Just making sure I comprehend this right, but does EACH player roll on table 1-5 (page 33) and the group adds their individual rolls together for a total profit/ship point tally, or does the group roll once (for the whole group) and go with whatever the roll is (no individual rolls or totalling)?

I think I know the answer from the RAW, but I'd like to be sure I'm not confused.

No, I beleive as it is written the GM rolls and that's the deciding factor. It also states that you can let the players elect a member to make the roll so they will feel more involved. You can, of course, just pick a starting profit factor out right as the Gm if you had something specific in mind.

That's the way I read it. I thought cumulative rolls would be illogical based on the chart (and how illogical the big numbers would be based on what I've read so far), but it's good to have clarification.

We let the Rogue Trader roll on the chart, it's his fortune after all.

Individual PF might be interesting, each player increasing their own fortunes through joint endeavours. Might make the game a little more competitive, though starting with a large fleet is the main downside there.

The group as a whole rolls once on the table to determine shippoints and profit-factor for the whole group. Else every group would fly a battleship AND got a profitfactor for 150+ right from the start... which of course is not how it's ment to be.

It's not just the Rogue Trader's stuff, either, or at least it's not just the Rogue Trader player 's stuff, it's the whole playgroup and Rogue Trader has done quite a decent job of emphasizing that the players should co-operate so that their characters make sense as a group, will work with each other, have links to each other and so on.