Hi guys. I'm preparing for a session and want to make sure I understand this issue. Is this correct?

1. If a pilot spends one maneuver to accelerate his ship, and then spends another maneuver to Fly/Drive his ship, his ship suffers two system strain.

2. The same pilot above then fires his ship's weapons in the same turn, the pilot suffers two personal strain and the ship suffers two more system strain.

3. In the same round as above, a separate turret gunner fires the ship's turret weapon, the ship suffers another two system strain.

4. In the same round as above, the copilot attempts the angle the deflector shields maneuver and the ship suffers another two system strain.

5. In the same round / turn, the copilot then attempts an Astrogation roll as an action to plot a jump. Neither the ship nor copilot suffer any strain.

6. At the end of the same turn, the ship's engineer attempts the damage control action to restore some system strain. Attempting this does not cause any kind of strain.

Separately, a player of mine has a jet pack. Is this correct?

7. User activates jet pack and goes from speed 0 to 1 as a maneuver. The user then uses Fly/Drive as a maneuver or action to move. The user then decelerates from speed 1 to 0 and lands as a maneuver. All in the same round / turn. In total, the user suffers two personal strain and his jet pack suffers four system strain. Correct?

Thanks in advance!

Only your #1 us correct.

Your #2 is the pilot using an Action, and this does not cause SS.

Your #3-6 are all being done by someone that is not the pilot. These do not cause SS.

Your #7 is using three pilot-only maneuvers in a turn, and is therefore not legal.

#7 might work if the character has some way of obtaining a third maneuver, such as the Explorer's Unmatched Mobility. The rules on vehicle maneuvers are unclear; they don't explicitly allow for a ship to perform more than two maneuvers, although they don't outright forbid it like they do for characters. The only plain restriction on vehicle maneuvers is that a Silhouette 5 starship/vehicle can't benefit from more than one Pilot Only maneuver per round.

Thank you for the feedback!

Per my #7, I'm now trying to understand how Boba Fett could've used his jet pack in Episode VI: RotJ under these rules to jump from Jabba's sail barge onto the skiff. After all, my players and I all saw the movie. And my players will want to do the same thing. Is there something I'm missing?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is Boba Fett could've done this all in one turn;

1. Boba Fett standing on top of Jabba's sail barge activates his jet pack with the Accelerate maneuver, going from speed 0 to 1.

2. Boba Fett then conducts his jump over to the cargo skiff with the Fly/Drive maneuver. But, this could be an action using a skill roll if the GM determined it was a dangerous or tricky attempt depending on the situation; i.e. in the middle of combat, could miss the skiff and fall into the pit, trying to land on the slanted surface of the cargo skiff, etc. So this could be an action.

3. Then Boba Fett uses the Decelerate maneuver to deactivate his jet pack.

In total, Fett used two maneuvers and one action in this example, and Boba suffers two personal strain and his jet pack suffers two system strain. Does this scenario sound right?

Note: The vehicle rules are a terrible way to handle jet/rocket packs. It would have been far better if they just allowed a combination of Hoverer (like Toydarians) and movement like the Kyuzo leaps.

Use of vehicles in personal scale combat period is something that could really use some rules.

12 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Note: The vehicle rules are a terrible way to handle jet/rocket packs. It would have been far better if they just allowed a combination of Hoverer (like Toydarians) and movement like the Kyuzo leaps.

Actually, the jet packs are just one of the more extreme examples: The worst is the rocket boots that automatically take one strain (of a 3 SST) at the end of each round to represent your limited fuel supply.

The Vehicle rules seem to kinda fall apart if you look at them closely.

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

. If a pilot spends one  maneuver to accelerate his ship, and then spends another maneuver to Fly/Drive his ship, his  ship suffers two system   strain 

Correct

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

The same pilot above then fires his ship's weapons in  the same turn, the pilot suffers two personal strain  and the ship suffers two more system strain. 

No, making a combat check is an action, so no personal strain, and firing weapons is not a Pilot Only action so no system strain. Firing the weapons on a single pilot craft is still technically not Pilot Only, even though there's only one person who can fire them, unless you are doing lap-rides or something.

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

In  the same round as above, a separate turret gunner fires  the  ship's turret weapon  , the ship suffers another two  system strain. 

Not Pilot Only, so no, no system strain.

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

In the same round as above, the copilot attempts the angle the deflector shields maneuver and the ship suffers another two system strain. 

Again, not pilot only, so no.

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

In the same round / turn, the copilot then  attempts an Astrogation  roll as an action to plot a jump. Neither the  ship nor copilot suffer any strain.  

