1 hour ago, TheTubaTanker said:I think the check for the frame and hull is too easy. A shuttle frame is only hard but you can get the weapons banks by increasing your scope. You should make the hull daunting if you intend to keep the same silhouette requirements. I want to hand this to players who want to play an engineer but I don't want someone who is 1 hour and 45 min into my campaign, building a "ship of the line" (used in broad meaning) because it was easy enough for them to try. If you don't want to raise silhouette requirements or frame requirements then I would make it more difficult. I can just see a player going "we need a shuttle" followed by a "I can do what?", I'd like for there to be a more obvious reason why that isn't the case.
With a starting character I was able to design and build a shuttle with sil 5 speed 3 HT40 SS40 defense 6/3/3/3 and 6 armor handling -1 (this was with 2 black for testing reasons). I have a hyper drive, advanced sensors, a med bay, engineering access, escape pods, life supports systems, and highly automated. The other 10 HP went to weapons banks. My ship has 25 weapons (a lot more than dp20 lancer or CR90). because I'm size 5 I get light turbo lasers made available. When the checks were rolled 5 times the only one I failed more than once was the assembly which was daunting. Now would a character have the credits to pay for this? Probably not. We should make the difficulty dissuade the players from doing this as soon as they see the article. I like that larger scope is easy to get but before vsl was added it was kinda a bad thing mechanically. It made you easier to hit and harder for you to hit enemies. Now it gives you more HT and gives you access to the bigger hulls with strong mods. I recommend that the "larger scope" also upgrade the difficulty of further checks on the project to reflect the frame being pushed to its limits. It mixes red into the system so that we use the other half of the table and that's scary to builders. Additionally, we might consider making the "ship of the line" hull difficulty daunting. Does a team of engineers with ~100 xp care? No. Does a shipwright with ~100-200 xp care? No. Does a character that is not an engineer or very early engineers care? Heck yes they do. If my rolls were hard, normal with a red, daunting with a red and daunting with a red my starting characters would never try this. Also when a hight xp character goes to build home one or their own ISD you want it to be impressive. You want other non engineer character to sit with their jaws on the table as the engineer downgrades difficulties adds his 5 blue upgrades his checks and pools this massive dice pool. IF there are hard and easy checks its kinda a forgone conclusion when the 300xp engineer starts the project and that's no fun.
I was actually planning on making the ship of the line hull daunting, I changed it to hard because of space constraints on the table, but a bit of reformatting should fix that. Now I'm thinking of increasing the difficulty of every hull bu one since they provide bigger benefits than in fully operational
I was thinking of increasing larger scope to 2 advantage.