It is quite possible I have overlooked it on this forum, but has anyone been tinkering with the crew population, crew morale and boarding rules? I can't be happy with them as long as a nearly crippled Cobra has a better morale and crew population than a Lunar that isn't even half damaged.

Well, for Boarding I decided to use the Mass Combat rules from Black Crusade's Tome of Blood supplement. Each Hull class gets a number of "free" units representing its armsmen 1 for Transports, 2 for Frigates and Raiders, 3 for Light Cruisers, 4 for Cruisers, and so on. The damage dealt to each of these units is then represented in the Crew Population and Crew Morale damage the ship suffers based on what percentage of the ship has just been taken out with the total units representing one third of the surviving ship's numbers. To represent how damage to the ship affects its combat capabilities, I simply use the existing Mass Combat modifiers for outnumbering and add them as penalties to the defender based on how much damage the ship has suffered.

This has worked for me so far, but I'm sure there are other ways people have handled it on the forum.

For boarding a lot of people like to use modifiers to the command tests based on the hull size. For every class bigger than you, you suffer a -5 or 10 and for every class you are larger by, you get a plus 5 or 10.

As for population/moral issues, yeah, most small ships are going to explode long before moral becomes an issue. you could try doubling the moral losses on escort sized ships ( far more likely to lose someone you knew on a smaller ship) or something along those lines?

What are the guidelines for onboard weapons? You don't want your plasma gun to shoot out, through the hull, or some such. I know I sort of could look in the book, and see, but I'm more trying to figure out what the alien equivalents are likely to be, so something more like "less than Pen 8, and not Energy damage" might be more useful than "just look at the boarding rifle, and extrapolate from there." If you are sending boarding parties over, or especially if you, and your coterie of PCs, with their pimped out, best there are guns, what do they have to sub in for their plasma, bolt, or xenos pistols, in order to take the ship, rather than depressurize the compartment they are in?

What real damage can any hand-held weapon do to a ship 2 miles long? Melta weapons are good as breaching charges to create shortcuts with, but even they won't effectively disable a ship's systems, even if discharged on the bridge. At worst you'll ruin some on/off switches.

What real damage can any hand-held weapon do to a ship 2 miles long? Melta weapons are good as breaching charges to create shortcuts with, but even they won't effectively disable a ship's systems, even if discharged on the bridge. At worst you'll ruin some on/off switches.

I've read stuff, at least, where they have to take precautions not to use too powerful of weapons, lest you breach a bulkhead, damage a mechanism, or pierce the hull, in a spot; I was led to believe it's one of the reasons solid projectile weapons are still prevalent aboard ships. No, I wouldn't think your hand-held weapons, even a melta-, or plasma-variety kind, will damage the ship , but you could damage "the terrain around you", while aboard, and lead to fatal power discharges, minor hull breaches, hitting your own people, on the other side of a wall/door, or other such things, even if no where near, say, the enginarium. Granted, as I said, I was led to believe it, anyway, and it's part of why I asked. I'm looking at some different weapons some xenos might have, either in the defense of their own ships, or the efforts to board their enemy's vessel, and trying to figure out what their best options are, considering they don't really use "slug throwers", and have weapons renowned for piercing even tank armor.

They do make a very large deal of the potential damage that energy and/or heavy weapons can do if fired from the inside of the ship in the fluff, especially in just about any write up for navel weapons, but it never really made it into the rules...well unless you count the rules for hit and runs anyway which can lead to quite a lot of damage to another ship just using hand weapons ( especially flamers, starting fires in a closed, high O2 filled space is never a good idea)

This actually got me wondering, and I could definitely see a stray plasma or melta shot ruining a lot of peoples days. If the Imperial navy constructs there ships using the same mentality as the US navy, there is probably a lot of critical components and hardware all mashed together in as little space as possible, and that may affect several different systems. Take a carrier for instance, i know of several places in the engine spaces that a well placed frag grenade of stray bullet could severally degrade the ships performance ( not disable it , but still losing even 25% of engine power would be a big blow) and that is just using steam based systems, upgrade that to plasma based, and yeah scary stuff.

As for some sci-fi examples, star trek is a pretty good example with its rupturing conduits killing people on the other side of a bulkhead and the episode were they got held hostage by someone pointing a hand gun at the warp core.

Another one that uses technology a lot closer to Warhammer would be Babylon 5 and in that show they were very worried about hull damage from stray weapons fire ( as a side note, that is why the PPG was invented, it is a sort of low kinetic/high thermal version of a plasma weapon that was designed to not have the energy to punch thru a ship or habitat hull)

It is quite possible I have overlooked it on this forum, but has anyone been tinkering with the crew population, crew morale and boarding rules? I can't be happy with them as long as a nearly crippled Cobra has a better morale and crew population than a Lunar that isn't even half damaged.

I did change the aspect of crew pop and morale, but mostly because of ship combat attrition. It's my google drive, under the folder "House Rules", file name "House Rules."