So I'm looking at the stats for the Home One in the Lead by Example book, and I'm getting kind weird vibes from it.

The size of the Home One has been contentious for literal decades, ever since West End Games declared that the ship was the same size as the other Mon Calamari cruisers shown in ROTJ. Curtis Saxton, the guy who got LFL to change the size of the Executor after years of argument, also scaled the Home One using film evidence to be about 3,200 meters, but unlike for the Executor, LFL never really budged on the Home One and its size as recorded on Wookieepedia is still, to this day, 1,300 meters, where it's sat since 2013.

But along came Empire at War, where the game artists scaled the ship up to twice the length of an Imperial star destroyer, which is explained away on the Wookieepedia page as "hero ships are bigger"; and now Lead by Example makes the Home One out to be Silhouette 9 - a statistic it shares only with the multi-kilometer long Praetor II and Assertor-class ships - plus, it's given twice as many turbolasers (same number of batteries as the Independence, but quads instead of twins) as any of the other Mon Calamari cruisers, and eighty quad laser cannons that hadn't been listed anywhere before.

The problem is though, that the crew remained almost the same, at 5,480 total crew, and 1,200 passenger. The Praetor has 109,000 crew and 14,000 troops; the Assertor has 125,000 crew and 20,000 troops. Given that Home One shares the "Massive 3" rule with the other Silhouette 9 ships, I'm fairly certain that the Silhouette is not a typo (not that it would be the first one in an FFG book...), but the lack of adjustment for the crew size is strange. Mon Cal ships *have* always had crews on the small side compared to similar-sized Imperial vessels, but this is *really* small for something that size.

So, my question here is, what would you change about the Home One to make it work better? Bigger crew, smaller ship, or just avoid it altogether?

For most practical purpose the crew size is not really important for the narrative and furthermore the crew sizes of many imperial ships are outlandish large, especially when you compare them of similar ships from the clone wars which seem to have a much higher grade of automatisation instead of ships which fall apart without constant attention of large crews. Lastly a Preator II might be be about a magnitude bigger to a 3200m MC80 (based on a 8 km length), volume scales so much quicker than just length, so if you assume that Mon Calamari ships in general need just half the crew to those imperial ones, you would be actually in the correct ballpark, which leaves you just the sil 8 mc80s oddly big crews in comparison.

And btw, the maelstrom crew numbers are just outrageous

Heh.

The reason crew numbers are important is that personnel costs account for the lion's share of actually operating a ship, and at only 6,680 crew+troops, the Home One as typically described would cost *peanuts* to run compared to the Imperial one with its almost 47,000, despite being probably in the region of three times the mass.

...It's those damned West End Games numbers again that are screwing things up.

Right... but narrative-game-wise what does it matter?

I mean, even if you're playing a rather oddly detailed game where managing the cost of all the players expenditures, including crew salaries and benefits, it won't really matter if a cruiser is crewed by 50 or 50,000...

Also the rebels do not have an academy of conscripts to work with like the Empire does.

If it really bothers you, double Home One's crew size and then you're there. With doubling the crew you account for the larger size (and the extra command and control crew). The Alliance has to be way more efficient than the Empire, because they simply don't have the resources and also it's the Empire's philosophy to make their crew feel how insignificant they are in the big picture.

Why shouldn't there be different levels of automation? Design philosophies and tech differences between shipbuilders are enough to account for that. That's more interesting than having everything same-y and fitting into neat categories.

On 2/26/2017 at 5:49 AM, Ghostofman said:

Right... but narrative-game-wise what does it matter?

I mean, even if you're playing a rather oddly detailed game where managing the cost of all the players expenditures, including crew salaries and benefits, it won't really matter if a cruiser is crewed by 50 or 50,000...

It matters because of the difference in magnitude of the heists you have to pull off in order to keep funding your Big Good. And it matters because with a million men, the Empire can crew 25 Star Destroyers, but the Rebellion could crew 200-ish Home Ones, if they had them. And it matters because literal autism on my part.

