The Skypray is good only if the pirate plan to take over the ship and fly it somewhere, if they only want to plunder the cargo, it's too small.

Seems to be the general consensus that fighters aren't the best choice for Pirate groups. Can fill a roll, but it's not the best fit.

Like the suggestion of the Skipray Blastboat. Real big fan of the M22-T Krayt Gunship also

It's not a fighter, but the 4R3 Light Assault Transport is tailor-made for pirates. It looks like an unarmed freighter and then pops out serious firepower along with a boarding tube and 16 passengers (a big boarding party) and the ability to haul off 80 EC of loot (not a tremendous amount, but it's good for high-value items).

Most of the pirate groups I recall from both Legends and Canon used fighters. I would go for Y-Wings, Hyperdrive modded Cloakshapes, Starviper M-2s and R-41s for Ion cannon equipped fighters tat have offical FFG stats.

5 hours ago, RogueCorona said:

Most of the pirate groups I recall from both Legends and Canon used fighters. I would go for Y-Wings, Hyperdrive modded Cloakshapes, Starviper M-2s and R-41s for Ion cannon equipped fighters tat have offical FFG stats.

Exactly. Isn't the strategy to get those fighters' ion cannons to disable the ship? And then dock your larger vessel - or a large shuttle or transport - to the disabled ship to liberate its cargo? (And then, of course, leave before any authorities arrive?)

Note: I haven't run this type of scenario in EotE yet. But this kind of thing was a staple of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter PC games.

I'd imagine it's much faster to disable a ship them fly/tow it into hyperspace than move all the cargo across to your own ship.

20 hours ago, Lareg said:

The Skypray is good only if the pirate plan to take over the ship and fly it somewhere, if they only want to plunder the cargo, it's too small.

You move in with the blastboats and a boarding transport, then bring in a bigger ship for cargo and hostages once the target and her crew are subdued.

Works well and actually has the advantage of keeping you mothership out of the mess, allowing it to avoid identification, counterboarding, and allowing you to just use an ordinary cargo ship instead of a suspicious looking warship....

15 hours ago, Harlock999 said:

Exactly. Isn't the strategy to get those fighters' ion cannons to disable the ship? And then dock your larger vessel - or a large shuttle or transport - to the disabled ship to liberate its cargo? (And then, of course, leave before any authorities arrive?)

Note: I haven't run this type of scenario in EotE yet. But this kind of thing was a staple of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter PC games.

Often but not always. When the Wraiths were undercover as pirates they just used lasers to take out their target's comm transmitter and engines then gave the targets the choice to surrender or be destroyed before bringing in a transport to pick up loot.

On 1/30/2017 at 1:07 PM, Wonder Lemming said:

The Skipray Blastboat looks like a good choice too, ion cannons, decently tough, and you can fit a boarding party in the back too.

If you can get it away from the Empire! In my games, Skiprays were very desirable and decently hard to come by. Mostly my players just tried to survive against them

Needless to say, obtaining one would be a huge win for any pirate group. Way better than any starfighter.

Okay, my Cr2.

My character would want a Y-Wing, if our group got involved in piracy. (note the two conditions in the previous sentence).

The Y-Wing is a really interesting multi-role vehicle with mounts laser canons, proton torpedo launchers, and ion canons .

If you can pull it off, the object is to seize the victim ship with minimal damage. Damage is an expense that can cut into your profit margin when you turn around to re-sell the ship, and if you can take a ship down with just ion canon's that's a plus.

The laser canons and torpedoes let you consider taking down much bigger prey.

The Y-Wing also boasts a hyperdrive, so if the operation goes pear shaped, everyone can just jump ASAP to another system without delaying your exit plan by trying to execute fighter recovery operations in the middle of battle.

I also have a preference for the BTL-S3 version. Having a turreted Ion Canon allows you to employ twice as many weapons. And our crew should be able to field enough personnel to man the -S3.

Y-Wings are awesome. Add a PC astromech and this thing is a monster and eats defenders for breakfast.

Still, disabling a ship works aswell with the aim maneuver and laser cannons, and resale values of stolen ships are rather low, the trouble with BoSS and all. Crew is on top annoying, not worth enough for ransom, but you can't kill them either as a reputation for pirates is the most important thing. If the crew believes they are good as dead they will fight to the death and self-destruct their own ship. Heck, even if your reputation is stealing the ships, they might punch the escape pod and leave a bomb as surprise.

