As it asks. Through various threads, and opinions shared among them, depending on what you find on the receiving end of your macrocannons, you might not be able to just "lay claim" to an enemy human's ship (a pirate raider, maybe; this might be a reasonable way to get some light escorts for your own ship), or it might be an Orky/Eldar xeno vessel you CAN'T operate, or perhaps you're pious enough to actually see it as heresy to, whatever. Many of the ships of the void are described as ancient, massive craft, which took years to build, and may traverse the void for as many centuries. When you are done, and have disabled the raiders trying to loot you, or defeated the opposing Rogue Trader, trying to stop you from getting "their" loot, what course do you take? Do you pour shells into them until their ship explodes (probably after looting some cargo, some treasures, and "repurposing" some of their survivors to fatten your crew back up), leave it crippled, and adrift, hoping, like Dr. Evil, that things will just take care of themselves? I'm curious because many ships of most classes re still described as rare, and precious, so to hulk them, or worse seems a waste, but "bad people" rarely get better, so leaving them alive just means probably having to deal with them, again. Sending a message to the Battlefleet seems equally wasteful; they've got little time, and less manpower, to do anything about the crippled ship you left behind, and they might execute everyone for piracy, anyway.

So, at the risk of asking one more of my weird questions, post a space battle, what do you do with your opponent? Their crew? Their ship(s)?

I alternate as GM and player with another guy in my group, and what we do with ships tends to vary depending on which one of us is the GM at the time.

Mainly, if it's a vessel type worth keeping, we keep it. So far, most ships we've captured have been so damaged that most of the crew were killed. When the crew is small in number, and holding no affiliation to Chaos, we tend to keep them, integrating them among our other crew, generally spreading them about so they can't collect together, which decreases tensions and expedites assimilation. Most of the ships we've captured in this way have been raiders crewed by pirates. When there are too many enemy crew, we tend to round them up, throw them in the brig, or chain them up in the cargo bay, and turn them over to the nearest authorities, such as the Damarins, or the Adeptus Arbitus at Port Wonder.

If the ship is one we probably can't keep, but captured anyway, we tow it along to sell or return for brownie points. We captured an ex-Navy ship and disposed of it in this way for rep with the Navy. We also battled and captured a current Navy vessel, which we've presently towed along with us to return (long story, but let's just say we got dragged into the fight by two opposing Inquisitors, and plan to make the best of a bad situation by taking on the survivors and returning the ship).

If the ships are affiliated with Chaos, we hulk them. After a battle with a large Chaos cruiser and a small fleet of raiders, after slagging the ships into submission, we promptly sent them on a path into the local sun, survivors and all (though we did rescue as many of their slaves as we could first, though most were pretty damaged, and a few had to be mercifully executed by our Padre).

We did board a wrecked Eldar cruiser, and looted a handful of components, but could not keep the vessel (due to circumstances at the time, there were Eldar survivors, who rigged the ship for detonation after we rescued them and agreed to return then (and their soul stones) to the nearest webway gate they were willing to divulge the location of). In most cases of possessing xeno technology, we either sell it to the Breaking Yards, back to xenos (like the Stryxis, should we encounter them), or just hand them over to the AdMech, again, for brownie points.

Ship repair tends to take quite a long time in our games. After bringing in a wrecked and damaged ship, it often takes a full two campaigns before they're up and running again, and all the while the Dynasty is paying for them. We captured a pirate cruiser, and it took three full campaigns to be ready for service again, finally becoming available on the fourth campaign since its capture. Smaller vessels, depending on their state when acquired, generally don't take so long, but few of them are rebuilt quickly enough to use the same campaign they're captured in.

As far as hull types we keep, the most heretical hull we have is an Infidel-class raider, which was slagged so bad there were no survivors. Though we have it up and running, there are objections by some for us having it. We have a colony co-owned by the Ecclesiarchy, and they don't want it guarding their system. Only its wide rep as a (stolen) Imperial design, similar already to the accepted Havok-class, and not a blatantly heretical one (like an Idolator), has allowed us to keep it without too much issue, though we've never brought it into Imperial space, and probably never will.

In any case, a long winded response, but then, you asked more than one question.

Hmmm....how do they end? This is something I'm actually attempting to change. Given, the PCs usually win. I've probably run, or participated in, 50 space battles in my various campaigns. I think the PCs lost....none. They lost ships, but never the battle. I want more ships capable of breaking off action and escaping. I don't like my PCs chasing down Wolfpack Raiders in a Dauntless on flank speed. That's smacks of stinky cheese.

