Thats hardly a strong reason, from a Doylisr perspective.. I mean, it provides no fear of failure on the part of the players. They can just cut losses and run with no real genuine consequences.

Id rather the players HAVE to steal a Star Destroyers to achieve some grandiose rescue/attack plan upon which the campaign hinges. That puts dramatic weight to the plan and the decisions.

"Lets just steal **** for giggles" is not my idea of good motivation.

Depends on the groups you run with. I have heard of a few groups that are the Conductors of the Crazy Train. And a GM willing to let it happen.

If that's how your game is rolled, then my perspective is useless. Thats all

Whats to stop you from just capturing a SSD? Or the Death Star?

On 11/12/2015 at 0:06 PM, SolkaTruesilver said:

If that's how your game is rolled, then my perspective is useless. Thats all

Whats to stop you from just capturing a SSD? Or the Death Star?

This would be something my group would try just for the kicks of trying it. If they fail they fail, roll new characters. If they succeed they live and get major kudos from the Alliance. I may just use this as their in with the Alliance again, since they made bad rolls, got captured with the Fleets navigational data on a ship that never got its wipe (they figured out the captain of the MC80 didn't wipe his personal ships computers), and cause not only the fleet to loose a significant portion of it's assets but caused the Battle of Hoth. Lets just say they're on the run from both the Alliance and the Empire.

When you compare the WEG & AoR crew numbers to the rough volumes approved by LFL, they are better than the USN... And the USN is one of the higher automation fleets on the ocean. While ocean ships are not space ships, the fundamental roles are much the same. A handful of maneuver crew, a handful of nav crew, then gunners, engineers, and deck-apes proportional to tonnage.

The low-automation with manual relays is a great tool to prevent a single virus from overtaking the ship. If the engineering computer is "air-gapped" with only manually input crossover in the form of human intelligible strings.... then the nav computer can't readily compromise the engine comp. Even so, such massively slows response times... and doesn't seem to match what we see.

What we see is lots of sensor ops monitoring sensor feeds... and a handful of system supervisors. I expect the battery commanders are also at bridge stations.

On 30.10.2015 at 9:13 AM, Sturn said:

EDIT - HOW TO STEAL A STAR DESTROYER IF THEY REQUIRE MASSIVE CREWS. If you take the WEG numbers as fact, how could you steal one in game? WEG gives 5,000 minimum. So let's say that number comes from a minimal bridge crew tasked with directing the 100's of other ship systems which also have minimal crews each. As in to handle the shields you must have 1 command crew on the bridge to give orders (how much power to each area), but you still have 2 shield crew at each of 200 shield stations around the massive ship plus 1 repair crew per 10 stations making sure they don't break down...421 shield crew minimum. Add up all of the 100's of systems and you end up with the 5,000 minimum number.

The PCs obviously can't recruit enough helpers with the proper know-how to replace the 5,000 minimal crew. So how to do it? Wait until the ship is docked during a maintenance cycle. Imperial Navy law requires a minimal crew at all times, even when not in service. The PCs must sneak aboard disguised as a maintenance crew. They must somehow make it past security measures to the command bridge. They then must defeat the 10-man minimum command crew that is on-duty there. There's only 5 PCs, so they must then decide which stations not to man. Hyperspace, Subspace, Communications, etc. are manned but Shields are not manned so they won't be "on". Then, Deception rolls to convince the other nearly 5,000 crew on other parts of the ship that the maintenance cycle Commander is ordering the Star Destroyer to make a hyperspace jump out-of-system due to some sort of emergency or test run of the newly installed hypercoils?. After they arrive at an empty, out-of-the-way system, they must deal with the 1,000's of crew still aboard. A trip to Life Support to disable sections of the ship containing the crew? Convincing the crew that due to an impending reactor explosion they must head to the escape pods? Rebel starfighter wing shows up from their hiding place and starts picking off hundreds of escape pods for gunnery practice?

On longer operations I kind of agree with you, but I don't think that that you need the minimal crew to for stealing the thing. Doing an emergency hyperjump, changing course and going to ramming speed, this kind of stuff sounds like something which you can directly from the bridge or even engineering. This is not day to day operation, it does not include maintenance, it does not include any combat performance … actually it does not even include any turret based weapon controls, this alone justifies a lot of crewmen, if we assume a gunner, assistant + two technicians, happily ignore the bridge crew and add 3 shifts we are at a crew of 1,440 , just maintain, man and control the weapon systems of the, 24/7. Same for the 144 TIE-Fighter which should at the bare minimum need a crew of around 1300. Which covers already 2,740 of those 5,000 crewman of the minimal crew just for the ship's offensive options.

But neither shifts, nor individual weapon control are a thing when stealing such a ship. Keeping the control against such a larger crew is problem, but making a single jump and flying the ship for a few minutes should not be a problem.

And btw, for our groups last captured victory-class we send in ~1,000 troopers and started to send over crew as well, so I don't see the issue with recruiting enough helpers for the jobs ... or better the rebellion has plenty of those recruits already and over time players will gain into positions of command in AoR to make use of those recruits.

As much as this might not be adding anything, I'd assume that it would be VERY hard to capture a standing Star Destroyer. The ship is massive, with a crew of thousands. Super Star Destroyers, like the Executor, and the Lusankya, had the problem of maintaining more than a skeleton crew, due to their size, and all being in one location, but a "typical" Star Destroyer could do it, not much problem. One thing to think of, the Empire rarely had problems with manpower. The Clones were effective, but one reason Palpatine intended to phase them out, in favor of the stormtroopers we now have, is indoctrination. As the Rebellion proves, there are people who might disagree, possibly violently, with the Emperor's policies, and one of the easiest ways to restrict such outbursts is to take the youngest, best, healthiest young men (and women, but Star Wars, in the past, has been dodgy on that), and train them in the military. They get many of the same perks we might see, serving in the military, and the Empire gets a chance to indoctrinate that generation to believing what it preaches. These people won't oppose their Emperor, even if he tells them to do something monstrous, and even those who are less susceptible to being "molded" are still in a position to be closely monitored, for signs of dissension. In this way, even if you break the faulty image that much of the Empire's military is the stormtrooper corps, which it isn't, you can easily present impressive numbers, and man numerous ships, even at this scale, and also limit the availability, to the Rebellion, of young, able-bodied soldiers.

Also, as I mentioned the Star Destroyer is a behemoth, it has, or can have, "backup stations" for numerous posts. Even if you captured the bridge, which is not likely, if the engineering sector learned of it, they might use one of their jolly rancher badges to lock out the engines, and prevent the ship from going anywhere. With so much space, so many redundant stations, and the sheer quantity of bodies, I wouldn't peg good odds on this, unless you broke into a star pier, say while the vessel was under repairs, and much of the crew was offship, which might allow you to succeed, but only if you get through all of the security checkpoints.

I might very well just be being too overly literal, or a buzz-kill, but even thrill-seeking, I wouldn't want that operation.