Can anyone give me/us a peek at ship to ship space combat? What weapons do RT ships mostly have Macro cannons and lances?

A good way to get an idea is by looking at the Battle Fleet Gothic main book online. (See specialist games off the GW site.) From what I can tell they are following the 3 basic types of weapon types from BFG:

Batteries- Cheaper with good damage but effected by armor, and shields.

Lances- Pricey with okay damage but good pen.

Ordinance- Pricey, good damage,good pen but effected by turrets. Torps, bombers....

Which is not to say there aren't weapons that don't fit in groups above even in BFG.... I'm personally planning on using boarding torps one way or another.

Bording torpedoes? good but thinking small. I want my ship to have a nova cannon

Talex said:

You are thinking like a player. I'm thinking like a GM. I just like the image of the PCs stuffing themselves in a boarding torp. Or Orks in a can jokes....

Dalnor Surloc said:

true, quit suprising then that i'm my groups GM. Surely the RT or his bridge crew would use a torpedo to bord...they would die....in space...shot to pieces by a turret its abit...un heroic

ECLIPSE1970 said:

In terms of what the book actually contains, there are several kinds of batteries--three macrocannon types (basic shells), a laser battery (long range), and a plasma battery (heavy damage and good criticals). There are also three types of lances, all of which are essentially the same weapon getting progressively scaled up. They have a sidebar titled "What about Torpedoes?" that says more advanced weapons and complicated weapons will be detailed later.

Oh, and there's a xeno-tech macro battery called a Shard Cannon, but I would never, ever take one--they aren't very strong and tend to explode.

EDIT: In response to the bit about Boarding Torpedoes, I would like to mention that even without launch bays, you can fire a hit and run attack with a guncutter.

Okay, because people keep asking (and I can't blame you), here is a more detailed summary of ship combat, without transcribing the whole section.

To start out, you need to understand ship mechanics. When you make your party, you roll or select what trade off between profit factor and ship points you want to start with. You can have more of one, or more of the other.

Then you use ship points to construct your ship. Ships have statistics that can be broken down into a few categories:

• Stats (power and space) that affect how many shiny extras you can put on your ship
• Stats that affect your speed and maneuverability
• Stats that affect how much damage you can take
• A couple misc. stats used for other certain circumstances

You spend the bulk of your ship points on your hull choice. Each hull will determine the base stats for most of the above. Then you spend your power and space to choose the components of your ship. Some components do not cost ship points, some do. Components include weapons. Components can also raise or lower the different ship stats. Many of them will also give you bonuses to certain actions in ship to ship combat, or to Achievement Points. (I will assume you've read the designer diaries, I'm not going to repeat them.) A few give bonuses to other things.

Now you have a ship and are ready for combat.

In ship combat, you basically can either take actions that use the ship, or personal actions, called Extended Actions. Actions using the ship largely fall into either moving or shooting. Moving is important for positioning your weapons, and has some fairly complex rules. In all cases, actions with the ship require a roll usually using a combination of a skill/stat of yours, and a stat of the ship. Extended actions (which I looove!) use a wide variety of skills, and have a wide variety of effects on the combat. They range from reacting to certain events (like say ship damage) to helping lock on with sensors to make weapon shots more effective. And lots in between.

Anyway, so you take your actions, resolve damage whenever one of those actions is shooting a ship weapon.. see what has happened to ship as a result, and move on to the next turn. A turn in ship combat is ~ 30 minutes.

Those are at least the broad strokes. Hope it answered more questions than it raised.

I'll reserve judgement until I've seen the thing but BFG is exactly what I didn't want it to be like. BFG is way too abstract.

I understand that BFG needs to be, as you'd have dozens of ships on a side, but for me (and everyone I know who's played BFG and refuses to play it again) the abstractness is less than satisfying. Sure, it's sex. She looks pretty, but it's straight up and down missionary position and no foreplay with the goal of finishing in under 5 min.

I was hoping they'd put more Warhammer 40k:Rogue Trader into it...and maybe they did. Like I said, I haven't seen the thing.

One question: Can a player pilot a fighter?

Maxim C. Gatling said:

There aren't rules for fighter to fighter combat, no. And with the scale of ship combat I'd assume the stance is that one fighter cannot reasonably harm a ship of the scale the combat system was designed for.

That said, we know a lot of stuff had to be pulled out for space. I am highly expecting to see future supplements with more components and more extended actions. I think it's pretty likely we'll see groups of fighters as a component in the future, with PC's able to take the extended action of leading a team of fighters. Even if not, one could very easily make a house rule for it based on the house rules for Hit and Run boarding actions.

Hmm... Well, sure a single Fighter wouldn't be much good against Capital Ships, but smaller Frigates, Gunboats etc... And then Fighters are used to shoot down incoming torpedos...

I just hope they don't give them the "Ordinance" treatment BFG did. Using an "Extended Action" to command a Squadron sounds like it might work nicely.

I'm just so depressed...I want my very own copy of the rules...I don't want to wait another month.

First of all...

God bless you aethel and RocketPropelledGrenade you make our waiting interesting!

Second I have two more questions:

1. Is it possible to capture a ship via boarding action and not blow it to bits.

2. Space travel. How fast it is? Do we get any rules for warp travel (speed, time, etc) and not only vague: As fast as you want

Hee, hee! Seeing as enemy ships are "treasure" in this game, let's hope so.