Still, how do they end? So much depends on the chosen ship and armaments. In one campaign the PCs armed their ship with disruption batteries and boarding components (teleportarium, etc.). They tended to capture ships rather intact. In another, a carrier was chosen. They tended to capture ships that were on fire. All attempted to capture ships; some were just less picky about what it took to refurbish starships. Then there's the enemy ship...Chaos ships don't lend themselves to capture, especially Nurgle ships. Eldar ships usually need specialized crew not available to Rogue Traders. The Nurgle ships tend to get towed into an appointment with a star; the Eldar ships still get towed home and carved apart. Hulls are hulls, after all.

The end of battles covers such things as prisoner counts, dealing with important survivors, rigging towing chains, affecting emergency repairs, etc.

Btw, I never give my players an easy out. There is no "dumping" of prisoners on any easily accessible colony. If you don't want to deal with the tedious consequences of your actions, then just kill the prisoners and be done with it. Moral decisions are at the heart of rpgs. I go out of my way to throw moral dilemmas at my players. Being a good guy isn't supposed to be easy, and being a bad guy is supposed to generate excess emotional baggage. I would note, however, that the Koronus Expanse has an easily accessible penal world in Winterscale's Realm, and most Warrants of Trade authorize Rogue Traders as de facto judiciaries. And, I love it when my players give me recurring villains for the mere cost of a cowboy jail break. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It's usually a capture if possible approach*. If they're too busy or shorthanded to take it with them, they'll normally depopulate the ship, stick a beacon on it to trigger on receiving a particular Dynasty-specific code, and stash it somewhere, usually on a long, but charted, orbit, for later recovery, either by themselves or trusted underlings.

*Whether or not it is possible ... well, that depends on the kind of enemy, and size of ship. Some ships, as noted above by others, just aren't possible to capture - Nurgle-worshippers, daemon-ships, bioships, etc. And some, while it may be possible to take the ship, the enemy crew will be fanatical enough to blow the plasma drives (or deliberately trigger a warp breach) when they're about to loose the ship, to take as many of the boarders with them as possible.

Eldar ships, while you can generally take the hull itself, you're going to need specialty personnel to actually do much of anything with it without extensive shipyard work. Usually, you can either trade them back to the Eldar, strip them down for useable components, and/or sell them to the AdMech or the Ordo Xenos. Of course, to sell them to the AdMech or Ordo Xenos, you need to first locate and make contact with a faction who's interested in getting their hands on Eldar tech. You might also be able to trade one to the Deathwatch or an Astartes Chapter that wants to acquire an Eldar hull for training purposes (maybe the interior of the last one has gotten shot up too much during training), but again, you would need to locate and make contact with the right people first (plus, if they want an Eldar ship for training purposes, they're quite capable of getting one on their own).

The situation is often similar with many xenos ships - while the hulls can often be captured without too much difficulty, you need specialty personnel to do much of anything with them - linguistics and technical personnel to relabel controls and readouts, and to mark control runs and splice in Imperial display and control interfaces. Usually, with captured Xenos ships, you wind up stripping them for parts/materials, selling them to other Xenos, selling to pirates/etc, or selling to a suitably interested faction of the AdMech, Inquisition, Deathwatch, Astartes, or, even more rarely the Imperial Navy. But one needs to find and establish contacts with the right people first. The Imperial Navy will only very rarely acquire xenos hulls - and even then only if it is something from a new species, in order to obtain information about them, but even then, that's more usually the purview of the AdMech and Ordo Xenos.

Of course, I have houseruled bigger ships to be a lot sturdier, and have a lot more points of crew population than smaller ones (a cruiser has an x3 multiplier) - and crew population is huge for boarding actions; and upgraded NPC crew capabilities. This means that if they're going to try to capture bigger ships, they either need a big one of their own, or to be smart about it, and they usually seek to do both.

Virus torpedoes are hugely valued for taking large ships mostly intact. Also popular for capturing enemy ships are disruption macrocannon, and las-burners, along with the usual spread of boarding/hit-and-run augmenting components.

Hit&Run is also big for taking ships intact-ish, as long as you've got the Command for it, not so much because of the 1+ 1/DoS Hull Integrity (and thus Crew) damage, but because of the Critical results - taking out the enemy Life Support system component is extremely bad news, despite the rather curious lack of rules about what happens when Life Support goes down.

Hmmm....how do they end? This is something I'm actually attempting to change. Given, the PCs usually win. I've probably run, or participated in, 50 space battles in my various campaigns. I think the PCs lost....none. They lost ships, but never the battle. I want more ships capable of breaking off action and escaping. I don't like my PCs chasing down Wolfpack Raiders in a Dauntless on flank speed. That's smacks of stinky cheese.

Still, how do they end? So much depends on the chosen ship and armaments. In one campaign the PCs armed their ship with disruption batteries and boarding components (teleportarium, etc.). They tended to capture ships rather intact. In another, a carrier was chosen. They tended to capture ships that were on fire. All attempted to capture ships; some were just less picky about what it took to refurbish starships. Then there's the enemy ship...Chaos ships don't lend themselves to capture, especially Nurgle ships. Eldar ships usually need specialized crew not available to Rogue Traders. The Nurgle ships tend to get towed into an appointment with a star; the Eldar ships still get towed home and carved apart. Hulls are hulls, after all.

