I posted this on the FaD forum, but this might be a better spot...

I would apply a critical hit to the engines, mark the ship as doomed as it already on a down spiral into the plants atmosphere and start the ship with being over its system strain and hull threshold on top, but with within reason to be repairable to get some control back. So set the Hull 1 point above the threshold and the SS maybe 10 points or so.

Tell your players that it will take a few turns until the ship will break up, let them first search for tools for repairs, let them do repairs to bring the systems online enough that the pilot can start doing his job and from here begins the fun part. The ship is clearly not in a good shape and not having an engine clearly does not help, set the fall speed to 5 (lower if your pilots are not as good as I think they are), the sil is 5 apply difficult terrain rules. so a formidable check with 5 upgrades (hurra). Allow a copilot check to reduce the difficulty for the pilot check like mentioned in the additional ship actions in the starship chapter (Table 7-7: " On a succes s fu l check, each success downgrades the difficulty of the pilot's next piloting check by 1" ).

After they have successfully made their first turn, introduce the reason why the Gozanti is falling from the sky: A meteorite shower. And the ship is falling straight into the bursting and exploding dirt-rocks. Setback dice onto all following checks, the numbers depend again on the skills of your players, a good guess would be +4.

Now either the last player can try to help with his perception and astrogation skills to plot a course in advanced that is safe true the shower or take position in one of the quad-laser turrets and try clear a corridor for the ship. No matter the specific choice, allow the removal of one setback dice per success like suggested in Plot Course action. This turn pilot rolls again for piloting, this time to actually avoid a major or minor collision. Spend threats to system system or increase instead of decrease the speed of the ship. That is as well the right moment to tell the players that they better reach speed 1 or zero when they hit the ground to avoid heavy damage to themselves.

Now play a few rounds, describe how the ship gets closer to the ground, opportunities for crash landing, etc … . The mechanic will be busy to keep up the system strain of the ship in operational conditions, co-pilot, plot-course and piloting will require a lot of teamwork to bring the ship down and in the end apply the speed times 10 wounds to each player on the crash + one further critical hit to the ship. Avoid any extra hull damage, as you can only repair hull once per encounter and you used this as starter for the encounter. Criticals at the other hand are fine.

If your players have grav shuts as they should and their gear is still on the ship ... well easy way out in case you miss-judged the piloting skills. Even if they don't have some, a destiny point could arrange for the original crew to had some in storage.

Lastly, naturally don't allow them to go below speed 1 before they reach their impact turn.

Thank you! That was awesome I really appreciate it. I wanted the crash to take awhile and that'll work great.

16 minutes ago, HueyLewisNthePews said:

Thank you! That was awesome I really appreciate it. I wanted the crash to take awhile and that'll work great.

Be careful with my numbers, they are for a pretty maxed out pilot / mechanic combo, I recommend either adjusting them later if you see it becomes too tough or just doing a few checks on the dice calc to see the chances of your party. You want it challenging, not a speed 5 crash into a mountain side.

Upping the difficulty should be easy, just spend threats to increase the speed, and hand out extra system strain for "coming in to fast" to keep the mechanic bussy.

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=5&ability=1&challenge=5&setback=4

Awesome thanks for the link. Yeah one of the pilots has a ton of xp in piloting and has played the game a lot and the others are pretty new to the game itself, and only have one rank in piloting. The mechanic/pilot has a pretty high mechanic rank also so I'll play around with the calculator. Cheers

I really like this approach, but be sure you have an alternative. They could always eject in escape pods if they fail to fix the ship, pilot safely, etc.