Our group started out with a Dauntless Light Cruiser...

Since then, our endavours and adventures have led us to accumulate two raiders (deftly comandeered and stolen during "Into the Maw" scenario), and another Dauntless Light Cruiser (which we found buried on our archeological site which we established earlier). Granted the second Dauntless first needed to be purged of a genestealer infestation, be unearthed and fixed into well enough condition to be able to reach escape velocity with the aid of several lifter vessels, but after a lot of work on it we managed to get the old boat functional.

As a part-time GM in thi group (we take turns) though I have to say that im rather worried of this trend. Sure, it's nice that our dynasty boasts four formidable vessels under our flag, but so far no one has really enforced any kind of actual "drawbacks" to maintaining an entire fleet of vessels.

Also, I have yet to familiarize myself fully with the rulebook (it's a thick tome after all, and I have more books that need to be read as well). Are there any rules concerning the upkeep and maintenance of one or several vessels in the current rules?

If not, what sort of tangible costs, difficulties and penalties would be appropriate to apply to the maintenance and upkeep of several vessels?

The reason for asking is because most of the players in the group are very hungry when it comes to hit and run actions (using the dreaded teleportarium + murder servitors combo). And rather than having to fit every enemy NPC vessel with a tenebro maze and "fudge" a malfunctioning teleportarium result each encounter in order to discourage the players from simply "murdering the enemy crew and steal the vessel" each and every encounter, I'd like to introduce the concept of costs vs benefits.

After all, it can't be cheap to keep an entire starship running through such a wild and uncharted area of space like the Koronus Expanse (even "day to day" operations would, in my opinion, be quite costly of such huge superstructures).

I want to keep the Rogue Trader campaign as player driven as possible, and I dislike having to GM fiat in the oh, so boring "no you can't do that" way, or just saying: "three of your vessels got attacked before this adventure started and was destroyed and you had no chance or way to influence this..."

I want to focus on what choices the players make and make the game world react accordingly with a subtle hand. And so far the actual costs vs benefits issue hasn't ever come up (we all just assumed that the Profit Factor automatically pays for the upkeep of all vessels, regardless of how many our group own/steal). I think it's time to introduce it, and I'd very much appriciate some suggestions from all of you.

So what do you think would be the best route of making upkeep costs felt? Multiple and mandatory Acquisition tests? PF penalties? Mandatory misfortunes or increased risks of them?

Discuss.

for each vessel after their first I would reduce their profit factor - as profit factor is just that - profit - and the upkeep of additional ships would eat into that. It is simple and IMO works nicely and adds a new element to the game by encouraging the group to seek more endeavours, trade routes, establish business' etc etc in order to support their fleet

as to how much to decrease their profit factor that would depend on the size of the ship (IMO between -5 and -15)

Also if you are afraid of how much power the group is building up you could make one of the ships a famous Imperial Navy ship - which they want back or contain an unknown Archeotech device the Mechanicus want

EDIT: As for what to do when the group is performing their hit and steal action on every ship they come across - have the Imperial Navy rock up to 'help out' and take the vessel off their hands - or an Eldar fleet, Inquisitor ship or Space Marine Battle barge come in to cleanse the xenos.chaos infected ship the group is trying to take. Or leave a tip off for the group that the Imperial Navy/Inquisition is looking for a group of shipjackers to arrest/interrogate/cleanse them

I've found that without Navigators who are Adept or Higher at Tracks in the Void , the problem sorts itself out rather quickly. If they manage to equip every ship with a skilled Navigator, then bully for them. There's probably some kind of penalty to directing a fleet through the Warp though. I'm inclined to give a fleet that can track each other's status a single set of Warp Navigation rolls, but with -5 to -10 per additional ship involved.

On a different note, more ships=more Past History. That can often be a way of bringing a group down to size if they are not yet ready to handle the fleet. Re-rolling misfortunes, being hated by certain groups, or hounded by the Ordo Xenos can really put a crimp in the plans of the overly ambitious

Take a look at the crew sizes, and try and figure out how they're going to get the ships home having "murdered the crew and stolen the ship". Sure, there are rules fro recrewing once they make port, but unless they deliberately pack their ship with spare crewmen before going off to hijack starships then they'll end up with at least one of them scarily undermanned (quite aside from any crew casualties suffered during the action).