The end of battles covers such things as prisoner counts, dealing with important survivors, rigging towing chains, affecting emergency repairs, etc.

Btw, I never give my players an easy out. There is no "dumping" of prisoners on any easily accessible colony. If you don't want to deal with the tedious consequences of your actions, then just kill the prisoners and be done with it. Moral decisions are at the heart of rpgs. I go out of my way to throw moral dilemmas at my players. Being a good guy isn't supposed to be easy, and being a bad guy is supposed to generate excess emotional baggage. I would note, however, that the Koronus Expanse has an easily accessible penal world in Winterscale's Realm, and most Warrants of Trade authorize Rogue Traders as de facto judiciaries. And, I love it when my players give me recurring villains for the mere cost of a cowboy jail break. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Yeah, I suppose I could've thrown in a bit about whether the game frequently allows for players to limp away, and escape, should things go pear-shaped for them, but I was sort of thinking that, much of the time, players' stats surpassing the best Crew Ratings, and their ability/willingness to min/max, compared to the NPC's more likely "stock" ships, would mean they usually DO win. I suppose the GM could as easily pimp the NPC ships, use, if you'll forgive me, EK, one of those "idealized, all the best choices, and perfectly doable" ships you've shown us (yay Supercarrier!!! ), and nothing stops their RT from hiring on a crew member whose equal to your crew's ___________; why would you have the ONLY ace VM?, but then the PCs would HAVE to pimp, and min/max, just to compete with the rabble. I wasn't trying to throw anything at you, by the way; just sort of voicing my take on how the void combat CAN go/may often go. While I'm sure it could depend on the person in question, just as it could the players in question, if you were defeated by Hadarak Fel? Aspyce Chorda? Charlabelle Armellan? I'm not sure what they might typically do to you, your crew, or your ship, once you drew them into combat, if you happened to lose. I've read some stuff in the books of "dashing pirates" who board, take what they want, and then leave, but assure that you have the resources to get to port, and I can also imagine the Bastilles, Feckwards, and Winterscales who would possibly just steam-roll your ship, and possibly steal your crew for slaves, if not just leave them to die, with the destroyed ship, or weeks later, when resources ran out.

I suppose if you are good enough at the money aspect of the game, pirates could be the good source to adding to your fleet, if you can support the extra craft, and the rest of the Imperials, maybe yeah, just tow to safety, or be sure they can, for "brownie points". Xenos, I imagine you might just scrap, unless its my RT char, and they are Eldar, or give them to others, for BP.

NPC crew ratings are inadequate.

I houserule all Generic NPC crew ratings to be +10, and they can take Crew Rating Bonus actions per round at (modified) Crew Rating +15.

Thus a Competent Crew now has a Crew Rating of 40, and can take 4 Actions/reactive tests at CR 55/per round. Any additional tests are at the (modified) normal Crew Rating of 40. Usually, these will be used on firing weapons, but can be shifted to other applications as needed (opposing boarding actions, etc).

This also means that NPC ships are a whole lot less likely to get eaten by the Warp on their first jump.

Non-generic NPCs ships get streamlined profiles for the senior crew/command staff.

---

As far as what happens if/when the PCs loose .. it depends on who they lost to, how badly they lost, how much bad blood is between the two sides, and just what they were fighting over.

It can also depend on how smoothly they can fast-talk the victorious captain. If the victor is feeling gracious or there hasn't been much bad blood, PCs can usually talk their way into ransoming/paroling themselves, with or without their ship - this will usually cost the PCs some PF and/or favors to be named later, but probably not a huge amount - the price of themselves from victor feeling less gracious or with more ill-will towards the PCs will cost much more.

That, of course, assumes that victor isn't an enemy - then you can get marooned, tossed into a penal colony, sold to another enemy, sold to Dark Eldar, given forced surgeries to be used as a body double for faking somebody's death (involving an actual dead body), etc.

A PC usually won't just be summarily executed, but it's possible, especially if it's a major enemy/rival. This means fate point burn and waking up in a trash compactor, or getting dumped overboard (and fate point burn to make it to an inhabitable planet or picked up by someone(GM's choice) happening by.

Speaking from a GM point of view:

My players always want to capture.... if it in any way counts as a ship, they want to capture it.

This constant desire shapes the way they fight space battles, they use a Teleportarium and Murder Servitors in order to preserve as much of the prize ship as possible.

