My group is ready to flee Raxxus Prime (store closed, so we ended ready to fire up the engine). The Bandit is in minimal flyable shape, as none of the characters were particularly useful (Coordination/no Athletics, etc., and the Mechanic only passed 2 rolls all night), and the party's ship has one astromech and a warm body on board (the lone Force user - she came back to defend the ship while the mechanic raced back to get the Bandit's fourth engine running after fixing their ship's damage), and it took the full 30 minutes to reach this stage. As nobody has expressed an interest in space combat (the pilot left due to scheduling conflicts) I gave them the option of narrating the escape (result not revealed), but enough of them want the space battle they might try to fly out anyhow. Nobody has Gunnery so most weapons will be firing at 2 or 3 green dice (The Selonian does have 4).

If they play it out I'm expecting a loss (was probably going to go 50-50 for narrated); so I would appreciate thoughts on what sort of escape scenarios would be appropriate. They'll have one Force user on the outside with a ship that's operational, while the rest of the party (Bounty hunter, Heavy, an Mechanic) will be on the losing side along with Cratala, Harsol, and the IsoTech team.

Before doing something as potentially lethal as this may be, I'd tell the group there is a VERY high chance they won't make it. I've also had other gms do the same for me when I've engaged in high risk behavior (specifically Deathwatch when my Dark Angel sent a message from the Inquisition ship to home base. I won). Have you done this yet? After telling them they may cause a party wipe they, as a collective, may change their minds.

It's ugly. I'm not really sure how the PCs were supposed to handle quite a few elements in this book, and this is probably the most deadly. 8 guns doing 10+ damage (before Linked) per round would be rough, even if the Bandit wasn't nearly scrap. As it is, one very good round from one SPC is enough to wreck the Bandit, and the PCs have to face either 2 or 5 rounds of shooting before they can escape. The more I look at it, the more I feel the need to replace two of the Turbolaser Batteries with Ion Cannon. Damage is nowhere near as good but the target value is much lower. With the ship disabled they can be boarded, and hauled back to the Imperial base for an escape adventure, complicated by lots of civilians and their new partners.

I would minimize the escape part above the surface.

the main challenge was to fight off a few waves of enemies on the ground, while getting the ships up and running and making sure everyone is on board.

this can be epic enough so that the escape in the air can be played out in few rounds. if your group is not skilled for this, don't make that challenge too deadly - scale down the difficulty accordingly; make the foes not ready to the PCs making it up in the air at all, so the PCs have the advantage.

Now, if you need to hold the players on the ground for some more time - you can always come up with the ways to do it. for example:

- the enemies star by hitting engines/APUs with rpg or something similar, so that mechanics need to spend some time fixing the ships.

- the enemies can sneak in and temporarily disable electronics abourd the ship(s) with some sort of EMP grenade/device.

- use traps that work like docking clamps that require mechanics or computers or brute force to deal with. or perhaps this could be some sort of a "natural trap", e.g. some beast that lives beneath the surface of Raxus and feeds of the ships.

also, for anyone who's not done this adventure just yet - the third act is the weak part of this overall great book. just consider if you need it at all and re-write it to fit with your story/PCs better.

My players ran through this one a couple of months ago. And it was **** close. The PC's on the Bandit were burning through Destiny Points left, right, and center to make their escape. The Imperials focused on the Bandit , so the players on their own ship only had to deal with a few TIE fighters, but the players ship took a few hard shots, and a critical or two, in the process.
The PC's skills weren't that great for space combat (the focused entirely on 'ground' combat), but it was balanced out by my bad rolls, the entire night.
After the PC's got away, everyone had to take a few minutes....get some air...get some water...just recover from the whole situation. The players were sweating bullets, the entire time.

Could have the Imperials send a couple of TIEs after them whilst they focus on the much larger target.

As long as they stay away from the Imperial ship it should just be a matter of either being lucky enough to shoot the TIEs down or trying to get the astrogation done so they can jump out before the TIEs overwhelm them?