Assuming they decide to (and manage) to take a ship with her crew mostly intact, they may have the bright idea of simply putting a small prize crew aboard and have the original crew do most of the work (and in terms of 40k combat, this is probably the most practical option). The problem is, the ship's original crew is not going to be particularly loyal to the Dynasty. Unless and they're prepared to completely replace the crew when they make port, or do something really drastic and spectacular to get that loyalty, the captured ships are going to have a much lower morale, and so a correspondingly higher chance of mutiny...

Alasseo said:

Im afraid that route might be hard, at least if the group keeps up their current MO. They basically cripple the enemy vessels so badly and later floods them with demands and ultimatums, directed at the crew rather than the officers of the enemy ship, urging them to commit mutiny and await further instructions (which they naturally do when fires are raging across their vessel and several of their shipmates have died due to horrendous attacks).

Once the enemy captains and officers are dead (which they usually are by that time since the vessels we've stolen so far were pirate vessels with rather abusive slavers as captains and officers), the Rogue Trader offers the crew better terms in the form of better food and lodgings, more lenient working hours, guaranteed shore leave once the vessels make port etc.

Also he usually has the Seneschal of the group (that would be my character) to shuffle the fleet rosters a lot (ferrying crew ratings from one vessel to another vessel or replacing them altogether with new members etc.). That way he makes sure that dissident groups with "former allegiances" don't stand a chance of forming aboard any vessel, because most crew members either don't know eachother at all, or the few crew members who do know eachother are posted at stations far away from eachother on the vessel so they have little opportunity to meet and plot against the officers.

Of course, this process takes time everytime we do it, but the prospect of having more vessels flying under the dynasty's flag pretty much convince the entire group that spending the year or so time it takes to make each new vessel fully operational and loyal to the cause is worth the effort. And so far, it has, because the rules haven't mentioned aspects of upkeep costs or anything similar, so the time invested pretty much guarantee's a win/win situation.

I want to bring about some changes to that trend.

It sounds good to lower the groups profit factor to resemble that the new ship have a upkeep. But having 2 ships instead of one should also bring in a faster profit if they are doing trade runs that need cargo hold or in other way can take advanges of 2 ships. So in the end bring in alot faster profit than normal.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Wow. That's far more practical than any of my players would be. The mixing up of crews would probably be the clincher, especially in the short term, although the odds are that it would lower the Morale of the entire fleet (the effect per ship would be far less, so it's still a better deal).

Hmm... Well, I can see the increased number of hulls imposing a fairly significant penalty to PF. The costs of running a fleet are, if memory and analogy from the Golden Age of Sail serve, roughly a function of the square of the number of vessels, particularly if they don't have universally compatible/interchangeable spare parts. The increased redundancy and flexibility afforded by the number of hulls would tend to counteract that somewhat, and would theoretically allow the Dynasty to attempt and complete multiple simultaneous Endeavours by assigning key members of the Dynasty a ship apiece and sending them off alone.
Possibly you could divide the 'extra' PF (for Achievement points over and above the threshold) by the number of ships in the fleet?

Certainly you should require upkeep tests for repairing and refitting the crippled prizes.

The thought also occurs that while moving crew around and breaking up potential groups of mutineers is good from the point of view of personnel integration and morale, it's not going to be a particularly good way of maintaining the quality of the crews. The spacers on each ship are going to have worked together for a while, they'll know each other's quirks and work patterns, not to mention the customs that will have developed aboard that particular ship. Mix them up with a group of strangers and you're pretty much asking for culture shock and resentment, plus inefficiency as they get used to the customs and traditions of their new home (or develop entirely new ones as part of the 'ghetto culture' you're effectively creating), and learn to work with their new shipmates. In addition, the fact that pretty much all starships in 40k are unique constructions, even within the same class, means that moving crews from ship to ship is going to degrade their performance while they learn to work with the new ship, and how its' machine spirit's quirks differ from what they are used to.
So, upkeep tests or degrade crew quality/morale while they settle the Lilliputian bigendian/littlendian rivalries between disparate groups from varying ships of origin, and possibly a second upkeep test to see whether they can figure out how to get the best performance out of the ship and its' machine spirit(s) (or at least, the same level as the original crew), with failure degrading crew quality during a shake-down period?

