So I know there's a bit of uncertainty with Ion Cannons in spaceship combat and that combat between capital ships are more narrative than anything but how do you think an interdictor, with all of its weapons replaced with heavy ion cannons, would do against a victory class or even ISD? I'm running an upcoming session and the players have a few cruisers and other silhouette 5 and 6 ships with a single interdictor that's all ion cannons. They want to use it to capture another star destroyer without doing much damage and using the gravity well so it can't escape.

Well, I guess it is a bit too late to you tell you not to let your player have such firepower, since they already have an Interdictor

Anyway, I would say that it is possible, but not without careful planning of the operation : do not let them just jump to the Imperial Star Destroyer, shut it down, and take it. And even if the stats say they can, do not let them do it ! As you said, battle between capital ships are mostly cinematic, and nothing is supposed to stand against the power of these ships)

Make them search for some information about the exact location of the ship, perhaps some way to intercept their communications, in order to jump out of the hyperspace just behind the ISD (so that the Interdictor don't get blown up, as it will be the first target)

Have them defend the Interdictor against waves of TIEs trying to disable the gravity well

They also need some way to deal with the crew... how many soldier is there in an ISD already ?

And finally, they need to be able to "reboot" the ship and leave before the imperial reinforcement arrive, or their catch is likely to become a deadly trap

Out of curiosity, what are your players going to do with it ? are they rebels ? pirats ?

Also, how much Obligation would bring the steal of an ISD ? ^_^

They are working with a rebel cell. They don't directly own the interdictor themselves but it's part of their cell's resources. They personally just have a custom cruiser. Once they get the star destroyer it's going to the rebel main fleet. They've currently spent a month getting the plans, recruiting, planning the attack, and devising the main strategy for taking it. Their current idea is to have a few ships use signal jammers so the Empire can't call for help and then come in fast and hard to blindside the star destroyer. Then they want to overwhelm it with ion weapons to shut down it's main power before a boarding party goes in to disable communications and life support long term. Then wait out the ship's crew as they suffocate. Then it's basically split the crew of the interdictor so they have enough to at least turn the star destroyer and jump out to a safe system.

I like the tie waves and defending the interdictor. That was mostly my plan already. The rebooting problem is also a good idea I might use. Obligation wise I imagine it would give them quite a bit but I'm primarily using duty instead, since blame would mostly go to the rebellion as a whole.

They seem to be part of really powerful rebel cell...

18 minutes ago, Rozial said:

Then they want to overwhelm it with ion weapons to shut down it's main power before a boarding party goes in to disable communications and l  ife support long term. Then wait out the ship's crew as they suffocate

That's more a siege than a raid, then. How long do you think it's going to take ? I am thinking days, 2 or 3 at least. And then they'll have to deal with the attempts of the imperial to take back the control (both soldiers and engineers...that could be an occasion for the computers guy of the party to make some opposed checks in his speciality)

Also you can have an imperial light cruiser be sent to investigate, as an ISD reported missing is not something the empire would take lightly. They'll have to destroy/disable it before it can call reinforcement.

3 minutes ago, AbsatSolo said:

That's more a siege than a raid, then. How long do you think it's going to take ? I am thinking days, 2 or 3 at least. And then they'll have to deal with the attempts of the imperial to take back the control (both soldiers and engineers...that could be an occasion for the computers guy of the party to make some opposed checks in his speciality)

Also you can have an imperial light cruiser be sent to investigate, as an ISD reported missing is not something the empire would take lightly. They'll have to destroy/disable it before it can call reinforcement.

I like the light cruiser idea.

I was trying to guesstimate from what we've seen before in canon like in Rogue one where a few bombers disable a star destroyer. I figured an entire interdictor bombarding it with ion cannons would shut it down faster. And with around 46,000 people on board I didn't think the oxygen would last them days. I figured a few hours and ships can take a long time to cross large distances with lightspeed so they would have at least 5-7 hours before a major imperial force arrived.

Well, the bombers are designed for that role, rather than the interdictor.

I'd have Oxygen last a fair while, more people means more Oxygen required, so they probably have more there.

Remember that once shut down, it isn't hard to bring a ship up again with repairs, and an ISD will have a lot of engineers.