1 hour ago, Winchester3 said:

It matters because of the difference in magnitude of the heists you have to pull off in order to keep funding your Big Good. And it matters because with a million men, the Empire can crew 25 Star Destroyers, but the Rebellion could crew 200-ish Home Ones, if they had them. And it matters because literal autism on my part.

The magnitude of heist means for most practical purpose: None because the rebellion is paying for that ship. Now if you stole that ship of the rebellion, the magnitude of your heists means again rather little, but it is more of a question how much money the employs of your organisation make for the organisation and if that is enough to justify the spendings for the cap ship. The economics at this scale are better dealt with something similar to the mass combat rules than tracking every credit.

For the empire this at the other hand matters in context of security of their ships and not in terms of cost, conscripts are cheap and they tax trillions and trillions of peoples anyway. This might be actually one of the reasons why the empire has so outlandish crews compared to when they use clones with loyalty in their genes (and biochips) while it blow up so much when stealing imperial ships or even deflection whole crews of imperial ships became so common. Traitors everywhere, so let's reduce individuality as much as possible on crew level already. That is a luxury the alliance as not to do, nor do they need to the same extend.

Old thread but I just read the book "Strongholds of Resistance", and I think I have your solution.

Page 60 it says the Independence heavy cruiser (same size as Hole One) is running a skeleton crew. Then you can find just below the rules for running a light crew, between 51 and 99% of normal crew. Then the rules for running a skeleton crew wich is the minimum, aka between 25 and 50% of norma crew number.

I won't spoil the rules but they are a good point and a good add for running Rebels lacking members.

4 minutes ago, Rosco74 said:

Old thread but I just read the book "Strongholds of Resistance", and I think I have your solution.

Page 60 it says the Independence heavy cruiser (same size as Hole One) is running a skeleton crew. Then you can find just below the rules for running a light crew, between 51 and 99% of normal crew. Then the rules for running a skeleton crew wich is the minimum, aka between 25 and 50% of norma crew number.

I won't spoil the rules but they are a good point and a good add for running Rebels lacking members.

That doesn't really work.

First of all, the Independence is *not* the same size, it's only Silhouette 8, which is the same size as the Imperial-class Star Destroyer or the MC80 Liberty type from the core rulebook. (I *think* Independence is supposed to be the wingless variant of the Liberty that was seen in RoTJ. Note that the other, non-MonCal, Silhouette 8 ships have crews in the tens of thousands, while the MC80 types have less than 5,000.

The Home One is Silhouette 9, and the only other ships that size are the Assertor-class and the Praetor II, which are Seriously Huge Investments in Personnel (100k+). Even allowing for all of the MonCal ships to be a little on the small side for their Silhouette rating, I would still expect any Silhouette 9 ship to have a bigger crew than a Silhouette 8 ship. A 5000-ish crew is ridiculous enough when the comparable ships are running on 37,000. It's beyond ludicrous when the other ships are running on 109,000 to 150,000.

Also, the listed crew is *not* the skeleton crew, it's the crew you need to run the ship without any penalties. Running a silhouette 9 warship that's more powerful and harder to kill than a Star Destroyer on about one tenth the crew with no penalties is really OP.

Something is strange cause the Independence is listed as a Class : Home One in its description, still page 60 of Strongholds of R.

6 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

Something is strange cause the Independence is listed as a Class : Home One in its description, still page 60 of Strongholds of R.

Independence

As each Mon Cal cruiser is a unique ship, it becomes hard to determine the type and class by the look of it, they all look different even within the same class.

Still the whole LbE MC80a is an oddball, with those 80 Quad-Laser Cannons added to the 78 regular guns, that sil 9 size which assumed the non-canon 3200m length and using a rather heavy different profile from the Independence, while still maintaining the crew for the 1100m version, but not adding any heavy guns either, just rather useless anti-fighter guns which are best not touched at all.

1 minute ago, SEApocalypse said:

Independence

As each Mon Cal cruiser is a unique ship, it becomes hard to determine the type and class by the look of it, they all look different even within the same class.

