I'd like to know your thoughts on this guys, since it's been brought up by one of my players: can a pilot operate turrets from the cockpit and, if so, do any limitations (such as Forward Arc only) apply? On the one hand, it makes sense that the turrets could be fired from the cockpit, but I'd like to make sure, especially given said pilot's near-maxed Agility and my desiring to ensure other combatants have something to do during space skirmishes.

Any input?

I don't think there's any official word on it, but there are at least 2 different ship attachments that apply to various ship weapons that might be considered: the gunner droid brain in Special Modifications, and something in Stay on Target, although the name eludes me.

Generally, though, I run it as follows: if the ship has any weapons that are forward mounted, they can be fired from the cockpit by either the pilot or copilot. If they are turret mounted with multiple firing positions, they must be manned, and cannot be fired from the cockpit.

I've allowed it if the Pilot locks the turret into facing forward only (Forward Fire Arc) then add a Setback since it wasn't made to be fired that way.

For me I take the "Yes... And" of this game seriously, I try to never say no. So I would say yes they can but apply the appropriate Setback and Upgrades depending on the situation.

Firing the turret of a Y-Wing from the pilot seat while in an asteroid field is going to be a challenge, so I would probably upgrade the check once and add 2 Setback

Firing a turret on a Nebulon from the bridge is much much easier. I would ask for a manoeuvre to change stations but impose no other restrictions.

There would be examples in between, perhaps you have a copilot, so crashing is not such a worry but you still get the Setback. Perhaps the Forward arc is in the guns range and your in a small silhouette vehicle, that's going to make it less challenging.

Ultimately it's situational, but I can't imagine a situation where No is the answer.

We have an on-screen reference for it though. In A New Hope, the Millennium Falcon blasts the TIE fighter out of the trench, causing the second to veer into Vader, freeing Luke to take the shot. The camera immediately switches to Han, who is in the cockpit with Chewie. As we know they are the only two on board, either Han fired the cannons from the cockpit or he moves with incredible alacrity. Now, as to whether he had a droid brain assisting him, or if the guns were temporarily fixed forward, I can't say, but it is definitely possible in canon.

Thinking about it a little further, I think we can take some assumptions into play; The BTL-A4 Y-Wing is specifically changed to allow a single pilot to operate the craft, and its done by fixing the turret forward. We could then assume that most freighters equipped with turrets have a similar feature to allow them to still defend themselves without gunners. As the turrets return to a "stowed" position for landing, some utilization of this feature would be used to lock the turrets in place while the pilot fires them. A droid brain would then allow the turrets to swing free by disengaging the lock when in operation. At least, that's how I would rule it.

I had this come up in my f2f game, and, while you know my thoughts already, I figured I'd leave my official agreement here: I've always run it that turrets can be "locked in place" and fired by pilots or copilots in the Forward Arc.

Was it my imagination or did Finn fire both turrets on the Falcon in TFA (even though he was manning the ventral, I vaguely remember shots coming from both in the exterior shots)? Come to think of it, maybe both turrets were slaved together, which is why when the ventral turret was damaged and could only fire forward Finn didn't just climb the ladder and enter the dorsal turret? Or I could be talking through my hat!

I think my ruling on it would be something along the lines of:

If you have multiple turrets that can fire forward, you can lock them forward and fire them as per normal.

If you want to, you can take an action to fire a turret remotely, at any arc it can normally hit, but you add a setback die. Maybe two if the vehicle doesn't have a decent fire control computer?

On 2/17/2017 at 1:31 AM, Daronil said:

Was it my imagination or did Finn fire both turrets on the Falcon in TFA (even though he was manning the ventral, I vaguely remember shots coming from both in the exterior shots)? Come to think of it, maybe both turrets were slaved together, which is why when the ventral turret was damaged and could only fire forward Finn didn't just climb the ladder and enter the dorsal turret? Or I could be talking through my hat!

I think my ruling on it would be something along the lines of:

If you have multiple turrets that can fire forward, you can lock them forward and fire them as per normal.

If you want to, you can take an action to fire a turret remotely, at any arc it can normally hit, but you add a setback die. Maybe two if the vehicle doesn't have a decent fire control computer?

no he did not.

On 17.2.2017 at 0:39 AM, Kyla said:

We have an on-screen reference for it though. In A New Hope, the Millennium Falcon blasts the TIE fighter out of the trench, causing the second to veer into Vader, freeing Luke to take the shot. The camera immediately switches to Han, who is in the cockpit with Chewie. As we know they are the only two on board, either Han fired the cannons from the cockpit or he moves with incredible alacrity. Now, as to whether he had a droid brain assisting him, or if the guns were temporarily fixed forward, I can't say, but it is definitely possible in canon.

Are we sure that he had not a pair of rebel gunners on board?

Anyway, for the Y-Wing it is suggested that the turret needs to be locked forward to allow the pilot to fire it and for the lancer-class pursuit we have an example how locking and linking weapons forward allows to fire them all together, even the tractor beam, though this requires a special targeting computer and is so far unique to the lancer. So I would assume that at the very least the locking forward should be indeed an option even without this special targeting computer, which sounds like a fantastic 1 hp mod btw.

edit: Now for using a turret in fire-arc all from the cockpit. I would be fine with that, just not from the piloting station, that sounds like an gunner station of the ship. So a clear case of "Yes, you need to switch to the gunner station (on maneuver or incidentally if you have "Let's ride") and lose access to pilot-only maneuvers. Now if the ship has no turret gunnery station in the cockpit, it still a yes … you just need to run to that turret. *g* Most of this is fluff anyway, so it is up to the players to play it like they like. Most sil 5 ships should have gunnery stations on the bridge, meanwhile it is reasonable to assume that the pilot has access to the turret controls from his seat in a Y-Wing as system redundancy is important for such ships. The same applies for flying the ship from the gunner seat in a Y-Wing, meanwhile you might have trouble with flying from the gunner seat of the aft-cannons on the ARC-170, it unlikely to have a set of flight-controls there, would be a good place to have a gunner-brain as backup there, so you can still activate the aft guns from the cockpit … so much fluff which can become part of crunch however the group wants.