Have a think about what scenes you'd like to see. Where do you want to see major fights happening on the ISD? Do you want to see enterprising ISD crew throwing curve balls? A long siege where the players wait out the enemy is a reasonable tactic, but doesn't work great cinematically without setbacks, and doesn't work for the hit and run rebellion ever.

Possible ideas:

Counter-boarding team launch breaching pods from ISD and try to disable Interdictor.

ISD / Tie Bombers launch missiles temporarily disabling Interdictor, allowing ISD to launch with the Rebels on board - Now the time pressure is on the Rebels instead, as they fight for control before arrival.

2 minutes ago, Darzil said:

Counter-boarding team launch breaching pods from ISD and try to disable Interdictor.

ISD / Tie Bombers launch missiles temporarily disabling Interdictor, allowing ISD to launch with the Rebels on board - Now the time pressure is on the Rebels instead, as they fight for control before arrival.

I really like the counter-boarding team. I hadn't considered any shuttle they still have.

I'm also thinking a zero-g firefight in the disabled star destroyer's hangar would be fun and difficult.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I really have no idea of how much air 46000 people need to survive 3 days, but you could imagine that the ship has some secondary emergency life support allowing them to last long enough for the siege to be interesting.

The investigation cruiser could show up on day two, followed by the reinforcement 6 hour later if it managed to call for help. And on day 3, when the imperial start to suffocate :

39 minutes ago, Darzil said:

Counter-boarding team launch breaching pods from ISD and try to disable Interdictor.

That idea is REALLY awesome, love it

In this game, ion cannons are practically worthless against capital ships unless you're willing to believe a ship with thousands of crew doesn't have scores of damage control teams running around that would pretty well purge SS inflicted by ion weapons in a very short time. I still cling to some verisimilitude, so I can't accept that. These rules are just bad at covering anything beyond a small Silhouette 5 ship.

I appreciate what your players are doing, and it is a cool idea. But unless you're down for it, consider recommending a more viable target. There's plenty of capital ships out there that would be quite the boon to the rebellion, and really give the players something the run with that also can provide a more believable adventure.

Also consider the Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander situation. Anything the players can do to an NPC, an NPC can do to the players. If capturing a Star Destroyer is that easy, then capturing it back will be just as easy, especially for the Empire with more Star Destroyers, better trained officers and troopers trained specifically for such a mission, and things like Gamma Class Assault Shuttles and Space Troopers that capture ships for breakfast.

Give a player a cookie, he'll want a glass of milk. Give a player a Star Destroyer, he'll want to use it to capture a Super Star Destroyer.

9 hours ago, Rozial said:

how do you think an interdictor, with all of its weapons replaced with heavy ion cannons, would do against a victory class or even ISD?

/K2-SO It would go badly for the interdictor... it would go very badly.

Interdictors are not well armored and have a high Sil. Additionally, anyone with experience with them recognizes what a huge threat they pose both tactically and strategically. A Victory or ISD captain would recognize that immediately and hammer that thing in an attempt to disable or destroy it, and both ships have the firepower to do so pretty quick.

There's a reason Interdictors stock weapons are nothing but anti-Starfighter quad-lasers: because the Interdictor is supposed to stay so far out of the fighting that only Starfighters can reach it easily.

Offhand the Interdictor would be able to bring about 14 guns to bear on a single target. For ease of discussion I'll round up to 15. So now it's shooting 3 groups of 5 guns, or a barrage. They are slow firing s you're either staggering fire or firing every other turn.

Alpha-strike everything at once:

3 groups with lets say Agility 3 firing at the aft fire arc, give you YYYG vs. PPBlkBlk. On average you're probably talking 2 Success. So each hit will do 9 Damage. The ISD has Armor 10, and the VSD Armor 9. In either case you don't even touch it.

Lets say same pool, but lets do Concentrated Barrage... Now you MIGHT get an advantage or two giving you Damage 10 or 11. So... 1 or 2 points of System Strain to the Destroyers... yeah, they'll laugh, come about and hit you with the heavy Turbolasers.

7 hours ago, Rozial said:

I was trying to guesstimate from what we've seen before in canon like in Rogue one where a few bombers disable a star destroyer. I figured an entire interdictor bombarding it with ion cannons would shut it down faster.