Still the whole LbE MC80a is an oddball, with those 80 Quad-Laser Cannons added to the 78 regular guns, that sil 9 size which assumed the non-canon 3200m length and using a rather heavy different profile from the Independence, while still maintaining the crew for the 1100m version, but not adding any heavy guns either, just rather useless anti-fighter guns which are best not touched at all.

The Home One *does* have more heavy guns than the Independence - the turbolasers are all quads, rather than twins. I realize that does not actually mean that the ships will do twice as much turbolaser damage due to how the Linked rule works, but it has the *potential* to do so. If you roll a godawful amount of Advantage results.

Also note that the game rules treat all heavy turbolasers equal, and that I had to invent my own stat lines for the seriously big guns on Fractalsponge's original creations, because under the game rules a quad super-heavy would have better potential damage output than a twin ultra-heavy. (They probably still do given that my rules basically just adds 1 point each in Damage, Breach and Slow-Firing without changing anything else.)

1 hour ago, Winchester3 said:

Also note that the game rules treat all heavy turbolasers equal, and that I had to invent my own stat lines for the seriously big guns on Fractalsponge's original creations, because under the game rules a quad super-heavy would have better potential damage output than a twin ultra-heavy. (They probably still do given that my rules basically just adds 1 point each in Damage, Breach and Slow-Firing without changing anything else.)

There are some ships that have weapons that differ from the norm. Look at the turbolasers on the Dreadnought and the Bulk Cruiser for examples. While both of those present inferior models of the weapons, it's not impossible to have superior versions too.

42 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

There are some ships that have weapons that differ from the norm. Look at the turbolasers on the Dreadnought and the Bulk Cruiser for examples. While both of those present inferior models of the weapons, it's not impossible to have superior versions too.

Yeah, the Raider-class corvette has Accurate 2 on its twin heavy laser cannons, as an example of a stock improvement. The thing is though that the weapons I wrote the additional stat lines for are supposed to be to heavy turbolasers what heavy turbolasers are to light turbolasers, and after running the numbers I don't really get that idea out of them. (Basically, against armor 9 ships, all kinds of turbolaser except light turbolasers do an equal amount of damage per gun, per combat round. Above armor 9, the bigger the gun the more damage per combat round; below armor 9, the smaller the gun the more damage per combat round. This is mainly due to the reduction in rate of fire, if I dropped the extra Slow-Firing the damage for the big guns would skyrocket...)

2 hours ago, Winchester3 said:

The Home One *does* have more heavy guns than the Independence - the turbolasers are all quads, rather than twins. I realize that does not actually mean that the ships will do twice as much turbolaser damage due to how the Linked rule works, but it has the *potential* to do so. If you roll a godawful amount of Advantage results.

Also note that the game rules treat all heavy turbolasers equal, and that I had to invent my own stat lines for the seriously big guns on Fractalsponge's original creations, because under the game rules a quad super-heavy would have better potential damage output than a twin ultra-heavy. (They probably still do given that my rules basically just adds 1 point each in Damage, Breach and Slow-Firing without changing anything else.)

The LbE version has added quad laser cannons, that is the canon type from the millennium falcon, 80 of them. I was not referring to the upgrade from twins to quad-heavy turbolaser batteries. Upgrading the turbolaser makes sense, adding 8 useless quad-laser cannons is super odd, especially as you could replace them all for turbolasers, which would increase the firepower of the ship by 30% to 50%. It is an oddball in the RPG stats.

And btw, heavies do 11 damage, breach 4, crit 3, slow firing 2 at long-range, while mediums do just 10 with breach 3 and slow firing 1. Meaning against armor 10 with two successes you do 7 damage per shot, instead of 5 damage per shot, that is 14 vs 15 damage in 6 rounds or 28 vs 30 damage if you alternate between ventrals and dorsals or port and starboard cannons. So whoever wrote those rules made the heavies to less damage than the mediums on armor 10, I would assume this is even intentionally to make heavies something which is only good against super capitals which go beyond armor 10.

With armor 11 it is 12 vs 12 damage. With armor 13 this changes to 4 and 2 damage per shot and 8 vs 6 damage in 6 rounds. With armor 14 it becomes 3 vs 1 damage. I am not aware of any ship which can go above armor 14, but I would not be surprised if one of those ultra-heavy super capitals go beyond that.

