Hi

New to the Star Wars games but love them. Hosted a session so far with my group, they loved it. Most of the rules, I understand.

But some of the space combat and especially maintaning speed bands is still a mystery. I'm planning the next up-coming session from the adventure Debts to pay, and is stuck with the concept to chase after the droid Lookout who is destroyng the storm barriers. The guide book says the pilot need to keep speed 3 or faster to keep up. My concern is that, fly/drive is a from my understanding a free maneuver and not a skill that needs a dice pool. In a chase, it don't get exciting if you can declare without a skill check that "I fly in the speed bands and accelerates to the correct speed".

If I were about to resolve it on the session, I would say a piloting check to keep up and with a success or advantage, the pilot succeeds to maintain the desired speed bands, and with threats or failure, he loses the speed and is drawn back a band.

I'm super aware that I have a long path to go for perfection, but this messes with my mind. And yes I have searched in the core rule books and Google 😃 for combat rules.

Can someone please explain how the speed bands works in a chase?

I have not run Debts to Pay, so I may be misunderstanding the circumstances.

However, in the Core Rulebook, it discusses rules for chases. The Chase has a set difficulty, and each participant rolls against that difficulty to determine how well they do. If Party A has more net success than Party B, Party A gains 1 range band+1 for every point of speed he is faster than Party B.

So if Party A is at Speed 4 and Party B is at Speed 3 and Party A wins the Chase check, Party A gains 2 Range Bands.

It should also be noted that if there is difficult terrain (asteroid field, for example), the Fly/Drive Maneuver requires a check based on current Speed and Silhouette.

It may be that in Debts to Pay, they expect you to just "keep up" as long as you are going at the proper speed, but I would probably run it as I described above.

You have to make Piloting checks to go through difficult terrain- do they specify the storms are difficult terrain? The difficulty is equal to [speed].[1/2 silhouette], so the faster you're going the harder the checks are. For a YT-1300 (4/2=2) going speed 3, that's a 2 red 1 purple check.