Reputation is key.

Still Y-Wings are great, cheap, punch way above their weight class and are, for fighters, rather sturdy too. Great for pirates who are short on cash, but high in spirit.

All this talk about impracticality. Bah! This is Star Wars! If your choice is between logic and cool starfighter dogfighting, then by gum, pick cool starfighter dogfighting!

That said, if you want to inject a LITTLE reasoning into it, I would disagree about kitting pirate starfighters out with any ion weapons or with any intention of disabling a larger ship - that is what the pirate gunship is for. It seems to me that pirate starfighters are most likely to be a defense against escorts that may threaten the pirates' extremely vital gunships, whether those escorts are starfighters or patrol boats. Hyperdrives could make them useful as an advance force, ambushing first out of hyperspace and tying up the escorts before the main gunships jump in.

Now, personally, I would pass up the Scyk and go for the HH-87 Starhopper on the next page. It's cheaper than the Scyk, has a second hard point for the pirate who likes to customise, and is way more durable on top of that, with 2 more points of armour and 2 more points to its wound threshold. It's barely slower in sublight speed, and is actually faster in hyperspace with its Class 1 hyperdrive. While its stock armaments aren't as variable as the Scyk's, its extra hard point can always be used on missiles or other weapons, which would actually make it better armed than the Scyk.

3 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

Still, disabling a ship works aswell with the aim maneuver and laser cannons...

If you disable a ship with laser cannons, though, then repairs are gonna be much more costly than if it was taken down with ion weaponry. So there is the matter of credits...and pirates do love their credits.

And it is the odd-one out that is going to commit suicide in the face of possible death. I had a GM whose NPCs committed suicide way too often. It was annoying, and felt very petty. It's like they ALL had a "If I'm going, I'll take all you M*****-F*****s down with me" complex.

23 minutes ago, awayputurwpn said:

If you disable a ship with laser cannons, though, then repairs are gonna be much more costly than if it was taken down with ion weaponry. So there is the matter of credits...and pirates do love their credits.

And it is the odd-one out that is going to commit suicide in the face of possible death. I had a GM whose NPCs committed suicide way too often. It was annoying, and felt very petty. It's like they ALL had a "If I'm going, I'll take all you M*****-F*****s down with me" complex.

As I said, reputation, reputation, reputation. If the passengers would have guessed the aim of 9/11 terrorists, not a single of the airplanes would have reached it's target. And thanks to escape pods it is not even suicide. If you have a reasonable expectation to not only lose your cargo, but as well your ship and life, then blowing the ship up and trying your luck with the escape pods is only logical.

Besides, the repair cost are trivial as disabling with the aim maneuver does no damage, nor does it create critical hits, it just temporarily disables systems. Might actually require less repairs than bringing the system strain up again , not that it would matter, selling stolen ships is not a very lucrative market and basically a waste of time ;-)

And btw, that "if I am going, I am gonna take you bastards with me" is a rather normal reaction. The question here is: Why did those NPCs lost all hope of survival in the first place? Was this a murderhobo group with a notoriety reaching from the inner core to the outer rim and beyond? This can be some GM problem. but it can be player induced as well … or just a prefered playstyle

Eh...in my games, laser cannons cause actual damage lol. I'm not talking about HTT, I'm just talking "your engine needs a new engine."

In answer to the question, we were not at all a group of murderhobos...and it wasn't even that the NPCs were facing death. It was just that if they were ever outnumbered or facing capture, they would just blow themselves up rather than surrender. Come to think of it, I don't think he ever had an NPC willingly surrender. And if we were able to knock one out, he would try and kill himself first thing after waking up. The GM had them come standard with cyanide pills (stormtroopers, pirates, smugglers, mercenaries, you name it, they had cyanide) until we started sweeping their mouths

All that said, I'll agree to disagree on the whole suicidal outlook. Not everyone is brave enough to fight to the death, or to take their own lives, even in the face of certain death. You've gotta play your NPCs intelligently, and consider their personalities.

At any rate, I don't believe that average ships are equipped with self-destruct mechanisms...? And I wouldn't think that many cargo/passenger ships would routinely carry around enough explosives to do the job, either. But if they're trying to lay a trap for pirates, I could definitely see that. I just don't think that this would be a standard response to pirates.

Plus, reputation might be everything, but the people you're raiding have to 1) know about your reputation, 2) have the emotional fortitude to adequately respond to the threat in the moment, and 3) have enough time to adequately respond to the threat. That's not gonna be every raid, not by a long-shot.

