So one of the least explained and most complicated things you can do in this game is to have Silhouette 5+ ships fighting each other.

1. How do people streamline this, with regards to how many initiative slots a ship gets, what guns can fire each turn, etc, particularly if its a NPC ship

2. How big do you make a minion group of gunners to reflect the firepower of the ship

3. How does the concentrated barrage action interact with linked weapons

Sex in advance

Definitely check out the Order 66 Podcast episode on capital ship combat from a couple of years ago (episode 48).

1. Each PC gets a slot obviously. Beyond that it really depends on how many pc’s are on the ship. For a fully NPC ship you should have a Captain (Rival or Nemesis), then add a single NPC slot for Piloting and Engineering as one, most Piloting will be manoeuvres and most repairs will be actions so do them at the same time. Then add at least a single minion gunner group slot, although definitely not much more than 3. The fact that there may be hundreds of minions doesn’t matter, you just need to track how many effective attacks a ship gets each turn. The minion groups should all be somewhere between 2 and 4 strong, they basically won’t die so the dice pool isn’t going to change therefore the size of the group is only relative to how difficult you want the encounter to be.

Your captain is going to be doing things like leadership checks , social Comms checks, computers checks, then depending on the character it may take over Piloting or Gunnery on occasion. The pilots/Engineering slot will involve accelerating/decelerating and flying places then doing repairs and boosting shields. Gunners will shoot, using whatever bank of guns makes sense, remembering to track things like slow firing etc. more gunner groups means more attacks each turn, although obviously you are limited by the number of weapons. Treat each gunner in a minion group as an actual weapon station, so if 4 gunners are acting together then that’s 4 Weapons Firing at the same time, on smaller ships this should limit the number of minions in a group for certain firing arcs.

2. Between 1 and the number of guns in that firing arc, up to 6 at the maximum.

3. It doesn’t really. Edit: by that I mean Concemtrated Barrage adds Damage to a single hit of 1 Attack. So you Attack with a bank of 5 Weapons with Linked 1, spend 1 Advantage to add 5 to the damage of the first hit, Spend 2 more Advantage to hit a second time for Base Damage + Success.

A simple rule of thumb might be to give an NPC ship a number of initiative slots equal to its Silhouette. I do this for PC ships with large crews too. In both cases, a significant character (whether PC or NPC) can use their own slot to replace a crew slot of the ship they occupy (not take it in addition). So the Chimera (Sil 8) has 8 "crew" slots, or 7 "crew" slots plus Thrawn's slot if he's aboard.

In addition to what has been said already, it's important to decide what the purpose of the combat is in your session. It is easy for a capital combat to take up most/all of a session, particularly if you add in flights of starfighters doing their own thing.

If the combat is happening in the background of the characters' story then handle it narratively or through Mass Combat rules.

If you are planning on getting into real capital ship combat, I highly recommend having a session (or half session) that is solely devoted to learning the system. Run a mock combat between two capital ships with the players divided between them. This helped our group immensely.

We divide weapons into groups of 4-5, and give each ship a pilot, engineer, and comms action/maneuver. We have all positions on an NPC ship go in the same initiative slot.

Since facing on large ships is important we track it with tokens (easy enough as we play on Roll20), and require a pilot maneuver to reposition facing (one segment per current speed).

As GM I use the three capital ship firing actions most turns to simplify and speed up the action.

Would it be an over simplification to allow the ship to have an amount of slots equal to 2 +1 every 2 silhoette above 4.

So a corvette gets 2. A Neb b gets 3, a ISD gets 4.

This would scale up the damage they can do each turn well.

It depends how many ships are in the encounter, for a two ship + fighters battle that may be ok, but 4 ships? Probably not.

You don’t want many more NPC Initiative slots than there are pc’s, it will become too boring as the gm plays with his toy ships and the players watch. Just try to focus on what’s important, not a simulation of the entire fleet

43 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

You don’t want many more NPC Initiative slots than there are pc’s, it will become too boring as the gm plays with his toy ships and the players watch. Just try to focus on what’s important, not a simulation of the entire fleet

The GM could (and maybe should) let the Players also control the friendly NPCs. But I agree, too many slots will bog the gameplay down and it stops being a fast paced space action adventure. For more than two capital ships I'd use mass combat rules and play out the important stuff happening on the PC's ship in-between.

Also, IMHO, there should always be a secondary goal other than "destroy the enemies fleet", especially if the players are rebels. There might be a big space battle going on, but there should be a task outside the battle (rescue a ship/ escape pot, break through a blockade / send a transmission / hack slice a database / destroy super-weapon of the week /...) and there should be more than one way to reach that goal. Such a goal also gives the PCs a reason not to jump to Hyperspace, other than "you encounter an Interdictor. Again.". And even if they fail to reach their goal, they can still jump to Hyperspace and live to fight another day.
Otherwise you could just as well play Armada or X-Wing....

13 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

It depends how many ships are in the encounter, for a two ship + fighters battle that may be ok, but 4 ships? Probably not.

You don’t want many more NPC Initiative slots than there are pc’s, it will become too boring as the gm plays with his toy ships and the players watch. Just try to focus on what’s important, not a simulation of the entire fleet

If there was more than 2 capital ships I would switch to mass combat anyway

On 3/27/2018 at 5:57 PM, Funk Fu master said:

If there was more than 2 capital ships I would switch to mass combat anyway

Where are mass combat rules?

You can find them in 3 places

Simple ones in "Onslaught at Arda I"

And expanded ones in "Lead By Example" and "Friends Like These"

If its just ship on ship, it can be done with each ship doing its actions in turn, but I usually use mass combat rules.