On 12.4.2017 at 3:09 PM, biggreen10 said:

This seems a bit like one of those "forces of nature" kind of like Vader. With the number of weapons emplacements, fighters, etc, a PC ship can't really hope to stand up to it. I feel like if you made stats, they'd be irrelevantly high.

The same would apply to other imperial command and super capital ships, yet we have stats for those as well and can actually use rather well, mass combat is a thing and having an army behind your back to deal with this kind of threats as well.

Now for the executor itself, I guess it is still heavier than the other super star destroyers we have already in the system, more guns, maybe even a little more more armor, etc … make sure to increase massive as well, no matter how big, a few good crits and the thing is going down, so make it not to easy to get those critical hits.

If a pirate band can both capture and operate an SSD I figure players can as well or at least end up in command of one. And as crazy as it is there actually is a pirate SSD in canon.

I would always use the mass combat rules against this ship. Doing that you don't really need it's stats, only those for certain subsystems. If you are ina Fighter/Bomber, you can never be targeted by ALL cannons at once, sou you compartionalize the ship.

There is this one X-Wing mission, that came with the GR-75. In it a Star Destroyer is firing into the fray, from off the gameboard. That worked pretty well.

13 hours ago, RogueCorona said:

If a pirate band can both capture and operate an SSD I figure players can as well or at least end up in command of one. And as crazy as it is there actually is a pirate SSD in canon.

It was a LARGE organization (yes pirates can have large organizations ) and they went out of the way trying to recruit more people to man it once they captured it (usually from victim ships they targetted); not the small team of several operatives like your players.

Black Sun and the Hutts could crew an SSD as well as could the Zann Consortium which actually did capture an SSD in Legends only to abandon it after looting the on board archives. You could fully crew sever dozen frigate or light cruisers or a couple of hundred corvettes for that same crew pool. Which do you think makes a more effective pirate fore one massive ship which can only be in one location or a fleet of smaller ships which can be covering dozens of locations simultaneously and form task forces should you need more firepower at a single location for some reason?

Not to mention the maintenance costs on an SSD are incredibly high and since the pirate group which is operating her is keeping at least some of the ships it captures rather then selling them off that cuts deeply into their potential profits.

And then there the difficluty of finding outlaw shipyards that can maintain and repair an SSD.

If the Hutts ever got their hand on an Executor SSD, they would convert it into a highly mobile black market base. That would be the biggest value to the Hutts.

I think if the hutts got thier hands on one they would build a pirate fleet around it and send it out to loot and plunder. They would of course keep their involvement completely secret. Some "independent" pirates running around that can't be traced back to them, but the money comes to them. That ship would be enough to make smaller systems simply pay up. It'd be a great protection racket.

The problem is gaining enough loot to actually profit from the ship's operations without hitting something so major a fleet is called in to hunt you down and with the cost of running an SSD finding targets both rich enough to make money rather then lose it and avoiding drawing attention from someone who can and will blow your ship out of the sky is unfeasible and not really worth the trouble.

Especially since a fleet of smaller ships would bring in more profit by allowing multiple raids at once, and be easier to maintain, and harder for targets to escape

On 5/5/2017 at 11:20 AM, Alexhurlbut said:

It was a LARGE organization (yes pirates can have large organizations ) and they went out of the way trying to recruit more people to man it once they captured it (usually from victim ships they targetted); not the small team of several operatives like your players.

Sam Whitwer actually had a similar situation. His players ended up getting control of a massive size, ancient starship. And one of the big issues they had, was not having enough crew. So a portion of the campaign revolved around the PC's trying to find NPC's to man the ship. And IIRC, they ended up finding a large number of droids to help them.

So yeah, I"d totally let the players take the ship, but I'd stress that unless they find some large numbers of NPC's to help crew the ship, it's going to be seriously limited in what it can do. They just don't have the personnel needed to utilize the ship to it's full potential. They can limp along, getting it running, and making jumps sure, but it will be slow going, and they will be seriously vulnerable for a lot of it.

One would think, for the most part, the Praetor would suffice; maybe crank that up a little bit, here and there. As said, the Executor, Lusankya, and several Eclipse-variants were ridiculously big, and armed. Even if you could mass a fleet, it would probably get stomped. Star Destroyers almost never die by "conventional" means.

EU Fates of the Big Ships

Their fail point was staffing, so I like to think they couldn't even fire too many of their guns, at once. Even Vader's time aboard the Executor, I believe, it was usually only staffed with a skeleton crew, by its massive standards. I also agree, as a space station-class vessel, it should, for the most part, be a set piece.