Now, when they capture ships, it generally goes like this:

Loot Valuables

Seize Shuttles or any other useful equipment

Execute Prisoners (Most of the time they're just spaced)

Strip Valuable Components (Which may or may not require them taking the prize to the breaker's yards)

Assess Hull Worth (They'll mostly just sell it off at the yards, they've only ever kept 2 ships they've captured)

taking out the enemy Life Support system component is extremely bad news, despite the rather curious lack of rules about what happens when Life Support goes down.

Noticed that too eh.

Yea, my space battles been about the same as above with players. Usually they try to capture the ship(s) to keep after battle, so tactics revolve around that. They hardly ever try to destroy a ship, unless it's tainted or they did not want to leave it for a rival to take. Depending on my mood, the enemy in question, ship class, how they secured it, and how far along in the campaign they are merits whether or not no complications occur with keeping it.

This also includes space stations, refineries, asteroid bases, etc. I've never had any players just raid a place without the intent to come back and claim it later.

Prime Example: Imperial space station infested with orks over a desolate world. Players destroyed hanger bays, agro-dome, life support systems and crew quarters from afar, and decided to return a few sessions later to reclaim it when most of the orks died or left. They then exploited the world below them with the additional info gleaned from the space stations data core.

I think everyone wants to capture ships because ships are just so rare and expensive that giving one out is basically a huge reward for surviving.Since a lot of ships end up overkilled by lances, I just treat Hulked as "there's very little salvageable from this."

My players' favourite method is to target all the weapon systems, then use the crazy Astropath to just set fire to the ship until everyone burns to death. My general approach is in some cases, captains will realise that most people WILL expect a capture to mean execution and theft, and the end of their life, so they will just attempt to detonate the warp core to take their slayers with them.

Otherwise taking over the ship can lead to Security and Tech-Use tests to get around captain command codes and prevent that inconvenient "The next time this ship takes damage, the life support turns off" booby trap that captains leave in there.

Most ships are worth trying to take as intact as possible, even if all you intend is looting the hell out of it.

If it's xenos, you just got a Cold Trade windfall (unless it's an Ork ship, and even then there's probably some loot that's usable that they looted from somebody else). The riskiest ships to loot are the ones of Chaos-worshippers, because you don't want your crew getting corrupted by uncontrolled (by you) Chaos influences.

There is, after all, pretty much every reason to capture and loot, and few (if any) significant reasons to not capture and loot. At least, under normal circumstances. At worst, the PCs don't have the resources to refit and maintain a human ship, and so either need to mothball it or, more likely, sell it (after stripping it for components they want to keep), and if it's xenos, it can be stripped for useable/saleable parts and raw materials, and/or sold/traded off to other xenos (with an included and carefully concealed remote-detonated atomic (or some other destructive device in the right place), just in case).

And it's way too easy by RAW to board and Command Test your way into victory over pretty much any NPC ship, at least, if there's only a single opposing ship, anyways; all you need to do is get up close, and then it's basically impossible for an NPC ship to get away - the Pilot+Maneuver test is at -20, and a PC raider can just keep boarding an NPC cruiser, even if the cruiser keeps making the escape tests, and it doesn't matter that the raider should have a lot fewer bodies than a cruiser because of the crew population mechanic being quasi-percentage-ish.

Plus, it's a lot easier/cheaper to throw bodies at a single ship than it is to shoot it up - cleaning up bodies and replacing them is cheaper than repairing/replacing damaged or destroyed components. By RAW, an aggressive PC ship can usually get up close and personal for a boarding action in just one or two rounds from the outer edge of weapons range - and I've yet to see a group of PCs that didn't have at least one character with a very good Command test - even if they didn't optimize for it, and a group that plans on being boarding as a primary tactic will have a reasonably optimized Command test and build their ship for it.

The best way that I've found to keep NPC ships from getting steamrollered is my crew population/morale multiplier for bigger ships houserule (although that only helps the bigger ships, and leaves the escorts screwed once the PCs have a larger ship of their own), and to make sure that NPC ships, especially important ones, are almost never alone. Also, if you're already in a boarding action, and somebody else comes alongside and starts boarding you from the other side, you've got problems (you have to split the crew and have two people running the boarding actions against each ship side), and if the ship you're trying to board has a friend come alongside it, then they just got reinforcements against your boarding action/to pour onto your ship.

There's also the fact that if you're in a boarding action, you can't elect to pursue a ship that is fleeing combat.

Then too, I make sure to keep an eye on crew population numbers - every ship that gets captured and kept then needs to either be taken with or sent back to a friendly port with a prize crew. Any crew you detach as prize crew come out of your ship's (or ships') crew population, and you need a solid core of them to manage a prize, even if you're using the prize's original crew as well - I usually require 1 point of prize crew population per 10 points of original crew being used in order to maintain control, but the ratio will vary, depending on the original ship's crew, commander, and allegiances - but if you don't have enough of your crew onboard, it's quite likely, even probable, that there will be a mutiny/escape attempt by members of the original crew.