To be honest I would take the opposite viewpoint of Kyla:

1. Han used the forward guns of the Falcon (the ones Lando uses in RotJ)
2. The Y-wing explicitly mentions it, assuming it is unusual and others don't.

If you still want to allow it on other models, I'd go with Blackbird or Sturn: let them pay money, or add setback dice (or upgrade the check).

20 hours ago, Daeglan said:

no he did not.

Yeah, watching it again, it was my imagination!

SEApocalypse; when Han turns up to save Luke at the Death Star, this is after he refused to join the rebellion; it rather stretches credulity, IMO, to think that he had a change of heart, then goes back to Yavin, then convinces the Rebel high command to lend him a couple of soldiers, then flies back to the Death Star to save Luke.

Another data point - in X-Wing Alliance, you start out flying a YT-2000 armed with laser cannon in a turret. While piloting the ship, the lasers fired in a fixed forward mode. You could either man the turret yourself (in which case your droid flew the ship - badly) or let the droid man the turret (in which case he fired the guns in all directions - badly).

On 25.2.2017 at 0:00 PM, AndrewGPaul said:

SEApocalypse; when Han turns up to save Luke at the Death Star, this is after he refused to join the rebellion; it rather stretches credulity, IMO, to think that he had a change of heart, then goes back to Yavin, then convinces the Rebel high command to lend him a couple of soldiers, then flies back to the Death Star to save Luke.

Did we seem him leave? I only remember seeing him packing, but never leaving the Yavin base, than the fighters launch from the hangar, everything gets messy and suddenly Han shows up like the corillian he is. The Yavin IV base had not enough pilots, but they had tons of other personal, which he could have catched up if he had his change of heart before leaving the base.

But in general I have no problem with forward locking weapons. As I said, it mentioned for the Y-Wing anyway and the lancer pursuit has even a special form of forward locking system that aligns all guns onto a single point allowing the pilot to fire all with one action. Would be a great attachment for other ships too.

Too bad the Lancer's guns suck and would be improved by simply putting a quad laser cannon on the turret rather than making up a crappy special rule.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

Too bad the Lancer's guns suck and would be improved by simply putting a quad laser cannon on the turret rather than making up a crappy special rule.

The big deal about the lancer is not that you can get a useless linked(4), but that you can trigger the tractor while nailing a ship with your lasers. It is absolutely hilarious to trap an opposing ship with the tractor. Move, Fire, hurra tractor, move out of range with the second maneuver. The target now can not follow you, unless it uses an action for the piloting check to free itself from the tractor and if does this, well one shot to worry about.

Control is one of the central elements in space combat and the lancer is great in that regard, especially as speed 5 is above the 2-4 range for range bands traveled per movement maneuver, so you get here the best deal with the lancer as well. It is a cool little ship which can be actually used by a single pilot. Should be extremely fun if you give it to a single nemesis character … the tractor will drive players mad.

On top you can use the tractor in more conventional ways and prevent the target from taking a GtA action when you start nailing it from behind. It is basically action efficiency build into the ship. It fits the X-Wing version of the ship rather nice. It is still a shame that the system is not more selective. It's a little annoying that you can not just link the tractor with the front cannons and leave the laser turret for the crew to use.

Tractor isn't supposed to work like that. If you move out of arc or range of your tractor beam, then your opponent is automatically freed because you can't maintain the beam. It's not as if it hits the target with some kind of entangling field--it produces a link between firing ship and target. And, in the case of a light tractor beam, that link is pathetically weak.

9 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Tractor isn't supposed to work like that. If you move out of arc or range of your tractor beam, then your opponent is automatically freed because you can't maintain the beam. It's not as if it hits the target with some kind of entangling field--it produces a link between firing ship and target. And, in the case of a light tractor beam, that link is pathetically weak.

Mechanically I don't see an issue with going with the first way, it surely is not the most straightforward way to assume that you nudge the enemy ship with your target beam in a way that they need to first spend a pilot action to get on course again to follow you, but it does what the tractor quality says.

Narratively I don't see one either, hitting the target with the weapons, remain the lock and prevent the opposed ship from turning around, while you past it and make your own turn. The energy fighting is working anyway without tractor beam already. So if it bothers you or you say that the TB should in that case drag along the ship in the lock to prevent the change of range bands to each other then the use with GtA together is the stronger option anyway. Applying tractor(2) is still doing the trick. Control over the battle forever unless the target can perform two piloting checks in a single turn; No escape from you.

Either way that tractor beam is awesome. And a system like this would had been perfect for the TIE-Defender and TIE-Avenger as well. Especially the TIE-Defender is in a very poor state.

Lastly, hitting TB, move maneuver to get into a position out of harm's way would still work fantastically against sil 5+ ships, even if you assume that the tractor quality automatically breaks when leaving range of the beam.