Correct

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

At the end of the same turn, the ship's engineer attempts  the damage  control action to restore  some system strain. Attempting this does not cause any kind of strain.

Correct...unless he really borks the roll or something...

5 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

User activates jet pack and goes from speed 0 to 1 as a maneuver. The user then uses Fly/Drive as a maneuver or action to move. The user then decelerates from speed 1 to 0 and lands  as a maneuve  r. All  in the same round / turn. In total, the user suffers two personal strain and his jet pack suffers four system strain. Correct?   

No. First off, you can only take 2 maneuvers per turn unless acted upon by an outside force (like having a talent that allows it or something.)

So kicking on your jetpack, moving, and shuting it off is going to take 2 rounds.

That said, on the personal scale moving at speed 1 or more allows you to move anywhere in one maneuver (it still takes a separate maneuver to engage/disengage though) so the details of landing and not landing are narrative. RAW there is nothing wrong with "landing" but keeping the jetpack "idling" at speed 1.

50 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

That said, on the personal scale moving at speed 1 or more allows you to move anywhere in one maneuver (it still takes a separate maneuver to engage/disengage though) so the details of landing and not landing are narrative. RAW there is nothing wrong with "landing" but keeping the jetpack "idling" at speed 1.

Does that mean someone with a jetpack flying at speed 1 could flit around the battlefield taking pot shots all over the place, opponents never knowing who/where s/he is going to be in short range? As I see it then, the only reason one would need to disengage the jetpack would be to stop this nonsense. As a GM you could inflict plenty of setbacks to represent the difficulty of such a combat style, and certainly look out for any despair as that spiraling trail of exhaust smoke disappearing in the distance is all that'll be left of you.

36 minutes ago, Roderz said:

Does that mean someone with a jetpack flying at speed 1 could flit around the battlefield taking pot shots all over the place, opponents never knowing who/where s/he is going to be in short range?

It's still turn based movement. The jetpack jockey can only change position on his/her own turn. So they Fly to where they wish to be, but at the end of that turn they are stuck there until they Fly again (or until Move is used against them or they are otherwise knocked out of the air). The only difference between the jetpack jockey and ground pounders is that the jockey can change vertical distance and can move from Extreme (personal scale) to Short (again, personal scale) with a single use of Fly.

4 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

Thank you for the feedback!

Per my #7, I'm now trying to understand how Boba Fett could've used his jet pack in Episode VI: RotJ under these rules to jump from Jabba's sail barge onto the skiff. After all, my players and I all saw the movie. And my players will want to do the same thing. Is there something I'm missing?

The rules, especially vehicle and space combat are (as menzioned by others) not really in line with the movies.

This is where you can use yoir GM powers

Personally I'd treat this action as a piloting / athletics check to make an assisted jump with the jetpack. Or make it a custom talent.

And it explains how could Han shoot him, Boba jumped over with his action, and waited for his next turn, but Han made a double Triumph attack roll

13 hours ago, SemperSarge said:

Thank you for the feedback!

Per my #7, I'm now trying to understand how Boba Fett could've used his jet pack in Episode VI: RotJ under these rules to jump from Jabba's sail barge onto the skiff. After all, my players and I all saw the movie. And my players will want to do the same thing. Is there something I'm missing?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is Boba Fett could've done this all in one turn;

1. Boba Fett standing on top of Jabba's sail barge activates his jet pack with the Accelerate maneuver, going from speed 0 to 1.

2. Boba Fett then conducts his jump over to the cargo skiff with the Fly/Drive maneuver. But, this could be an action using a skill roll if the GM determined it was a dangerous or tricky attempt depending on the situation; i.e. in the middle of combat, could miss the skiff and fall into the pit, trying to land on the slanted surface of the cargo skiff, etc. So this could be an action.

3. Then Boba Fett uses the Decelerate maneuver to deactivate his jet pack.

In total, Fett used two maneuvers and one action in this example, and Boba suffers two personal strain and his jet pack suffers two system strain. Does this scenario sound right?

That method wouldn't work. Accelerate/Decelerate and Fly/Drive are both Pilot Only, so you can't do it that many times in a turn.

There are several ways to replicate that activity, the two easiest being:

1) Some Nemesis are allowed multiple turns in a round. So Boba may have been following that model. In initiative he accelerated and flew, at the bottom of the round he goes again for the decelerate and engage.

2) Movement isn't compulsory. So Boba didn't need to decelerate, his jetpack could have still technically been at speed 1 and he just wasn't taking any Fly/Drive maneuvers, so he didn't move. Essentially his pack was idling, and when Han hit him with the butt of the vibroaxe, it kicked in and the rest is belching history.

