Can ships weapons jam if I roll a 96+ to hit as with other ranged weapons.

In the rules it doesn't say either way in the ship rules and, in the Combat Circumstances section in the Playing the Game chapter, Weapon Jams refers to ranged weapons.

I can see it happening background wise. A crew stuffup has made you miss your opportunity to fire.

Should it not apply?

Should it apply?

If it did apply it would give meaning to the craftsmanship as you would apply the ranged weapons craftmanship to them.

Anyway what are your thoughts?

It hadn't occurred to me until I saw your post, but I think ship weapons could be susceptible to jamming. A roll of 96+ could represent a misfire, a dud, a launch tube jam, or an overload in the case of energy weapons. I think I'll incorporate this into my current campaign and see how it works.

Which raises the terrifying concept of using Technical Knock to Fonzie a macrocannon broadside back online...

A starship's weapons rarely are a single cannon somewhere, they are composed thousands of gun batteries around the ship. Having them all jam or break in unison with a roll of 96 would be just silly.

Shrike said:

Literally jamming the guns would be a bit silly, I agree. Not to mention efforts to unjam such weapons would likely involve EVA and a bunch of other nonsense that would be impractical to attempt in the middle of combat, meaning the weapon is now offline until the fight is over, effectively.

However, there could be plenty of other fluffy reasons why the weapon(s) misfire that one time and are then fine in a round or two. Computer glitch, some kind of jamming signal that temporarily interferes with the targetting computer, lackies in the fire chamber not reloading fast enough. Combat damage "takes the weapons offline" until repair crews can "fix it." Maybe the entire battery will refuse to fire if one of the access points is open, as a safety precaution.

I like the idea of jamming actually. Maybe you could rule it that the next round of firing the macrobatteries have their max number of hits reduced by 1.

Shrike said:

But having the targeting system aiming the thousands of guns having a error#shunt / Arbort: that stops the thousands of guns firing because of lack of targeting information (the target is very VERY far away after all) is not as silly. At the ranges these ships fire at they can't fire blind, they have to have at least some information to go on. It would be like trying to shoot a fly.

I see missing a turn of shooting would be appropriate as in that turn you would be solving the technical problem in the fire control (Where Technical Knock might come in handy ).

Hell, the "jam" may not even be technological in nature: old fluff states that during battles, the gunners would be hopped up on stimulants, so the engagement would go undisrupted by shift changes for longer (and they'd have the reflexes to fire in the stupidly short firing window). It also notes that the high doses of stimulants could cause paranoia and hallucination, and that it wasn't unknown for gunners to fire at ghosts, or have mental breakdowns (although their punishments would be light, as they were valuable, expert crew).
Maybe the jam could be that a gunner fired too early, and the rest of the battery followed suit, and the jam is the time needed to calm him/them down or replace them.

I often use jammed weapons to describe why otherwise 'guaranteed' salvos fired in ship combat miss. Cruiser at 2VU's and you miss? Jammed weapons.

In the words of the ships Rogue Trader, "What unjams macrocannons? Floggings and extra grog!"

This can also represent that the gun crews got the wrong firing solution from the spotter. (Doh! Forgot to carry the two!) Or, indeed, didn't get it at all as the intra-ship com system suffered a lapse.