It's a numbers thing and translation to game mechanics. I'm pretty sure that Ion Torpedoes are actually more powerful than Heavy Ion cannons, but it's also a question of how they are implemented in-game. Seeing as how in Rogue One the Players (Jyn, Cassian, ect) aren't actively taking part in the space battle, that would make it more likely run as a Mass Combat check, and one tempered by the fact the players aren't trying to capture such a vessel. Indeed the players are already pretty much going to die by this point in the Adventure, so the GM can be a bit more epic in the narration of a space battle the players aren't even a direct part of.

If the players were actively taking part with the intent to capture, you'd probably run it more conventionally. In that case you are looking at actual game mechanics, and disabling an ISD is no easy feat, not to mention CAPTURING it.

7 hours ago, Rozial said:

And with around 46,000 people on board I didn't think the oxygen would last them days. I figured a few hours and ships can take a long time to cross large distances with lightspeed so they would have at least 5-7 hours before a major imperial force arrived.

It probably would be a few days before you see someone come to investigate. But yeah, with a crew of 46,000, many of which will have access to breathmasks, space suits, and environmental suits per Damage Control practices, or their just plain jobs (any tie pilot is going to be fine)... they'll have plenty of time to screw you. Also consider the size of the ship, a warship, means there's not going to be one single life support system with a big red "off" switch, but tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of separate, redundant, backed-up life support systems distributed throughout the ship. The crew will figure out how to disconnect those from central control and hotwire them to local control in no time. Heck, again that's probably part of regular damage control training.

4 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

Also consider the Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander situation. Anything the players can do to an NPC, an NPC can do to the players. If capturing a Star Destroyer is that easy, then capturing it back will be just as easy, especially for the Empire with more Star Destroyers, better trained officers and troopers trained specifically for such a mission, and things like Gamma Class Assault Shuttles and Space Troopers that capture ships for breakfast.

Give a player a cookie, he'll want a glass of milk. Give a player a Star Destroyer, he'll want to use it to capture a Super Star Destroyer.

Well if the Empire was that good at capturing then the Rebellion wouldn't have survived more than maybe two months. But I also know the Liberator and Emancipator were star destroyers captured right after the battle of Endor. One was peacefully by Han Solo but the other they just blew out the engines and dragged it away. So the rebellion has managed to capture star destroyers before. Also this is 3 months before the battle of Endor and the campaign ends after the battle so they don't have time to steal another ship. Especially since I include hyperspace travel into their time.

Quote

It's a numbers thing and translation to game mechanics. I'm pretty sure that Ion Torpedoes are actually more powerful than Heavy Ion cannons, but it's also a question of how they are implemented in-game.

That's one thing I've been wondering is it seems like Ion cannons are the most worthless weapon in the game. It seems like all the money and time needed to refit a capital ship with ion cannons could instead by 5 y-wings and disable a whole Imperial fleet with them. It seems really unbalanced and I wish ion cannons felt like they were worth more than taking potshots at freighters.

12 minutes ago, Rozial said:

That's one thing I've been wondering is it seems like Ion cannons are the most worthless weapon in the game. It seems like all the money and time needed to refit a capital ship with ion cannons could instead by 5 y-wings and disable a whole Imperial fleet with them. It seems really unbalanced and I wish ion cannons felt like they were worth more than taking potshots at freighters.

Ion cannons have their uses, the problem is just that a Star Destroyer is a big hard target for any weapon, and the Interdictor is more a support ship than a battleship. It's there to do one job.

That said, If you want to do it, just encourage a more Star Wars approach. Look, Star Wars is all about the little guy doing something amazing. Small commando teams have destroyed Star Destroyers. It's a thing.

So, instead of letting the players throw themselves at the target like a man-grenade, encourage something more tricksie.

Look at something like the Hunt for Red October. Ramius had to get the crew off the ship if he was going to defect with it. He had to make the USSR think it was sunk so they wouldn't look for him. And he had to "sink" it somewhere where they couldn't prove or disprove it's sinking for years. It was a mission that required more than just a bunch of marines storming his bridge, and didn't require anything as silly as a total refit of an American Cruiser to execute.

So... look at it more like Rogue One. All those ships and troops can support the players, but you need something the Players can do themselves personally.