Option 2 is probably the best solution, as it also explains a lot if what you see in AotC, TCW, and Rebels.

12 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

2) Movement isn't compulsory. So Boba didn't need to decelerate, his jetpack could have still technically been at speed 1 and he just wasn't taking any Fly/Drive maneuvers, so he didn't move.

And it's this point that is considered one of the more prominent problems with vehicle combat right? I think in Genesys they tweaked things so that a vehicle at speed 1 would still move, but if the pilot didn't actively control the vehicle the movement would be controlled by the GM?

22 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

It's still turn based movement. The jetpack jockey can only change position on his/her own turn. So they Fly to where they wish to be, but at the end of that turn they are stuck there until they Fly again (or until Move is used against them or they are otherwise knocked out of the air). The only difference between the jetpack jockey and ground pounders is that the jockey can change vertical distance and can move from Extreme (personal scale) to Short (again, personal scale) with a single use of Fly.

The way I pictured this is that each turn, the jetpack operator (JO) would use a maneuver to fly and an action to attack. So whoever they attack would start at the same range as JO, but the JO could easily be at extreme range on JO's next turn. A bit like fighting Nightcrawler from the X-Men, you just wouldn't know where JO was going to be a moment later.

13 hours ago, Roderz said:

And it's this point that is considered one of the more prominent problems with vehicle combat right?

Yes, no, maybe, depends on how you look at it?

Yes it's a problem:

I mean yeah, other systems typically make things like vehicle movement compulsory and attach it to the relative speed of the vehicle in some way or another. And this makes sense, on a tight scale this is a very easy concept to communicate, understand, and assemble a rules set around. For simple car chase movement or something it usually works, but the more complex the movement is the more compromises you need to make. Looking at say the D6 version of Star Wars, to follow the vehicle rules 100% RAW you needed a complex 3D board with flying minis... but it did cover pretty much every core maneuver a vehicle could possibly do, and even allowed the tracking of not just facing, but vertical movement and even banking and rolling. Other games compress it down, so like D20 reduced it to a 2D grid, and dropped weapons down to what a craft could logically bring to bear at a given time.

Of course the downside to really detailed vehicle movement is you're tracking a lot of details that are likely to slow don't the game. Go ask the X-wing guys what it's like at the end of a game when there's only 2 fighters left on the table, both in less than idea locations relative to one another. And this Jetpack line of questions highlights this. How do you, within the construct of such a game system, show a character: hop from a ship, fly to the ground, and punch an enemy (like they do in TCW), without it taking 3 or 4 turns to execute?

No it's not a problem:

FFG did do a good thing in that they realized that vehicle movement often doesn't matter as much as it feels like it should. Star Wars isn't trying to personalize a wargame, it's trying to allow for situations similar to what you see on screen, and George Lucas didn't care about how long it take for an X-wing to turn while going at 100 MGLT. He only cared about if the X-wing was close enough to shoot the TIE Fighter or not. So FFG figured out a way to do the same. Two StarFighters actively fighting each other don't need a lot of complex movement rules to spend hours tracking, just let them fight and get the combat over with. Just make "Close" a really big area, like a kilometer or so across, and say that even though no piloting checks are being made the fighters are still moving around and any special jinks or rolls are folded into whatever dice are being rolled. It's not that the two fighters aren't moving, it's just that they aren't moving in a way that puts any distance of note between them, and that's the only distance that matters

It really shows up when you look at something that actually happens in the films. Take the Speederbike Chase in RotJ. The exact distance between Luke and Leia's speederbike and Han doesn't matter, so why bother applying a number to it? Han's too far away to help, and Luke/Leia are going to have a long walk back. The chase isn't technically going anywhere, so why bother moving any minis across a map? The only distance that matters is how far apart the speederbike chase participants are from each other, so you only track that, and even then only in broad enough terms to cover the action.

With Jetpacks it's a little weird (am I moving, on foot, or hovering?) but again, those are narrative details which don't really require attached hard mechanics, all that matters is if your jetpack is fired up or not, the rest is just a matter of the conditions applied based on where you are in a given turn. So doing that Fly down and melee move is possible in 2 turns, keeping action fast.

Of course the downside here is.... it's really weird and hard to wrap your head around. The very concept that a vehicle can move without "moving" takes some getting used to, especially with so many other systems do all this movement and that. When you watch a movie, you see movement, and expect that movement ot translate (more or less) 1:1 into the system in the same way that everything of note tends to have an attached special statblock. And yeah, the rulebook isn't really good at explaining that and bridging the gap between true movement and cinematic "movement."

I rather like the system, and I'll be the first to admit it took me several read-throughs to figure out what the heck FFG was thinking.