So I would advise against having "let's blow the ship up rather than have it fall into enemy hands" be a standard response. Every now and then it can be cool, as can the captain sealing himself on the bridge and plotting a course of collision with some planetoid (or star, if you wanna make it real interesting). But if the PC group's goal is to capture ships, and the ships keep blowing up in their face, then it gets old real quick.

Those ships have fusion or hypermatter reactors. They can blow up just splendid with as much as a mechanic check. And not just explode, but vaporize

And well, my condolence to your npcs, sounds not like a fun table when literally every npc reacts so irrational.

And let's agree to agree instead, because 1) 2) and 3) are correct. Now that does not mean that even by just being in the wrong sector you might run into better armed, more crazy freighter captains, simply because someone else is ruining business for you with his reputation or even worse, someone is coming into the territory of your merry band of pirates and completely spoils the hunting-grounds for you with a dozen massacres, which leads into your pirate group indeed running into more and more people who actually took the time to buy quad concussion missile launcher, upgrades his weapons to quad-laser cannons and bought a self-destruct button AND a Rapid Cargo Evacuation Chute, all just in case he runs into the notorious pirates of the region … and this is how pirate gangs buy or steal fighters … because that other gang cleary has to go. *grin* And a new campaign starts.
But yeah, people are indeed jerks, the "I see take a bigger loss then let see you get away with it" is a common one.

But to the aim rules: You specifically aim to disable in that case, so nah, you don't blow up the engines, you blow up the engines if roll a double triumph and spend it for that iirc or roll the fitting crit
Though as GM I would rule that taking the aim with two setbacks and triggering the critical might do the trick too, in that case the engine is gone too.

In general are the aim rules there to allow you to hit something specific in an easy way without doing actual damage, that is the price you pay for having such an incredible easy way to disable arms, engines, hyperdrives or stop someone from running away. ^_°

Aim can let you hit something specific, but it doesn't stop the weapon from having its normal effect upon whatever gets hit. If you make a called shot for component X with a laser cannon, you're not taking that component out softly, you're blowing it to hell. If you want to take it out with minimal damage, use ion cannons.

18 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

Those ships have fusion or hypermatter reactors. They can blow up just splendid with as much as a mechanic check. And not just explode, but vaporize

Agreed, but again such a thing would take time. Plus that, usually when this happens in Star Wars, it's not people trying to initiate a self-destruct, but rather either 1) the result of an enemy attack or 2) a complete accident, and now everyone has to get off the ship.

I just don't see a whole lot of this petty behavior in Star Wars. IMO, it should be reserved for highly sensitive missions, like if the pirates are trying to steal an experimental ship, or if there is classified/valuable information of some sort on the ship's logs or navicomputer. Otherwise it just doesn't feel right to me.

But to each GM his own!

17 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Aim can let you hit something specific, but it doesn't stop the weapon from having its normal effect upon whatever gets hit. If you make a called shot for component X with a laser cannon, you're not taking that component out softly, you're blowing it to hell. If you want to take it out with minimal damage, use ion cannons.

Table 6-2 Spending advantages and triumph in combat: "When dealing damage to a target, have the attack disable the opponent or once piece of gear rather than dealing wounds or strain, etc bla, bla crit table and not too excessive"

The aim thing does basically the same for two setback dice and maneuver, but I have to concede that the rules actually do not mention this and now I am little puzzled from which source the order 66 podcast and me independently have this. ( The Order 66 Podcast Episode 92 - Flight of the Navigator , QA at the end)

Is this again a hidden gem of the FAQ and I forget the source?

In the O66 episode, they were talking about aiming in personal combat, not ship combat. And healing a blaster burn is way less expensive than repairing a ship component.

But what, you're saying you disable an engine with a ship-mounted laser cannon, and magically it just starts working again when you want it to? How was it disabled in the first place if it didn't take any damage from the cannon blast?? And again, I'm not taking HTT, I'm just saying "the component is damaged to the point that it is nonfunctional (thereby disabled) and needs some parts and time to repair."

Same maneuver and mechanic checks are a thing.

It is the same maneuver, but starships aren't people.

Mechanics checks are a thing, but certain checks sometimes carry a certain cost with them. And this is an area where I would have there be a cost involved (e.g. in parts or materiel), or else some serious jury-rigging to hobble the ship to the nearest port.