How can the players get most/all the crew of a Star Destroyer off it? There's ways.

Hitting a ship on a combat cruise is dumb. It's fully geared up and ready for battle, it's looking for a fight.

How about something like this: A Victory-I, while old and outdated, is still a pretty good target, a capable warship, and a big symbol. It's also something that goes back to Kuat, or Corellia, or whatever for a total refit to become a Victory II.

Can the players hit the yard and capture a ship already running with a reduced crew on it's way in for refit? How do you get on board? How to you get it out of the yard? How do you resupply it after? It won't have any fighters, and it's missile bays will be low or empty.

Will the interdictor be better used as a way to prevent escape, or to stop reinforcements? Or maybe it's a Trojan Horse to get more forces into the yard to support the players?

See? Give the players better options. If they want to be the big gorram rebel leaders, feed them some intel to act on. Give them the option to make a plan that's better than just "we shoot them till we win, then turn off the A/C."

46 minutes ago, Rozial said:

Well if the Empire was that good at capturing then the Rebellion wouldn't have survived more than maybe two months. But I also know the Liberator and Emancipator were star destroyers captured right after the battle of Endor. One was peacefully by Han Solo but the other they just blew out the engines and dragged it away. So the rebellion has managed to capture star destroyers before. Also this is 3 months before the battle of Endor and the campaign ends after the battle so they don't have time to steal another ship. Especially since I include hyperspace travel into their time.

If this is effectively the crowning achievement of your party before a game reboot, this sounds awesome! If you want to drag on the action a bit, have the Empire have a couple commandos on board. Like a reverse Die Hard or Under Siege scenario. The rebels searching the corridors, dealing with hit and run tactics, traps, and some smart aleck taunting them on the radio.

16 hours ago, Rozial said:

So I know there's a bit of uncertainty with Ion Cannons in spaceship combat and that combat between capital ships are more narrative than anything but how do you think an interdictor, with all of its weapons replaced with heavy ion cannons, would do against a victory class or even ISD? I'm running an upcoming session and the players have a few cruisers and other silhouette 5 and 6 ships with a single interdictor that's all ion cannons. They want to use it to capture another star destroyer without doing much damage and using the gravity well so it can't escape.

Mathematically, this should go extremely poorly for the interdictor:

• Heavy Ion Cannons are Damage 7 [Slow, Ion]
  • ION (PASSIVE) : Ion weapons are designed to affect electrical systems as opposed to dealing raw damage. They are fitted to ships to knock out opponents' shields, sensors, and engines. They are shorter range than laser weapons, and deal larger amounts of damage, but their damage is dealt to the target as system strain (usually on vehicles). It is still reduced by armor and soak . Droids are affected by ion weapons, taking damage to their strain threshold.
• Imperial I-Class Star Destroyer has Armor 10, System Strain Threshold 60, and shields of 3 (or 2 aft) so you need to get at least 4 successes on your attack roll to do any strain at all. Overall, you'd need to get some combination of 60 '4 success' attacks or 30 '5 success' attacks to incapacitate it, and you'd have to do it really quickly: Damage Control checks are pretty easy and Star Destroyers have a very, very, very large crew...
  • If 'System strain less than half system strain threshold' then the difficulty of a Damage Control check is 'Easy (1 Purple)'
• Victory-Class Star Destroyer only have Armor 9, System Strain Threshold 50, and Shields of 2, but you still need to score 3 successes on each attack and there are still a lot of crew to do Damage Control.

Basically, the Star Destroyer should probably pulverize the Interdictor long before system strain becomes an issue

2 hours ago, Ominovin said:

Damage Control checks are pretty easy and Star Destroyers have a very, very, very large crew...

• • If 'System strain less than half system strain threshold' then the difficulty of a Damage Control check is 'Easy (1 Purple)'

According to AoR, the ISD-I has over 37,000 crew. Let's really lowball and suggest that only 2% of the crew are doing damage control during an engagement. That's more 740 crew which would logically work in teams. Let's assume 5-man teams (minion groups) for simplicity, and we have about 150 teams doing damage control per turn. Now we can assume that they might have to move around in the ship to reach the damaged sections, so only 1/3 of the teams can be "in the right spot" at any given time. OK, now we have 50 teams making damage control tests each turn. As these are dedicated damage control teams, they're going to have Mechanics as a group skill. Even with just Intellect 2, the teams are rolling two yellow and two green against that Easy Difficulty.