One idea is just start setting them against vessels they wouldn't want to steal (Or at least shouldn't if they are sane.) The pirate ship that when boarded they discover the halls are plastered with symbols of Dark Gods and the machine spirit is a hideous twisted beast. An Xenos ship with technology entirely beyond the players comprehension (possibly complete with regenerating crew - Necrons) or technology that just shouldn't work (orks.) Some of these ships could be considered to have bonuses to defences against hit and run attacks anyway whether it is crew which is inately better than human at close quaters combat or odd ship design making it hard to work out the vital areas.

That being said personally my preference would be to have plots about things going wrong rather than just mechanical effects, turn the growing fleet into a hassel and a challenge on occasions.

1) The growing fleet inspires some individual/group* who want's a ship to try to steal, provoke a mutiny etc in one of the ships ot the fleet. Then try to flee with it while the characters are distracted. If the players want their ship back they are going to have to track it down(Similarly this could be done with the officers the players promote on the ships taking their chances for sepearate glory and fame.)

*(Pirate Captain, down on the luck Rouge Trader, Radical Imperial cult etc)

2) When they captured the ships what the Senechesel never realised that amoung the crew of one of the ships hid a cult to the fell gods themselves, these cultists are now scattered across the fleet and to make matters worse these splinter cults have been growing recruiting from those isolated on their new ships. The cults have been mainly dormant, recruiting and making a few hidden sacrifices but things are about to change. The latest cargo contains a cursed artefact that the cult need. The cultists plan some large distraction on the flagship (Part of me is thinking infecting the murder Servitors with the Obliterator virus would be fun (There was an old Inquisitor resource on the web about it, but stat wise either Warp Tainted Serviators (Creatures Anthema) with slightly better melee weapons or constructer more battle serviators with the a sensible weapons loadout, then add Deamonic and Regenerate to a few of them and ignore running out of ammo.)) while the rest of the cult seizes control of another vessel, and preform a dark ritual to summon their god into the ship.

A Victory will still leave the players with damage to population and moral of their ships, the murder serviator component damaged and probaly damage to the ship the cultists tried to steal. Whereas failure could result in the players losing a vessel and probaly taking damage as the deamon infested ship escapes.

3) The next ship the players capture were the survivors of a horrible plauge and now carry the contagion, by splitting up the crew as much as possible the players expose their entire crew to this super contagion which spreads rapidly though the crew, straining medical facilities and reducing the effective working population of the ships to a skeleton crew (Game terms lower population seriously ~60% on all ships while the infection still holds, with a few permenant losses to pop and moral as time go's on. Also if the players call in anywhere they are likely to provoke hostile reactions for plauge carrying.

I can find no hard rules about this subject. However, the astronomical costs of keeping even a single starship and its crew operational multiplies when you have more ships. It seems obvious that the Dynasty with a lot of starships will need more endeavers to keep it running. It is not cost efficient to do a lesser endeaver with a huge fleet. You are probably better of with splitting the fleet and let them do their own endeavers. Of course the NPC's will be less effective then the PC's will ever be.

You could rule that the upkeep of each vessel in the Dynasty costs profit to begin with. For example:

Fleet upkeep:

1: Transport

2: Armed Transports and raiders

3: Frigates

5: Light Cruisers

10 Cruiser

The original vessel not included in this fleet upkeep. This way, your Dynasty better make sure they got plenty of endeavers to keep it from going bankrupt. But more endeavers mean more Glory and more opportunity for Profit. So it should balance out in the end.