Thus, the "space the lot of them" approach, while it does mean you won't have to worry about the original crew retaking their ship, also means a prize is functionally useless (even discounting any battle damage sustained) unless you put a large chunk of crew onboard, at the cost of your own ship's crew population - although you can send it back under some reliable officers with only a small prize crew, if extremely slowly and carefully. In addition, if you get a reputation for summarily killing everyone aboard human ships you capture (nobody cares if it's xenos, except them), they're less likely to surrender, and more likely to blow their plasma/warp drives if it looks like they're about to loose control of the ship - and since you'll be right next to them, your ship is automatically hit by a max strength plasma or warp drive explosion, and you probably get sucked into the warp rift too.

Just killing them all as standard practice quickly becomes far more trouble than is saved, and it costs you - especially if you are fighting with the forces of other Rogue Traders. There are a few situations where "kill them all" isn't socially frowned upon by your peers (Chaos-worshippers, loonies too fanatic or crazy to surrender, etc), or your peers are reavers, more interested in killing than making a profit.

This, in conjunction with my crew population multiplier based on size houserules, also means it's a whole lot easier to cull out a prize crew from a bigger ship than it is a smaller one, and it's a lot easier to put a prize crew on a smaller ship than on a bigger ship.

As you can no doubt imagine, players tend to prioritize getting a support group to clean up after them* and making sure to have at least a couple friendly safe ports that they can send prizes back to. These friendly safe ports are, by preference, worlds with some degree of Imperial presence - enough presence for an Astropathic Choir and relays back to the Imperium, and an Imperially Recognized Admiralty Court to formally sign off on your having properly taken the prizes and formally registering them as having been taken and now owned by you - if you want to add prizes to your fleet or sell them to the Navy, especially if they used to belong to someone else with recognized standing in the Imperium or were known pirate ships, especially if they were known pirates, after all, you don't want your new ship getting mistakenly blown out of space/taken by an Imperial Navy patrol, plus, if a ship was a known pirate, there might be a bounty for having taken her.

*This typically consists of a mixture of escorts and transports - the transports being a mix of salvagers and passenger haulers - used to haul troops and extra spacers ... and prisoners who have been judged too dangerous or unreliable to use, this group typically includes captains, officers, and sometimes senior noncoms, depending ... and the astropaths and navigators.

I also allow for ships to carry extra crew ... at the cost of endurance and morale penalties, unless the ship is equipped with an extra crew quarters component, which bypasses the morale penalties. Thus, if you're expecting/planning on taking lots of ships on a cruise, you can ship out with extra crew - this lets you replace crew losses and man more prize ships without impacting your own ship's performance, it also makes boarding actions easier. I usually figure pirates are normally running with extra crew as well.

I figure that for most RT vs RT conflicts, it's a lot like the Age of Sail in terms of what happens after a ship is taken - and that means the officers and senior noncoms get sequestered, usually transferred to the winning ship, while the bulk of the regular enlisted crew stay onboard the prize, and with some degree of regularity, at least some will work with the prize crew detachment from the victor to make it back to port, especially if weather comes up. Massacring the crew after they surrendered almost never happened, even with Age of Sail pirates - frankly, AoS pirates, for all their fearsome reputations, usually preferred to not kill anybody they didn't have to in order to force a surrender, so they liked their bloodthirsty reputations - when somebody believes that resisting will just make them bleed and suffer, but surrendering peaceably will leave them unharmed, they're a whole lot more likely to surrender than if they believe/know that they're going to get killed after they surrender anyways.

When FFG stopped providing proper profiles for NPC ships with space values and the power/space profiles for their new components, they really dropped the ball. Especially since they added components and upgrades to improve the capabilities of capturing and salvaging ships in better condition than ever before. *Cough*Disruption-Macrocannons*Cough* But even without such things making capturing ships easier, having that ship/component information would let GMs modify NPC ships to better suit their players. Or let the PCs use and modify one of those hulls or components themselves - which would be useful in something like Black Crusade, or even just a particularly radical/heretical RT campaign

I'd note that 1 point of crew population can vary considerably in size as well- on an Avenger-class grand cruiser, that 1 point represents over 1000 men, while 1 point of a Viper-class sloop's crew is a (comparatively) measly 75. So I'd take the base crew size of the prize ship when determining the needed prize crew.

This means that, assuming you reduced the crew of an Endeavour-class light cruiser (for example) by 60 points, you would have to find 4 points worth of people to form a prize crew to take it (using javcs' formula). That's 2700 people- a mix of officers, petty officers, armsmen and some voidsmen.

