with the navigator being so vital to the survival of the whole ship, how can you justify risking bringing him down on a planet? I mean, if he dies, the whole ship dies.

If a Navigator dies the ship doesn’t die, they just have to make charted jumps.

One of the concepts to handle a player navigator is the he is one of several navigators on board and is going out to be the off ship eyes of the primary navigator who never leaves his sanctum.

well I'm just going from the last lines of the Navigator Career page: for should a vessel lose its Navigator beyond the fringes, any such vessel, and all who serve aboard her, is surely lost.

sinkarna said:

Clearly this is hyperbolic and self serving nonsense perpetuated by the Navigator Houses to keep the shipping lanes firmly in their inbred, mutated grip!

sinkarna said:

It is explained in the disgner diary about Navigators. In short it says that Rogue Traders have special arrengments with the navigator houses so they get more than one Navigator (and "Master" and his/her novices) so you could play the old one wanting some adventure and leaving the young ones to bring the ship safely home if something happened or you could play one of the younf adventurous ones following the Rogue Trader and lets the old one safely aboard the ship.

"He who controls the spice, controls the universe."

In many cases, ships have navigator choirs. Watch for that PC glow and prepare a back-up plan.

I don't have a specific reference from inside the book on hand at the moment, but at GenCon, Ross explained that Navigators (and Astropaths) were assumed to be present in the plural on every RT ship. You play the lead or most plot-relevant one.

From what i understand (read in a design diary i belive) a player navigator is just one of several navigators on the ship, since going into uncharted space is dangerous you dont want to have only one navigator in case he/she is killed. Same goes for the other classes except the RT i would belive. Its just that the other secondry characters wouldnt be hero's they would be the same 'level' as the ships other crew.

sinkarna said:

Same reasoning was used for Captain Kirk. That's why Picard was such a wuss, he rarely risked his neck on Away Missions.

And what if there is no player Navigator? So you always are using the Navigation Choir? Worst case, the players decide to take on an Incompetent crew to save Ship Points.

Which means your Navigator has a 20% skill. Reading over the Navigating the Warp section, that sounds like the ship will probably never get anywhere. If the players take the default 30% skilled crew, it's not much better.

This is one of the reasons I really wished they had provided for a more Flyfire sized ship. I'm half toying with having the PC be the redshirts. Sort of a play on the Explorer Corp from Expendable. In Expendable the Explorers are people who are physically deformed, or just plain odd who are trained to land on other planets and determine if the planet is safe. They are purposely selected for their deformities, or oddness as studies showed that the deaths of such people didn't impart morale at much....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expendable

Good preview on google docs.

http://books.google.com/books?id=l0eEXoI55F4C&dq=expendable+James+Alan+Gardner&source=gbs_navlinks_s

PS- There isn't a Navigation "Choir". You are thinking astropaths. There are just backup Navigators. As far a warp travel it's not that bad. If you take shorter hops, and stick to safer travel routes 30% is enough to get you back.....

Maxim C. Gatling said:

yeah but in the end, even if kirk would die, the whole ship could make it back to a starbase no problem, kirk was kinda of as expendable as anyone else. Now if you take the Star Trek logic, it would be like going down on planets with your warp engine.