As to the second question, I'm curious myself. There was a big long forum discussion on just that topic on the DH forum.

Cat that Walked by Himself said:

Yes and Yes.

1. Most of the results from ship combat will lead to disabling, not destroying.

2. There are some pretty extensive rules for space travel (actually mainly around the rolls a Navigator has to make.. it's a tough job!) but it does all hinge on a chart with sample travel times for different distances. The chart still has some pretty wide ranges of base travel time, but it's not quite "Serenity travels at the speed of the story" anymore.

praise the emperor!

Praise His Name!

...what is the Emperor's name, anyway?

Maxim C. Gatling said:

I dunno, but according to Warrior Coven , Eldrad Ulthran does.

aethel said:

He douse? i declair a WITCH HUNT!

Cat that Walked by Himself said:

As was already said, you don't usually destroy a ship when you beat it. However, if you drop it through hull damage, it will get systems screwed up, and be hard to repair. And that's assuming you've got the usual destruction result--hulked. There's a 2 in 10 chance of plasma drive explosion, and a 1 in 10 chance the warp drive will implode, ripping a hole in reality.

But wait! There's good news! If you succeed at boarding an enemy ship, you can opt scythe through their crew population and morale (increments of 1d5 points each), or set charges and blow up hull integrity (increments of 1 hull damage each, which inflicts crew and morale loss at a 1-1 ratio as normal). Then, the losing side rolls a test on their current Morale, and the crew surrenders if they fail . That means a skilled pilot and a scary boarding force can capture completely undamaged ships!

I've seen people in a frigate capture a mildly wounded cruiser, with the help of some luck and good strategic thinking.

When reading the descriptions of ship classes it seems like raider/destroyers are one size/class of warship and frigates are the next size/class up. However when looking at the hulls in the ship building section, frigates are the same size as as raiders (Each has 1 hull 1.5 km and 1 hull 1.6km) and have the same number of weapon slots.

Granted both of each model of frigate's weapon slots are dorsal meaning frigates have stronger broadside potential than the raiders' 1 prow, 1 dorsal, but it also means raiders can mount lances and frigates cannot. (Lances can only be mounted in prow slots)

As frigates are described as the heavily armed mid-ground between raiders and ships of the line this seems a little odd to me.

Have I missed something again?

Well, there is the fact that lances do not automatically equal combat superiority. Frigates have a lot of other advantages, and Raiders are built solely around hitting you as hard as possible before you make them explode.

However, the Quick Start ship is a frigate with a lance, courtesy of the unstatted Firestorm-class. You can derive its statistics from backwards engineering it, or wait for me to do it and post them after breakfast.

Well this is all interesting, seeing as I was going to use BFG models since my players are incompetent with their imaginations to keep track of combat. I am a huge huge huge fan of BFG so.... This sounds a bit easy for me to visualize all the mechanics as they are similliar by the look of it.

Okay, the FIrestorm's stats are:

Speed 7; Detection +15, Armor 18; Space 40; Maneuverability +20; Hull Integrity 34; Turret Rating 1; SP 40; Weapon Mounts: Prow 1, Dorsal 1

Also, I forget to mention in my previous Raiders v. Frigates comparison that a prow mount is inferior to a dorsal mount in arc of fire (unless you're a cruiser, but that doesn't apply here). Raiders do not have a substantial enough Maneuverability advantage to even out that handy cap, especially when their greater speeds make it harder to turn exactly when you want to*.

And I would greatly remiss in my information if I made it sound like Macrobatteries were outright inferior to lances. Against lightly armored targets, or when directed by a skilled gunner, they can potentially exceed the lances capacity to do damage. And that's not factoring advantages like the Sunsear Laser battery having half again the range of a lance, or the Plasma battery's ability to damage multiple components at once with a critical hit. Don't knock macrobatteries. They're standard weapons for a reason.

Finally, I would like to add to the guy who mentioned BFG miniatures that this is what I am doing as well. Paper and pencil maps, preferably graph paper, are all but required to get the most out of the starship combat system. I'm not saying you can't abstract it--but I find the satisfaction of a devastating broadside is greatly increased when you actually see that you have a broadside facing them.

Rocket, thank you very much for those!

Doc- Frigates also have more space and can hold an engine that produces more power, don't they? That would mean you could have more/stronger components.

I agree with pretty much everything Rocket said about dorsal v. prow mounts, and Aethel is absolutely right about frigates having more space and hull integrity, so therefore bigger engines and bigger guns/defensive components. That pretty much takes care of all my questions except one.

For some reason I thought frigates were a good deal bigger (dimensions-wise, not just space-stat-wise) than raiders. Not light cruiser size or anything, just somewhere between the two. The near identical length and with is still throwing me. (I know it makes no difference to game-mechanics, just seems off to me, but I could be wrong)

RocketPropelledGrenade said:

This is a really neat touch... very Patrick O'Brian! FFG keep citing him as a primary inspiration, but it's nice to see a well designed game mechanism that's been put together to replicate the main intent of Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey: to capture a ship with minimum loss of life on both sides so he could sail it back to port and claim vast amounts of prize money!