If the victor in this example is, say, a Falchion-class frigate, optimised for boarding, it has to find that prize crew from the survivors

(as it's highly unlikely to win without losing anybody) of its complement, and for a vessel of her size, 2700 represents 10% of her nominal crew. So they'd need to (temporarily, at least) sacrifice another 10 points of crew population in order to get the prize back to a friendly port (warp permitting).

With regards to ships disengaging, a key thing to remember is terrain. Just because they're in space doesn't mean there's no terrain to take advantage of- they can hide in the shadow of a planet/moon, or try and slingshot around it; they can lurk in a gas cloud, or drift in a debris and/or asteroid field.

Even if there's nothing handy around (say they were ambushed out by the system's jump zone), there are still ways to turn a terrain-like advantage- a high-speed close pass of the other ship on a reciprocal course leaves you in the aft fire arc (and thus temporarily safe from virtually all fire), and in such a position that they will (hopefully) be too far away to catch you on an Active Scan when you go to silent running and disengage; or alternatively, still trying to turn around and re-engage when you escape into the Warp. (I've had my players try this trick a couple of times- it worked fairly smoothly running a Navy blockade, although there I did give them a bonus to Silent Running/Disengage as they were effectively masking themselves in the drive wake of a larger ship. Didn't work as well against a Night Lords cruiser, but they'd managed to damage the maneuvering thrusters on their firing pass and escaped into the Warp with no more extra damage than a few welded airlocks from a pointedly powerful Focussed Augury).

I'll also note, on the house-rule front, that if there's a significant navigational hazard around, I'll start adding penalties to Detection if ships start travelling particularly fast as bits of debris and particulate matter strike the shields and degrade the auspex returns. In well-travelled orbits (say, the volume around a spaceport or inhabited world), this can start kicking in for everything travelling at greater than 6 VU/turn (the exact penalties and max speed before they occur depend upon the situation, and can be negated with Repulsor shields). This makes it easier for ships pursued in a Stern Chase to escape and disengage (the ship overhauling has to be moving faster, and is having a harder time seeing stuff ahead).

In a similar vein, (and for similar reasoning) I rule that if a Void Shield is hit, it flares briefly, blinding the auspex and augurs of the ship it is mounted on temporarily. In a normal turn this doesn't matter so much, as they'll have reset within a couple of minutes and each turn is 30 minutes long, but in theory it could be used to mask a close-range launch from torpedo bombers, the final approach of boarding craft, or, if a ship's captain and helmsman are particularly skilled, covering an attempt to disengage. The latter situation has not come up (not had an NPC think of it who has also had the skill to pull it off, and it doesn't work if there's more than one ship from whom you're attempting to escape), but I have had players try and use it to cover a boarding attempt (their timing was off, and they killed almost 1/3rd of the Arch Militant's assault companies when a stray shot hit one of the shuttles).

When it comes to my own campaigns, however, unless they go for a ship while they're fairly close to port, they've tended not to capture them (as they have been worried about manpower levels when detailing prize crew. They're more likely to take one of the first two options from the classic Admiralty instructions: "burn her, sink her, or take her a prize"

(For "sink", read "hulk")

The ships that they do take sufficiently intact that they don't strip off prize crews for tend to have as many voidsuits as they can find confiscated, charges set on the major intercompartmental hatches, and on strategic external airlocks, so they can dump all the air from the companionways (but leave life-support active) and just strand the ship there. No-one aboard can get her underway without going through sections in vacuum and restoring pressure to helm compartments. That way, they didn't kill an entire crew, starvation/cabin fever did. And if they return with enough for a prize crew, all it takes is welding closed the blown external hatches and pumping in some extra air to make up for the loss. Any surviving members of the original crew are either so grateful for the rescue they won't cause trouble or so deranged no-one cares if they get executed...

The other ships... well, occasionally, to make a point, they'll disable (block/weld closed) the drive tubes and set the realspace engines to spool up to maximum power. Flood the entire ship with plasma. If it survives, you're left with a fire-gutted hulk, all components slagged (they did this to a wolfpack raider sworn to Karrad Vall, then left a taunting message in the ruins of the bridge once it cooled, knowing one of the other ships got away to report). If it doesn't survive, well, a plasma drive explosion is rather pretty to watch (and they should have time to reach a safe distance).

As regards my prize crew rules, I've abstracted 1 crew pop is 1 crew pop, but while escorts (raiders and frigates) and small transports use the book numbers, bigger ships have the book numbers multiplied by a factor dependent upon hull size - light cruisers have an x2 modifier, cruisers (including battle and heavy) x3, grand cruisers x4, battleships x5.

So that Endeavor's starting with a base crew of 200, so if you somehow managed to force it to surrender after loosing only 60 crew population, it's got 140 crew left, and so you would need to pull out 14 crew population from your own ship or ships. Since you probably lost more than 1 point of crew population in the battle, the Falchion (an escort), after combat losses and detaching a prize crew of 14, will be at least one step down on the crew population efficiency chart.