I'd just have the TIEs shoot them down they crash somewhere on the otherside of the planet where they're assumed to be dead.

The crashlands involves setting off an avalanche that causes an explosion which the TIE Fighter pilots think is them then reveal that Separatist ship wasn't the only wreck on the planet so with some searching they should be able to scavenge the parts to fix their ship then reveal that

thus allowing you to continue running this adventure if you want?

Honestly, I wouldn't expect the group to fail unless your dice are real lucky. Assuming the IPV-1s stagger their fire (so you get to roll dice every round) and the corvette angles shields to have 3 dice in each arc the dice pool for the IPV-1s ends up being PPABBDDSSS, resulting in about 60% hitrate. Remember you should be grouping NPC guns into 1 group and nearly always using the Imperial Gunnery Corp minion with agility 2. It's likely they get 2 boosts from aiming in the off round, but you could say they only aim once.

The weapons on the IPV-1 statblock are overpowered IMO (the turbolasers are somewhere between medium and heavy, both of which are supposed to only be on sil 6+ ships and the wikipedia article for the IPV-1 mentions turbolasers which are described as light; if I was runnjng it I'd downgrade them to light turbolaser stats) but even running as is it's still only 10 damage per hit (assuming 1 success) meaning the CR-90 can likely take 5 hits before being disabled.

Given the 60% hitrate, we can expect the corvette to take 30-ish damage during the fight (which even allows for linked to activate a couple times if there's a lucky roll and you choose). Assuming the mechanic is proficient and has a couple ranks of Solid Repairs, they'll be able to fix 4-5 hull trauma also.

The point is, I don't think the CR-90 going over hull trauma threshold is the thing which will lose them the encounter. This is especially true if you take a turn or two to shoot at the PCs' ship.

This being said, it's never bad to have a backup plan but the specifics are wide open! Does the disabled corvette crash on the planet, leading them to need to steal/build a tranport then steal/sneak on an imperial junk ship to leave the planet? Does it mean a desperate docking maneuver so everyone can pile into the PCs' ship before the IPV-1s board them? Is this an ongoing game where the PCs have some other group they can call on for help which arrives just in time? Could a battle which is going poorly be ended by trying a desperate early jump (at increased difficulty and red dice)? Since the PCs are in starships, it's extremely unlikely they will die/wipe from a failed encounter; but how the encounter ends will inform how they proceed.

I'd place a few leftover stormtroopers or ISB agents aboard the ship trying to sabotage it (and have the heavy/bounty hunter try to deal with them), throw a few things which break at the mechanic, and maybe also offer anyone in a gun a chance to disable an IPV-1s' guns.

Hope it works out!

How simulationistic you want it to be? When I GMed the BtR, I allowed PCs to escape with bandit on single piloting check (which I didn't make too hard, and all other PCs helped the pilot), because we already wanted to move on, and combat generally is the most boring part of game for us. The adventure between the book covers is nothing sacred to me.

If you want to handle the escape in more detailed way, you can e.g. Nerf the opposition (weaker weapons for ships in pursuit, etc.), or be more lenient with player ideas.

Just to return to this (we actually ran the escape before everyone's schedules fell apart for the holidays):

The Force User was the only player who wanted to go for the narrative approach, so we played it out. A couple lucky rolls took out most of the fighter cover before the IPV-1's were in range. The Concussion Missile missed - it could have had a major impact on how things turned out. Staggering the Imperial's shots helped quite a bit - more tension, and less overall damage. The freighter jumped out immediately thereafter, while the Bandit was still getting out of the atmosphere; it wasn't going to contribute very much with no real gunner on board. Both ships ultimately made it out, with less then 10HT between them. The IPV-1's were in better shape, but both were damaged.

It was about 5 minutes after the escape that anyone remembered their freighter was very heavily damaged during their arrival at Cholganna (the Yiyar got a couple great shots in). I think we started it with 75% HT remaining instead of 25%. Had any of us remembered, they might have abandoned the freighter on Raxxus.