Ok,now I have FO in front of me, FFG pulled a fast one.

Ion torpedoes do 10 damage with Breach 4, meaning minimum 5 damage with 1 success to an armor 10 target....

So max 12 hits required to KO a Star Destroyer at 0 starting strain in one pass.

So... If you narrative using mass combat rules, it's a mathematically viable outcome.

If you wargame it using actual play with squadron rules, minion groups and so on... Probably not going to happen in one turn.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I might retool the encounter a bit to make it more viable. I'll also give them a chance to add in some additional espionage before the encounter to maybe sabotage the star destroyer and make it a more viable target.

40 minutes ago, Rozial said:

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I might retool the encounter a bit to make it more viable. I'll also give them a chance to add in some additional espionage before the encounter to maybe sabotage the star destroyer and make it a more viable target.

Or, you know, just have a few guys with the Bad Motivator talent take a glance at it on the sensors and go, "You'll never believe this, but..."

On 1/7/2019 at 12:59 AM, Rozial said:

So I know there's a bit of uncertainty with Ion Cannons in spaceship combat and that combat between capital ships are more narrative than anything but how do you think an interdictor, with all of its weapons replaced with heavy ion cannons, would do against a victory class or even ISD? I'm running an upcoming session and the players have a few cruisers and other silhouette 5 and 6 ships with a single interdictor that's all ion cannons. They want to use it to capture another star destroyer without doing much damage and using the gravity well so it can't escape.

Savage.

I also think it might be easier if they made a virus that opened all airlocks and stopped emergency bulkheads from dropping.

I'm sure there would be some that would go down from manual activation, but it achieves the same goal. (it also saves you from writing yourself into a corner when it comes to ion guns)

3 hours ago, Rozial said:

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I might retool the encounter a bit to make it more viable. I'll also give them a chance to add in some additional espionage before the encounter to maybe sabotage the star destroyer and make it a more viable target.

Star Destroyers are supposed to be really scary: Personally, I'd recommend against allowing one to be space-jacked...

4 hours ago, Ominovin said:

Star Destroyers are supposed to be really scary: Personally, I'd recommend against allowing one to be space-jacked...

Keep in mind, this is effectively a "grand finale" for a campaign, with tons of set up beforehand. I think allowing a Star Destroyer to be hijacked is fine in that context.

As for means with which to steal a Star Destroyer, the current run of Marvel Star Wars comics had a great story arc dealing with just this. The Rebels boarded the Destroyer, barricaded themselves on the bridge and in the engine room, set the primary reactor to overload (convincing the entire 37,000 crew that the Star Destroyer was about to self-destruct, forcing the crew to abandon ship), then ejected the critical primary reactor at the same time that they used the secondary reactor to jump to hyperspace. So from an onlooker's perspective, the Star Destroyer vanished just as a massive explosion happened, and everyone would have believed the Star Destroyer destroyed.

This left the Rebels with a Star Destroyer running on back-up power piloted by a skeleton crew, with no remaining escape pods. The secondary reactor wasn't enough to power most of the shielding and weapons, and it was considerably slower (think the Millennium Falcon running in its backup drive in ESB), but hey, they still had a Star Destroyer at their disposal (Until Vader and SCAR Squadron got involved)!

To me, tricking the entire crew into abandoning ship by making them believe it's about to self-destruct is the best way to handle such a massive crew.

Star Destroyers can be set to self destruct from three different methods:

1. Making the reactors go critical

2. An automatic self-destruct requiring codes from the three highest rank officers onboard (which provides the most time to abandon ship)

3. The "Captain's Word," where the captain seals themselves in the bridge, orders all personnel to evacuate, the pilots the Star Destroyer into the nearest large object, such as a planet, star, or enemy capital ship. This is intended to be the last resort, if any of the other 3 highest ranking officers are dead, and if access to the reactor is unavailable.

I think using espionage to get access to the three codes for a given Star Destroyer, boarding, storming the bridge, and setting the automatic self-destruct would be a great method to force the crew to abandon ship. Then once they've abandoned, a daunting computer check (or harder, depending on your group) could disable the self-destruct.