If the battle goes the other way, however, and the Endeavor is supplying the prize crew to the Falchion (40 crew pop left), the Endeavor needs to pull out only 4 crew - which, even with combat losses, is unlikely to drop the Endeavor's crew population efficiency; the Falchion, however, is not going to be very useful in a fight for a while.

It's not exactly streamlined, and outliers like the Viper-class don't exactly fit real well into the mechanics, but that was the case before, and they still fit better now.

My players - while they almost always try to capture a ship mostly intact to loot, often don't immediately take it as a prize, and when they do, they usually send it back to the closest safe and friendly port. Usually - especially if they don't feel that they can supply an adequate prize crew for an extended period - they'll take a prize to the closest inhabitable planet, and maroon the crew there, and then put the ship into a secure orbit, sometimes hidden, and shut everything down, and then leave a beacon to activate when it gets the right Dynasty code. Junior members of their House get to run around retrieving these prizes for the Dynasty.

As regards my prize crew rules, I've abstracted 1 crew pop is 1 crew pop, but while escorts (raiders and frigates) and small transports use the book numbers, bigger ships have the book numbers multiplied by a factor dependent upon hull size - light cruisers have an x2 modifier, cruisers (including battle and heavy) x3, grand cruisers x4, battleships x5.

So that Endeavor's starting with a base crew of 200, so if you somehow managed to force it to surrender after loosing only 60 crew population, it's got 140 crew left, and so you would need to pull out 14 crew population from your own ship or ships. Since you probably lost more than 1 point of crew population in the battle, the Falchion (an escort), after combat losses and detaching a prize crew of 14, will be at least one step down on the crew population efficiency chart.

If the battle goes the other way, however, and the Endeavor is supplying the prize crew to the Falchion (40 crew pop left), the Endeavor needs to pull out only 4 crew - which, even with combat losses, is unlikely to drop the Endeavor's crew population efficiency; the Falchion, however, is not going to be very useful in a fight for a while.

It's not exactly streamlined, and outliers like the Viper-class don't exactly fit real well into the mechanics, but that was the case before, and they still fit better now.

My players - while they almost always try to capture a ship mostly intact to loot, often don't immediately take it as a prize, and when they do, they usually send it back to the closest safe and friendly port. Usually - especially if they don't feel that they can supply an adequate prize crew for an extended period - they'll take a prize to the closest inhabitable planet, and maroon the crew there, and then put the ship into a secure orbit, sometimes hidden, and shut everything down, and then leave a beacon to activate when it gets the right Dynasty code. Junior members of their House get to run around retrieving these prizes for the Dynasty.

Has this worked well for you? I know that the Universe, for instance, is technically a "Transport" class, but it's bigger than some Cruisers, and I'm not sure if it is purely "these cargo bays are just that much bigger, but the ship is otherwise a transport", or if it is more a ridiculous, cruiser-sized vessel turned into an over-sized transport; that's why, some time ago, I posted a quandary as to whether the regular transport components were big enough for a Universe, or if it had to use components more in line with its size. Some 40k ships have weird sizes, even regardless of class, which might, at least for me, make vague the requirements for that ships minimum crew.

I hope this whole thread didn't just come off as another of my why? questions. Partly, I suppose, it stems from me thinking as if looking out a window, and seeing the enemy craft, in which case "ducking behind some stuff" wouldn't really be an escape plan. I surmise, though, that if I think of it more like a Geth, ignoring windows, and only relying on augers/sensors to see, then hiding behind stuff, or Silent Running, might actually help. Also, I wasn't sure what the typical response would be between "you can't just steal their ship, and fly it like it's yours", and many other raiders/enemies/RTs being illustrated, in the material, as just getting rid of the competition, which wasn't up to the challenge. Anyway, glad to get to read the various answers. Thanks.

As regards my prize crew rules, I've abstracted 1 crew pop is 1 crew pop, but while escorts (raiders and frigates) and small transports use the book numbers, bigger ships have the book numbers multiplied by a factor dependent upon hull size - light cruisers have an x2 modifier, cruisers (including battle and heavy) x3, grand cruisers x4, battleships x5.

So that Endeavor's starting with a base crew of 200, so if you somehow managed to force it to surrender after loosing only 60 crew population, it's got 140 crew left, and so you would need to pull out 14 crew population from your own ship or ships. Since you probably lost more than 1 point of crew population in the battle, the Falchion (an escort), after combat losses and detaching a prize crew of 14, will be at least one step down on the crew population efficiency chart.

If the battle goes the other way, however, and the Endeavor is supplying the prize crew to the Falchion (40 crew pop left), the Endeavor needs to pull out only 4 crew - which, even with combat losses, is unlikely to drop the Endeavor's crew population efficiency; the Falchion, however, is not going to be very useful in a fight for a while.

