BaronIveagh said:

So what do your player's do for the three+ hours you all sit around a table together? That is, what does an average gaming session in your RT campaign look like if you never get 'em off the boat?

Also, while there are a few good historical sources one can draw on for inspiration, I agree that it is absurd to ask for too much realism from this setting (Dark Age Space Opera), which is a magnificently contrived flight of fancy to begin with, and I think that's the best way to sum up my problem with the OT...

Let me get this strait: you think that players should stay on board their space ship, looking out through stained-glass windows, past the marble statuary and ornate Gothic crenelations that adorn the bow and stern, because it wouldn't make sense to go down and fight the space elves themselves!?

Does humanity even float warp-capable ships as small as Serenity in the 40k universe? Half this thread is a discussion of how much of the 2+ kilometers of a frigate's length is devoted to it's drives and why it takes 1000's of crewman to operate it...

Well, if you start out with lots of SP and not much PF, I guess you could use your SP to purchase two ships (combination of raiders or transports) instead of one awesome Frigate or Cruiser.

Scipio Brahe said:

A vast number of experts at scrubbing plasma conduits, cleaning the life support waste tanks and hauling macrocannons on chains, then.

Even aboard the vessels of the Imperial Navy, every rating with a task requiring acquired skill (and possibly Mechanicus sanction) is heavily outnumbered by press-ganged slaves and menials dragged aboard to perform back-breaking labour for the rest of their lives.

Every starship in the Imperium - excluding those used by the Astartes and the Mechanicus (both of which have much greater degrees of automation and extensively use servitors for menial tasks) - requires vast amounts of unskilled labour. Fortunately, life is cheap in the Imperium, human effort the single most available and expendable resource available to any human in a position of power.

I decided to let my players start with 100 Ship Points plus whatever Profit Modifiers they got from character generation to build thier ship(s). Whatever is left over is their Profit Factor. This gives about 10 more points then the book initially gives.

I was reading a bit about the origins path.. Wouldnt it be more logical to backtrack it instead?

Does humanity even float warp-capable ships as small as Serenity in the 40k universe? Half this thread is a discussion of how much of the 2+ kilometers of a frigate's length is devoted to it's drives and why it takes 1000's of crewman to operate it...

There are some - and they're generally more expensive than the frigates and the cruisers because noone has any idea how to build them anymore.

Cifer said:

I got the impression from Inquisition War that Jaq Draco's personal warp conveyance was little more than 300 meters, if not smaller. And it seemed to lack a need for an extensive crew as well. Possibly the vast majority of it was the plasma and warp drives... But I may be recalling the details inaccurately.

-=Brother Praetus=-

The examples of smaller warp-capable ships are few and (I think I'm right in saying) all from older more questionable canon.

I think it unlikely a smaller warp-ship is going to work ... aside from anything else, let's say you do have a Serenity sized ship capable of Warp travel, so how are you going to credibly compete with other voidfaring traders (Rogue and otherwise) who have ships with holds big enough to hold your whole ship many times over?

Nah, this isn't Star Wars or Firefly, this is 40K, things here should be not just big, but VAST. Part of the fun of the game is having such huge resources and yet still being relatively small fry.

My players have a Dictator Class Cruiser (stats from the thread elsewhere on these boards), packing a Nova Cannon that in theory can cause global extermination events ... however I could still squash them like flies if I chose to. 40K is BIG, the villains have huge resources, often well beyond those held by the richest Rogue Traders (which the pcs certainly aren't).

Brother Praetus said:

Where as I was under the impression that Draco's ship was about cruiser-class in size, from what the book says (just reading it now).