Of course, this still requires getting a strike team onboard, fighting through the halls, and breaching the bridge, (and probably also the reactor room, just to make sure no engineers decide to make sure the ship goes up in flames), so it'd be no easy feat. But I feel this method would work better than trying to use ion weapons from an Interdictor.

On 1/7/2019 at 5:54 PM, Ominovin said:

Mathematically, this should go extremely poorly for the interdictor:

• Heavy Ion Cannons are Damage 7 [Slow, Ion]
  • ION (PASSIVE) : Ion weapons are designed to affect electrical systems as opposed to dealing raw damage. They are fitted to ships to knock out opponents' shields, sensors, and engines. They are shorter range than laser weapons, and deal larger amounts of damage, but their damage is dealt to the target as system strain (usually on vehicles). It is still reduced by armor and soak . Droids are affected by ion weapons, taking damage to their strain threshold.
• Imperial I-Class Star Destroyer has Armor 10, System Strain Threshold 60, and shields of 3 (or 2 aft) so you need to get at least 4 successes on your attack roll to do any strain at all. Overall, you'd need to get some combination of 60 '4 success' attacks or 30 '5 success' attacks to incapacitate it, and you'd have to do it really quickly: Damage Control checks are pretty easy and Star Destroyers have a very, very, very large crew...
  • If 'System strain less than half system strain threshold' then the difficulty of a Damage Control check is 'Easy (1 Purple)'
• Victory-Class Star Destroyer only have Armor 9, System Strain Threshold 50, and Shields of 2, but you still need to score 3 successes on each attack and there are still a lot of crew to do Damage Control.

Basically, the Star Destroyer should probably pulverize the Interdictor long before system strain becomes an issue

I think the range thing has a real point, The Interdictor would be taking heavy damage before it got into range. An ISD should also have picket ships. Arquiten's cruisers, Raider corvettes or some Gozantis (or Peltas, Neb-Bs, Corellian Corvettes, Hammerhead Corvettes....)

But with the system strain thing, we have to square that with what we see on screen.

We've seen two shots from a planet based Ion Gun take out an ISD for at least long enough to let rebel ships escape.

We've also seen a squadron of y-wings cripple an ISD for an extended length of time. Long enough for Raddus to think of his plan and execute it. The stats and the storytelling don't match up here.

17 minutes ago, Zrob314 said:

I think the range thing has a real point, The Interdictor would be taking heavy damage before it got into range. An ISD should also have picket ships. Arquiten's cruisers, Raider corvettes or some Gozantis (or Peltas, Neb-Bs, Corellian Corvettes, Hammerhead Corvettes....)

But with the system strain thing, we have to square that with what we see on screen.

We've seen two shots from a planet based Ion Gun take out an ISD for at least long enough to let rebel ships escape.

We've also seen a squadron of y-wings cripple an ISD for an extended length of time. Long enough for Raddus to think of his plan and execute it. The stats and the storytelling don't match up here.

Because plot, that's why. You don't roll for that. You just say it happens.

16 minutes ago, Rimsen said:

Because plot, that's why. You don't roll for that. You just say it happens.

And then we get people taking that to mean they can stock an interdictor with ion cannons.....

1 hour ago, Zrob314 said:

We've seen two shots from a planet based Ion Gun take out an ISD for at least long enough to let rebel ships escape.

A 20mm autocannon, isn't a 105mm howitzer, isn't an 80 cm railway cannon.

The cannon in ESB was something different with it's own ridiculous statblock that I don't think we've seen yet in official supplements.

1 hour ago, Zrob314 said:

We've also seen a squadron of y-wings cripple an ISD for an extended length of time. Long enough for Raddus to think of his plan and execute it. The stats and the storytelling don't match up here.

It takes a max of 12 ion torpedoes (found in FO) to take a ISD from 0 Strain, to disabled.

In the case of Rogue One, that scene was probably a Mass Combat check (since the players were all somewhere else doing something else) so saying a single squadron of Y-wings making an ion torpedo attack on ISD results in the ISD being disabled is easily explained.

If the players were directly partaking, 6 one-seater Y-wings all piloted by players successfully firing Linked 1 ion torpedoes could do it in one pass.