LOL with these rules no RT would EVER trying to amass a fleet.

-10 for a cruiser so for a fleet with 20 cruisers you would have -200 profit factor? check out the little table somewhere in the RT rulebook, what 170+ profit factor really means in terms of "fluff"

if you only have 1 cruiser, does it have an impact on your PF? no. so why should 2 have an impact. you can however make upkeep tests, when your other ships getting damaged. but reducing the PF just because you are trying to expand is ridiculous.

vogue69 said:

I agree, penalising pcs for managing to get a flotilla together is not only silly (jn that it doesn't really make any sense when running one ship isn't costing any PF loss), but it also kinda goes against the aim of the game; to be profitable and get a flotilla.

I do accept however the pcs rocking about in a big battle fleet does present some unusual challenges to we GMs - if nothing else it's going to start an escalation in nastiness and size of enemy forces just to keep things challenging.

My suggestion is that the pcs should be given the option of using their subordinate ships to guard their ongoing money making ventures (mines, trade routes, colonies etc), with the acceptance from the GM that if a misfortune comes up which would otherwise impact on the pc's PF a random check should be made to check if the area of the pc's wealth impacted is guarded - and if it is the attack is beaten off and no PF is lost. This means the pcs are still masters of their own assets, they can chose to split their forces to guard and husband resources, or they can take the risk and have the ships with them - or as I suspect will occur with my group, a bit of both.

Okay, here's a few ideas:

Read the section on Destroying Ships in the sidebar on page 220. It is your option as GM to reduce any ship taken past 0 Hull Integrity to an unsalvagable hulk.

Loose lips sink ships: Every time these captured crews hit port, they're in seedy bars telling everyone how the Dynasty took their ship by teleporting over murder servitors. Ergo, enemy vessels start doing detailed auguries to locate the teleportarium and servitor bays to take them out with their first critical hits.

Hidden officers: Have the slain captain of one of the ships have been a stand-in. One of the ships in their fleet has a high-born captain reduced to nothing and driven insane by the need for vengance hiding in the lower decks. He has the ancient access codes to the machine spirit and a crazy plot involving the Gellar fields and warp transit. Can the explorers piece together the mystery before one of their ships just...vanishes?

Rebellion: It was awful nice of the explorers to give an npc officer captaincy of his own ship. Too bad he decided to cut off on his own during a fleet warp transit to strike out on his own. Do the explorers continue working their endeavors, or take the time off to go hunt him down and bang up their own ship?

Oh, and for added fun, the traitor captain knows the command codes to their murder servitors and the frequency of their teleportariums. How do you fight someone you taught your secrets?

Misfortunes, Misfortunes, Misfortunes: Whenever the explorers take a year off from making more money to reorganize their fleet, roll for a Misfortune every month. Then they'll face the hard choice of getting back to work or getting their new ship set up just right and loosing profit.

Misfortunes are the mechanic whereby the explorers suffer expenses and reminders that they have to keep income rolling in, maintain previous investments/schemes, and generally can't have everything go their way all the time. If the explorers are just taking a year off here and there arbitrarily, this campaign could really use Misfortunes to remind them that their Dynasty needs the to be out doing something to bring the profit rolling in.

Misfortunes start on page 283. Read up on them.

Xeno/Chaos Vessels: Run a story arc involving lots of encounters with Ork or Chaos Renegade vessels. Ork ships can't be taken by non-Orks, and taking over a ship full of mutant abominations and demon-possessed junior officers would be foolish in the extreme. Even if they did find a way to make the Chaos filth work for them, they probably wouldn't be reliable. And having a Warp-tainted raider in the fleet should reduce the Morale of every other vessel. And trying the mix-the-crews trick with tens of thousands of betentacled, fanged mutants is a good way to reset the maximum morale of all your ships ludicrously low. Then there's the problem that a captured Chaos vessel (or Ork vessel hired on as mercenaries...even at gunpoint) would likely turn traitor in the middle of your formation in the very next combat.

