Okay.....
So - I was wondering about running a campaign with the players as titan crew.
I have a decent sized group (6 players), so was thinking about starting them in a pair of Warhounds. rather than something bigger
The idea is to throw them into a major ongoing war - I'm thinking versus chaos because that way I can use exact mirror images as well as the weird and wonderful greater daemon engines.
The things I need advice or guidance on are as follows:
Stats
Deathwatch included the Lupus Tempestus - a warhound titan - with stats for all common warhound arm mounted weapons.
Various Black Crusade Tomes Of include greater daemon engines (brass scorpions, subjugators, plague towers)
Deathwatch horde mechanics would seem suitable - except now looking at hordes of chaos marines as well as renegades and with heavy vehicles being the 'elite' analogue (so players might face half a dozen leman russ or land raiders) (a medium-sized horde with bolters would struggle to hurt a titan but should pop the void shields pretty **** easily.
Only War has rules for the baneblade, stormlord and shadowsword (the stormlord's cannon is similar but not identical in stats) - and therefore we have rules for the "dear god what the hell was that" volcano cannon.
However, I don't know if anyone's done any concepts for anything bigger?
Looking at Deathwatch and Only War, broadly vehicles get about 10-15 structural integrity in the RPG per hull point in game, which would put a reaver-class engine at 200-250 structural integrity.
The gatling blaster is essentially 6 battlecannons in a rotary mount - I'm not sure if a straight port of the battlecannon might be a bit weedy for titan engagements, though.
The laser blaster would use the same stats as the twin-linked turbolaser but with an extra barrel - I'd maybe make it semi-auto 2 with twin-linked? Or maybe swap out the warhound's twin-linked for semi-auto 2 to start with, then up it to semi-auto 3 for the reaver's gun?
Careers
Tech-priest is a possibility, but since there are 6 players, my brain says stick with the 'bridge crew' - all the forgeworld engine models show 3 crew per engine - a princeps, moderati and steersman.
I need to figure out how to divvy up tasks between them, and therefore what attributes/stats they're going to need
The princeps is the overall commander, and can take direct control (read: takes over if the crew stunned by criticals). In addition, if there's no tech-priest character, then he's probably managing the void shields through the machine spirit. Finally, he's going to be able to support the other crew - assisting on a test, essentially.
The Steersman supposedly does piloting (and hence evasive driving reactions) and navigation. The latter should be a big deal because frankly when you're the size of a titan - anything short of a starport landing field is either rough terrain, an enclosed space, collapsing around you as you move, or all of the above.
The Moderati does weapons and sensors.
Which in practice means that in a straight shoot-out, the moderati fires one weapon, the princeps fires another and the steersman maneuvers to avoid fire. As void shields pop and/or crew members get stunned, the princeps has to decide what roles to take over.
Therefore, my brain says Ag and Int for the Steersman, BS/WS and Per for the Moderati, Int and WP (for dealing with the machine spirit) for the Princeps.
Skills port over fairly easily, but obviously talents need a bit of thinking about. Titan-grade weapons probably deserve their own training talent, for example