The way the FAQ sidestepped the jetpack issue was that a jetpack equipped character uses the personal scale Move maneuver like everyone else, but the jetpack gives them full access to any position within the entire personal scale for that single maneuver.

On 10/28/2018 at 9:23 AM, DarthHammer said:

The way the FAQ sidestepped the jetpack issue was that a jetpack equipped character uses the personal scale Move maneuver like everyone else, but the jetpack gives them full access to any position within the entire personal scale for that single maneuver.

I like the idea for simplicity, but of course I'd prefer to complicate it a bit to prevent two things:

*The ability to bounce from extreme range to short and back to shoot you enemies at short while they need to spend two maneuvers just to close to long range.

*Dropping straight into engaged from any range, as that extra maneuver is needed to keep close combat reasonably balanced.

So, I'm thinking maybe letting you move twice as far on a personal scale as you normally would. So one maneuver could get you from medium to engaged and vice versa, or from medium to long.

If you want to expand that to the vehicle rules as a whole, you could say you get an extra maneuvers worth of movement for every maneuver spent on a personal scale. So Speed 1 would be twice (like above), speed 2 thrice, speed 3 quadruple etc. That would cover the use of stuff like full throttle and stuff to increase the speed of jetpacks and such above 1.

4 hours ago, penpenpen said:

I like the idea for simplicity, but of course I'd prefer to complicate it a bit to prevent two things:

*The ability to bounce from extreme range  to short and back to shoot you enemies at short while they need to spend two maneuvers just to close to long range.

*Dropping straight into engaged from any range, as that extra maneuver is needed to keep close combat reasonably balanced.

So, I'm thinking maybe letting you move twice as far on a personal scale as you normally would. So one maneuver could get you from medium to engaged and vice versa, or from medium to long.

If you want to expand that to the vehicle rules as a whole, you could say you get an extra maneuvers worth of movement for every maneuver spent on a personal scale. So Speed 1 would be twice (like above), speed 2 thrice, speed 3 quadruple etc. That would cover the use of stuff like full throttle and stuff to increase the speed of jetpacks and such above 1.

Maybe I was a little too vague, the jetpack would let you move to any range increment with one maneuver as per the 'change range increment' option. Since engaging with someone is a separate use of the move maneuver, you couldn't both change your range and engage with a single maneuver, even with the jetpack.

The only issue with having the planetary speed maneuvers give extra movement on the personal scale is that the planetary scale speeds are supposed to be substantially further than any bands on the personal scale. All of the bands, from short to extreme, are within close on the planetary scale, and even at speed 1, you can move within close range in a single maneuver. So having them only grant partial movement within the personal scale is an artificial limitation of the capabilities of vehicles.

What I think would be a good way to balance against being able to 'kite' using the jetpack would have those personal scale move maneuvers still count as a pilot only maneuver when you use the jetpack to do it. That way, if you move twice in a turn with the jetpack, you have to both take 2 personal strain and 2 system strain. And since the jetpack only has a system strain of 3, you'd only get to use that once before having to 'vent/cool/etc' the jetpack with a damage control action before you could do it again.

1 hour ago, DarthHammer said:

Maybe I was a little too vague, the jetpack would let you move to any range increment with one maneuver as per the 'change range increment' option. Since engaging with someone is a separate use of the move maneuver, you couldn't both change your range and engage with a single maneuver, even with the jetpack.

?

1 hour ago, DarthHammer said:

The only issue with having the planetary speed maneuvers give extra movement on the personal scale is that the planetary scale speeds are supposed to be substantially further than any bands on the personal scale. All of the bands, from short to extreme, are within close on the planetary scale, and even at speed 1, you can move within close range in a single maneuver. So having them only grant partial movement within the personal scale is an artificial limitation of the capabilities of vehicles.

True, and I was about to to raise a few points in defense of my idea, but...

1 hour ago, DarthHammer said:

What I think would be a good way to balance against being able to 'kite' using the jetpack would have those personal scale move maneuvers still count as a pilot only maneuver when you use the jetpack to do it. That way, if you move twice in a turn with the jetpack, you have to both take 2 personal strain and 2 system strain. And since the jetpack only has a system strain of 3, you'd only get to use that once before having to 'vent/cool/etc' the jetpack with a damage control action before you could do it again.

...you provided a much better solution. This could perhaps be used for all vehicles at Speed 0 in personal combat, allowing you to get some movement out of them in personal combat without needing to spend a maneuver to accelerate. Of course, if you prefer to have that delay between when someone jumps into their speeder and when it starts moving, making them spend a maneuver to accelerate (start it up) before blasting off is also a viable option.