Use these adversaries (as well as some Yu'Vath and/or other xenos you just make up) to reduce the numbers of 'lootable' ships they fight without reducing the amount of conflict. And given that the explorers have a small fleet of extra ships, you can really go for the throat on those - as a total party kill will only happen if you destroy the flagship. Have enemies wolfpack up and focus on one escort, blow it up, the flee to disengage. Whittle the ships down by severely crippling their 'spares' and forcing them to choose between going out to make more profit, or finding a way to salvage their smoking hulks. Oh, and time wasted dragging ships back to a dock, purchasing replacement components, and running repairs should of course result in more Misfortune rolls.

I agree with some of those suggestions, though I think monthly misfortune rolls is unnecessarily harsh personally. I'm opting for an annual misfortune roll as a rule, possibly six monthly if it ever seems like the pcs are resting on their laurels.

Adam France said:

The idea of my suggestion was that the Dynasty is expanding. The rules of the book are written with the mindset that the RT got a single voidship, perhaps 2 or 3. Not the fleet the OP is facing in his campaign. For smaller dynasties, I see no reason to add more rules.

When you do multiple endeavers at the same time, one run by the PC's, the rest run by NPC's, you will find that the upkeep of the fleet is not such a big deal. Multiple endeavers mean more chance of profit, offsetting the costs of the fleet. Until and unless they got a big endeaver where they got a need for their big fleet. You can rule that when engaged on such a big endeaver, the upkeep of the fleet is already calculated in the amount of profit you can make.

Sister Callidia said:

Going with your solution, it would be easier to simply assume the other ships captured by the PC's are off engaged in other profit making endeavors for the dynasty that, for all intents and purposes, pays for their upkeep. If the PC's desire, they can assign a specific endeavor that could earn some Profit to the ships in their fleet, but such can add problems as well as is the case of most endeavors run solely by NPC's, but that's the price of more profit for little PC risk I reckon. If pulled off of their normal endeavors that pay for their upkeep and formed into a single flotilla to engage in a single endeavor, then an upkeep test would be required, but the profits for such an endeavor might offset that if the endeavor is big enough. That would definitly encourage the PC's to only call in the fleet for really big undertakings, get them to be selective with which ships they call in to maximize Profit vs Cost, and have them off doing other things they can't be bothered with at all other times instead of tooling around with a massive flotilla to to do the RT equivalent of running to the corner store.

vogue69 said:

Seriously, if you have had the opportunity to amass 20 Cruisers then naturally you should have had the opportunity to amass points to PF during that time as well, so the penalties and bonuses should take eachother out.

Also, sometimes it's not advisable to keep an entire fleet of ships. Sometimes the ships will just cost money instead of generating money (like when they just sit at anchor and have nothing to do). Other times it is preferable to have a fleet of ships under your flag (like when you try to secure a trading post or special location with valuable resources that are under constant threats of pirate attacks or xenos activity).

It would be plain idiotic of a Rogue Trader to simply hoard a bunch of vessels without any sort of plan or procedure to make sure that every vessel is put to good use and earn some sort of income. Otherwise they are just going to cost money. Fuel and docking fee's aren't free you know, and considering the space required to keep an entire starship in good condition and the constant maintenance needed, resources are going to be bled dry if the Rogue Trader can't find a way to pay for having several vessels.

vogue69 said:

No it's perfectly sensible because it is assumed that the groups current profit factor is tied to the starting vessel in question (hence why big ships force you to start with a lower PF, while smaller ships allow you to begin with more PF).

If I wanted to be completely meticulous about it, each vessel should have it's own PF and be completely independent of whatever PF the group have amassed with another vessel (because this would represent the upkeep costs appropriately).

But that's too much bookkeeping for my tastes, so docking the overall PF is perfectly reasonable. Just because you're a Rogue Trader it doesn't mean you can collect ships like they were model ships and expect them not to cost a single dime in upkeep...

