleration experienced after inertial dampening'. Of course, if that is the case, we'd have a serious problem trying to find out what the efficiency of the dampers is, and whether that is a (relative) constant across all ships, or whether 'military' drives have more powerful inertiics than 'civilian' drives. I'd be tempted to say (purely for matters of storytelling convenience) that all the ships listed have inertial dampers of roughly equal power, which reduce experienced acceleration to 1/10th of its actual force, and that the numbers given are for sustained thrust.

As for the shields- my guess is that shields are one of the 'essential' components that get fitted after choosing your hull.

I cant even remember that part of Flight of the Eisenstien. I always cringe when the type of examples you gave show up because it always seemed to me to contradict everything I thought I knew about 40k space combat. Of course there is always the problem that Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale , I wish they had put some more concrete numbers in the BFG rulebook because not having any has lead to the situation that because the writers dont know how the ships should be working they improvise and give really contradictory views. The example in Flight of the Eisenstien may have been due to some freaky tech from Mars. Its just too hard to say what is meant to be the true numbers because there is zero consistancy in the fluff.

@Santiago - There is a list of ship classes at the start which doesn't include destroyers which is what a Cobra is, it might fit in the Frigate section but I would have expected to see it before the Sword and not after. They seen to only be giving a couple of hulls from each class of ship so I wouldn't expext to see the cobra as there is already two frigate hulls.

Kaihlik

The concept of player designed ships is a fun one. However, it should have an impact on the type of missions the players can persue. So if you are aiming to include published adventures, I'd imagine it would be good to look a few over before you let the players go off in some random tangent. Or give them an idea of the things that might be useful in upcoming adventures before they spend all their points on weapons and armor and nothing on cargo capacity or crew skill.

The crew skill mechanic looks interesting. I'm wondering how easy that will be to change in play. Will min/maxers go with poorly trained crews, to afford more hardware, then spend time developing the crew during the campaign?

As far as the gees listed for the ships, they seem right to me. Dark Heresy and, by extension I imagine, Rogue Trader subscribe to a more age of sales feel with space travel and, as such, it tends to take weeks and months as opposed to hours and days to get places.

If a ship were to travel from Earth to Pluto, the average distance would be about 39 AU's (all dependent on planetary alignment and all seeing as how these damned rocks never sit still). If a ship were to preform a full acceleration burn for half the trip (19.5 AU's), flip, and then preform a full deceleration burn for the second half (so it actually stops at it's destination as opposed to flying past it at some mind boggling speed), the Jericho Pilgrim Ship will take about 14 days, the Hazeroth Privateer will take about 5 days, and a Planet Killer with an acceleration in the hundreds (we'll go with 200 for this) will take about a day.

Given the feel that DH and, we can assume, RT is going for, the acceleration numbers seem good to me. Perhaps the numbers in BG or other sources were a bit high, especially considering that with such high accelerations, reaching the light-speed barrier would actually be doable assuming that the ship is able to carry more then 6 months worth of fuel for continuous burning.

The gees listed also can't be without dampeners as a few ships pull gees in excess of 5. Without some form of counter measures, the human body can only withstand such pressures for a few seconds before blacking out due to drastic changes in blood pressure.