It's not exactly streamlined, and outliers like the Viper-class don't exactly fit real well into the mechanics, but that was the case before, and they still fit better now.

My players - while they almost always try to capture a ship mostly intact to loot, often don't immediately take it as a prize, and when they do, they usually send it back to the closest safe and friendly port. Usually - especially if they don't feel that they can supply an adequate prize crew for an extended period - they'll take a prize to the closest inhabitable planet, and maroon the crew there, and then put the ship into a secure orbit, sometimes hidden, and shut everything down, and then leave a beacon to activate when it gets the right Dynasty code. Junior members of their House get to run around retrieving these prizes for the Dynasty.

Has this worked well for you? I know that the Universe, for instance, is technically a "Transport" class, but it's bigger than some Cruisers, and I'm not sure if it is purely "these cargo bays are just that much bigger, but the ship is otherwise a transport", or if it is more a ridiculous, cruiser-sized vessel turned into an over-sized transport; that's why, some time ago, I posted a quandary as to whether the regular transport components were big enough for a Universe, or if it had to use components more in line with its size. Some 40k ships have weird sizes, even regardless of class, which might, at least for me, make vague the requirements for that ships minimum crew.

I hope this whole thread didn't just come off as another of my why? questions. Partly, I suppose, it stems from me thinking as if looking out a window, and seeing the enemy craft, in which case "ducking behind some stuff" wouldn't really be an escape plan. I surmise, though, that if I think of it more like a Geth, ignoring windows, and only relying on augers/sensors to see, then hiding behind stuff, or Silent Running, might actually help. Also, I wasn't sure what the typical response would be between "you can't just steal their ship, and fly it like it's yours", and many other raiders/enemies/RTs being illustrated, in the material, as just getting rid of the competition, which wasn't up to the challenge. Anyway, glad to get to read the various answers. Thanks.

Oh, stuff like the Universe gets treated as a bigger ship for the size multiplier mechanic. Because it is. Same for the Conquest-class star galleon - that gets treated like a cruiser.

Only "small transports" get the book numbers, which, admittedly, is most of them.

I don't remember what multiplier I used on the Universe offhand, x3 or x4 I think. Because while it is huge, it's also designed as a transport, and not a warship/transport hybrid, and so it doesn't get the full benefits that a warship of its size would - and it's basically a universal thing that (a) warships have larger crews than merchants, and (b) warships are built much more heavily than merchants of their size. On the other hand, you can put a lot of holes into a really big merchant ship and still not hit anything important.

No, it's an important question that's well worth asking - even if the Devs seem to have forgotten about the whole concept of capturing ships even as they added stuff to let you capture stuff better. And kept on including components on enemy ships that give you stuff for capturing them intact .

The entire concept of prize crews is perfectly in line with both the fluff and the inspiration for BFG.

And I readily admit that my prize crew rules could probably be improved upon given a wider testing base - and that the modifiers for the kind of ship/crew and PC relationship with the former commander being taken as a prize are largely on a case by case basis, so that could probably get codified - they work well enough for me and my group.

Including a prize crew mechanic would have taken perhaps an extra page or two in the rules somewhere, after accounting for adding fluff and pictures, and maybe a table or two. Sure, it probably wouldn't be exactly the same as mine - but something roughly similar would probably be the result.

I also require changes in ownership (as in prize ships) to be logged with the Imperial Shipping Registry. After all, you don't want somebody to misidentify your new ship as belonging to someone they're in conflict with or a pirate.

As far looking out the window and seeing the other ship, generally speaking, if you can see another ship with the naked eye, either you're very close or all you can see is a particularly bright and flashing point of light from the void shields absorbing weapons fire, or you're staring at their plasma drives and it is a moving point of light. Space isn't just big, space is huge .

The bridge is not, or should not, be like that of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Remember that A-Wing crashing into the bridge of the Executor in Return of the Jedi ? Yeah, that is something you really don't want to happen.

Even if you do have windows on your bridge (this is bad), you are not going to be looking out of them to operate the ship. You're going to be looking at your control console's display screens and/or a holotank representation of the ship's sensor reach. You don't even really want the physical possibility of having windows on your command deck - you want it buried in the center of the ship behind lots of armor. Think Battlestar Galactica's CIC - that's probably a fairly good reference point. Or more, generally, the harder sci fi usually tends towards more realistic interpretations of what a command center would be like. Some sci fi books probably worth a read for where my position on prize crews and what command centers should be like comes from are David Drake's Lt. Lear/RCN series, David Weber's Honor Harrington series (well, most anything DW sci-fi).

Further prize crew stuff would be Age of Sail/Age of Sail-inspired materials, because that's where a lot of 40k ship to ship combat comes from.