Varnias Tybalt said:

The more I think about docking PF the better it sounds - it is simple, requires no bookkeeping and it just makes sense

Sure that extra cruiser can allow you to move more cargo/start new trade routes but that extra ship is going to hinder you while it is being refitted, it may not always be running and generating a profit and any extra profit generated has to be weighed against the upkeep of running extra ship/s

As my group has also recently begun expanding its fleet (Started with a frigate, have now gained two raiders), I have been wondering much the same thing. Here's what we've been doing so far.

1) Population and Moral.

Your own ships crew has known your dynasty for generations and is fairly loyal. If bought a ship and crewed it with a bunch of pirates off Footfall (the rules presented in the book for acquiring new crew pop. represent pretty much this), then you cannot expect such loyalty. If you captured the ship by convincing the crew to mutiny, then you should expect them to be mutinous.

We haven't used hard and fast rules for this yet, but I'd consider having some combination of a penalty to max moral or to moral loses. This penalty is reduced if you've used veteran members of your old crew as officers (which starts to hurt you flagship if you do it to often), and is reduced further if crewed by members of the party with leadership abilities (the command skill or Air of Authority).*

This makes a mutiny much more likely, and since the captain of the crew would be using their own skill to resist (only 30 if competent) a mutiny is a serious danger.

Even without this rule, maintaining moral and population becomes harder has your fleet expands.

2) Splitting up your Explorers.

A ship without a skilled party member is going to be much weaker than one that is. Compare your groups BS, Pilot, Tech-Use, and Command to that of the crews (for most i'm guessing 30). Unless your playgroup is huge, there will limit to the number of ships the group can utilize.

3)Outfitting a ship with a navigator and astropath is not easy.

Circumstances made this especially hard for my group (only 2 navigators and 6 astropaths in total), but this is limited resource for any group. Also, I'd say that acquring more definetly takes more than just a few die rolls. Other posters have talked about this so I won't talk to much.

4) Multiple Upkeep Rolls.

The book already mentions needed to make upkeep rolls for equipment including ship components. More ships means more components to maintain.

*To throw some potential numbers around. For crews uptained by force or similar means there is -10 penatly to Max Moral, and all moral loses are doubled. If the command staff is loyal instead increase all moral loses by 2. If commanded by a PC leader, it is a -5 penalty to max moral, and increase all loses by 1.

For piratical scum obtained at foot fall there is no penalty to max moral, but all moral loses are increased by 2 (1 with veteran command staff, no increase if crewed by a PC).

This may not be necessary, I'll see how the first couple space combats go before with the new fleet first. The lack of Hold Fasts ect. may be enough.

Upkeep is built into the system (upkeep tests), whenever a ship they have becomes damaged, they will need to make an upkeep test (this represents them getting ti fixed, replacing crew, etc). If they fail the upkeep test, there's a chart for what happens, one of the things is downgrade it or lose 5 profit factor permanently. 5 PF is alot, but not such a significant amount where they won't be able to replace it with proper endeavors. An upkeep test is just another procurement test at the same value as they'd have to make to get it, so sure, they can board/capture an enemy ship, it's theirs, getting it fixed will require an upkeep test, if they fail it, and don't want to scuttle it, it may cost them 5 PF. Same goes for overusing the murder servitors (which are an expendable commodity like ammunition).

BrotherHostower said:

Yeah, but those tests are mostly for when the ship has sustained heavy damage after a major battle. It doesn't handle much of the everyday logistical problems and the handling of re-supply.

Granted, these issues might be on the lower end of headaches if you have just a single vessel, but once the group of Explorers start to expand their operation to encompass an entire fleet rather than just one vessel, I think it's appropriate to make these issues show some effect. Handling a fleet should be more costly and more problematic than the handling of a single vessel.

Heck, im not a real starship commander, but after having played eve online for countless hours, I know that even in an overly simplified computer game it's hard to coordinate an entire fleet of space ships and making sure that your interstellar corporation is running smoothly and generates profit.

So, one ship = easier to handle and manage, upkeep presents less of an issue.

Several ships = could potentially earn you more profit from certain endavours, you have access to tactical flexibility and you can even bring the full might of your fleet to bear if a certain enemy warrants that much firepower. The drawbacks are that a fleet of vessels is going to be more costly and difficult to manage.