Anyway, gtg …

3 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

The LbE version has added quad laser cannons, that is the canon type from the millennium falcon, 80 of them. I was not referring to the upgrade from twins to quad-heavy turbolaser batteries. Upgrading the turbolaser makes sense, adding 8 useless quad-laser cannons is super odd, especially as you could replace them all for turbolasers, which would increase the firepower of the ship by 30% to 50%. It is an oddball in the RPG stats.

And btw, heavies do 11 damage, breach 4, crit 3, slow firing 2 at long-range, while mediums do just 10 with breach 3 and slow firing 1. Meaning against armor 10 with two successes you do 7 damage per shot, instead of 5 damage per shot, that is 14 vs 15 damage in 6 rounds or 28 vs 30 damage if you alternate between ventrals and dorsals or port and starboard cannons. So whoever wrote those rules made the heavies to less damage than the mediums on armor 10, I would assume this is even intentionally to make heavies something which is only good against super capitals which go beyond armor 10.

With armor 11 it is 12 vs 12 damage. With armor 13 this changes to 4 and 2 damage per shot and 8 vs 6 damage in 6 rounds. With armor 14 it becomes 3 vs 1 damage. I am not aware of any ship which can go above armor 14, but I would not be surprised if one of those ultra-heavy super capitals go beyond that.

Anyway, gtg …

I was ignoring the quad laser cannons due to them being, as you say, mostly useless. And yeah, the design choices are really weird sometimes.

I did the math myself earlier, which is how I got the Armor 9 break even point (I was assuming 1 success on average). My numbers are otherwise mostly similar to yours. Armor 13 is the highest printed value so far, and since it's for one of the outright biggest and most massive ships available, I don't think anything will top it unless they finally stat out the Death Stars.

Interesting note: assuming an average of 2 successes (+1 weapon damage) and no advantage results, two Assertors firing broadside at each other would be dealing 30 hull trauma per turn with their turbolasers, and 5 system strain from ion damage. They'd reduce each other to wreckage in 7 rounds; 4 rounds if we add an average of two advantage. It'd take 21 combat rounds for one Assertor to disable another, due to the high armor value adding up to the damage + breach values of the battleship ion cannons.

Two Home Ones shooting at each other under the same conditions would be dealing 20 points of hull trauma and 8 points of system strain per turn, and would take 8 turns to kill each other, or 12 turns if attempting to disable.

Now thinking about it, actually if you group 5 of those quad-lasers together they become rather useful when shooting targets up to sil 5. Its a formidable check, most likely, but the MC80a Home One Class has 4 hardpoints, which makes a advanced targetting array a rather good option, while still being able to upgrade the armor for example.

You get a dice pool of 5 yellows and 1 green with a boost against 3 difficulty 2 challenge dice with 4 setbacks in the "worst case": http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=5&ability=1&boost=1&challenge=2&difficulty=3&setback=5

That is actually quite the effective anti-fighter screen from the quads, especially as the ATA adds sniper shot for extra range. I did not think about that attachment before making my comment about the uselessness of that quad laser cannons.

On 2/27/2017 at 6:26 AM, Winchester3 said:

It matters because of the difference in magnitude of the heists you have to pull off in order to keep funding your Big Good. And it matters because with a million men, the Empire can crew 25 Star Destroyers, but the Rebellion could crew 200-ish Home Ones, if they had them. And it matters because literal autism on my part.

I get where you're coming from on the autism front, I have a mild case and I get hung up on details often enougj

On 4.3.2017 at 5:09 AM, Winchester3 said:

The Home One *does* have more heavy guns than the Independence - the turbolasers are all quads, rather than twins. I realize that does not actually mean that the ships will do twice as much turbolaser damage due to how the Linked rule works, but it has the *potential* to do so. If you roll a godawful amount of Advantage results.

Yes, but Independence's guns can fire into three arcs, Home One's only into one.That means that Independence can concentrate fire and do way more damage, Home One can only use all her guns when surrounded. Which isn't necessarily the spot that you want your command ship in.