Of course, if any ship sustains heavy damage during combat, then standard upkeep tests will be required as the ones you have described in addition to the "every day logistics".

Except that this game is built around the concept that you don't have to bother with petty things like that. You don't need to keep track of ammunition for things like that, it's assumed profit factor takes care of things like gas and food. Doing upkeep checks for damage is just one of 3 suggestions for reasons for upkeep tests.

BrotherHostower said:

For ONE vessel, yes (because you essentially "buy" the vessel in the beginning of the game due to the fluctuating number in starting PF depending on how big and outfitted ship you take). But for several, you should get some headaches.

And like I said, I don't feel like keeping track of an individual PF number for each and every vessel. It's easier to just dock the overall PF. The players should'nt complain, they've just gotten a completely new ship to their fleet roster. Paying a small amount of PF in order to get it function properly is a bargain compared to all the nasty misfortunes I could justifiably toss in to make their lives difficult.

Also, do note that im not the permanent GM. We take turns in my group, so any negative modifiers I make will by extension cause my character headaches as well, so I don't want anyone to accuse me of "GM abuse" or anything like that, because it wouldn't be a fair accusation.

FFG are you listening?

Rogue traders, Fleets, managing resources/profit, combat, zones of control....

This sounds like it could make a great board game.

Oh my ...and the minitures that would come with the game ...ooooOOOooOOOO!

Troy812 said:

To be fair, I actually wondered why FFG didn't extrapolate on these matters during the inception of the Profit Factor system in the first place. Though it could just be because of limited space in the book (they did mention that several sections had to be cut).

Still, I think most people would agree that managing a business veunture incorporating a fleet of vessels rather than A vessel is very different. A vessel requires you to go from point A to point B and do whatever it is you do there. And then perhaps go back to point A and sell the goods you acquired or claim the reward for a particular piece of information etc. etc.

That's what the core game seems to be about if you toss a glance at the rules and the general philosophy of it. But I think that others or new rules would be appropriate for larger scale business management and fleet management. And it doesn't really matter if the group of explorers can be expected to have a veritable army of advisors, assistants, bean counters and so on to do the hard part of the job. The Explorers will still have to sift through and made many decisions for themselves. After all they are supposed to be an active part of their own business venture, not just some silent investor schmuck who just sits back and hope that the army of incompetents below him/her works everything out.

Granted, I suppose it could make for a fun boardgame. And to be completey honest I can actually see some use for similarly "boardgamey" aspects in Rogue Trader that they did for WFRP 3rd edition. If at least to handle these types of things on a larger scale. Though that's not saying that I don't beleive it couldn't be handled the "traditional" way either.

After all, many RPG's before Rogue Trader have included concepts and rules for large scale business management.

I might point out that some of the adventures that have been published by FFG actually REQUIRE a fleet to complete. (Whispers on the Storm, anyone?). It's nearly impossible to do this adventure with only one ship, and very difficult with only three ships (Unless they're all cruisers). That's not including the NPC ships you can call in for aid, unless the GM gives you a BOATLOAD of system ships.

My players did the dauntless/Into the Maw boarding thing too. They also salavaged the Righteous Path , making the grand cruiser their flagship (and spending a year in port wander while the refit and repair took place.) After that they made a aquisition check for a large cargo transport.

So, two (upgunned) raiders, a Avenger-class Grand Cruiser, a Dauntless, and a cargo hauler. Now we do Whispers on the Storm.

End result: two raiders and the dauntless gone. (cargo hauler was wisely left elsewhere) In theory the dauntless might be salvageable, however the raiders are history (one was obliterated by a certain ship, the other crashed into the gas giant's atmosphere when it was crippled by Wasps.

End result: the GM pairs down the number of ships, the party has a good time, saving the day, and still having a cargo hauler to carry the loot away in.

Just don't do it too often, and make them occasionaly take an upkeep test on each ship (food, parts, fuel, other supplies).