2 hours ago, Spraug said:

Yes, but Independence's guns can fire into three arcs, Home One's only into one.That means that Independence can concentrate fire and do way more damage, Home One can only use all her guns when surrounded. Which isn't necessarily the spot that you want your command ship in.

That has to be laziness on someone's part, damned near every other ship in every other book has multiple arcs listed for everything. It's one of the problems I have with the FFG format of writing ships up - putting all the turrets of a single type in one line means the fire arc listings get really damned long.

Of course, this sort of thing isn't exactly new in Star Wars RPGs either, I have books from the old WEG games which had similar issues...

33 minutes ago, Winchester3 said:

That has to be laziness on someone's part, damned near every other ship in every other book has multiple arcs listed for everything. It's one of the problems I have with the FFG format of writing ships up - putting all the turrets of a single type in one line means the fire arc listings get really damned long.

Of course, this sort of thing isn't exactly new in Star Wars RPGs either, I have books from the old WEG games which had similar issues...

Long is not the issue, readability is when you are actually trying to shoot something. Listing just the weapons without arcs and afterwards listing for all 6 arcs what actually is avaible would be much better from a practical purpose. Though the fire arcs look like a typo on the MC80a Home One type

"Fire Arc Forward, Port or Starboard; Damage 11 …", they literally forget the AFT arc weapons in the writeup, and it looks like they meant "Forward and (Port or Starboard)", meaning that most weapons should be able to fire forward. If the mean separate arcs they always us OR, comma lists are for a list of arcs that those guns can use. So the port and starboard guns can both fire forward too.

Or not, as the scheme is completely broken with the ions

HEY FFG CAN WE HAVE SOME EDITING FOR OUR MONEY PLEASE! ;-)

Another case for rules question.

I'm about to start a game with the PCs as the bridge crew aboard Home One (set during the TFA era, so should be fun) and I must have read over the entry six or seven times trying to work out what FFG means here. My personal instinct is to say that the Forward Batteries can fire to either side, while the Port and Starboard Batteries can fire Forward, but not across the ship (mostly for narrative reasons).

Of course, if they're fired on from the rear, they're gonna have a bad day...

1 minute ago, SEApocalypse said:

Long is not the issue, readability is when you are actually trying to shoot something. Listing just the weapons without arcs and afterwards listing for all 6 arcs what actually is avaible would be much better from a practical purpose. Though the fire arcs look like a typo on the MC80a Home One type

"Fire Arc Forward, Port or Starboard; Damage 11 …", they literally forget the AFT arc weapons in the writeup, and it looks like they meant "Forward and (Port or Starboard)", meaning that most weapons should be able to fire forward. If the mean separate arcs they always us OR, comma lists are for a list of arcs that those guns can use. So the port and starboard guns can both fire forward too.

Or not, as the scheme is completely broken with the ions

HEY FFG CAN WE HAVE SOME EDITING FOR OUR MONEY PLEASE! ;-)

Another case for rules question.

Most of the time the "or" is only repeated for each group if there are multiple arcs per group of weapons. I don't think I've ever seen "Forward or Port or Starboard or Aft" anywhere. The "and" for the ion cannons is a definite typo though, as is the lack of an aft arc for the turbolasers. Very strange.

5 minutes ago, ColonelCommissar said:

I'm about to start a game with the PCs as the bridge crew aboard Home One (set during the TFA era, so should be fun) and I must have read over the entry six or seven times trying to work out what FFG means here. My personal instinct is to say that the Forward Batteries can fire to either side, while the Port and Starboard Batteries can fire Forward, but not across the ship (mostly for narrative reasons).

Of course, if they're fired on from the rear, they're gonna have a bad day...

At some point I want to make my own system for writeups with more detail than the games in current production allows using the clock system. A Star Destroyers's big guns would have a fire arc of 12-4 (starboard) or 8-12 (port), and the cigar-shaped Indepencence or Home One types would have multiple broadside fire arcs (12-2, 1-3, 2-4, 3-6 to starboard, 6-9, 7-10, 8-11, 9-12 to port) to show that they're spread over a curved surface and not as flexible as the big turrets.