I prefer more mundane adventures. Not to Dark Heresy levels, but certainly a Rogue Trader should not be able to stomp everybody in the Koronus Expanse he encounters, at least not before rank 4-5. My idea of an optimal ship is a fast frigate that can get out of trouble quickly while stocking its holds full of loot from a dead xeno world, while still having the firepower to take on other frigates/raiders. I hate the idea of the 20 PF/70 SP build, it reminds me of the "Million Nuyen Samurai" from Shadowrun.

But just clicking on RPG.net's ship-building thread for Rogue Trader I see a crapload of min/max'd cruisers and they all share something in common: No Cargo Bays. I found this amusing, mostly because the first thing I said when I went about designing my own frigate was "It's gotta have a compartmentalized cargo bay".

In my opinion, the penalty for not having a cargo bay is currently negligible. It takes up a crapload of space that can mean the difference between Sunsear batteries or Mars Macrocannons on a frigate. But you only lose -100 achievement points towards an endeavor, assuming your GM even uses the endeavor system. Yet couldn't a cargo bay double as an extended suppy hold? And where exactly are your players going to stuff that regiment-sized set of Lasguns they just made a successful acquisition roll on?

Well, unless you want to start listing exact sizes for cargo bays, armories, food storage, and every other bit of space, and then also listing exact storage sizes of every item in the books, it is hard to give a more exact mechanical usage to cargo bays, and instead falls to the GM to monitor how much stuff the RTs have, and decide when they have to start letting equipment pile up in the hallways because there isn't room for one more laspistol in the armory.

I do have to agree with you though, allowing it to be converted into extra food storage would at least provide a mechanical benefit of increasing possible travel time between restocking.

I'm not suggesting that, I'm just wondering if it's too extreme to tell players they can't loot that ship they just hulked or that world of xeno artifacts they just discovered because there isn't a **** cargo hold on their ship. Is it unreasonable to expect a trade-off for cramming your ship full of guns like it was an Ork kroozer?

((Or on the other hand, let them loot, but have crewmembers with sticky fingers steal crap from their unsecured loot pile))

Fortinbras said:

This is exactly how I would handle it. On something as vast as an imperial ship it would hard to have enough stuff that you simply, physically, couldn't keep it somewhere . But, it could certainly get in the way. Expect to have some of it disappear as people decide that it would fit well in their own pocket/home/holster. Expect any visiting people of importance to look down on the RTs as they have stuff literally flowing out of their storage. Expect any visiting people to make off with as much as they can get away with.

You could also provide a nice penalty to crew moral (Gee, look at all the thrones we're earning the captain, and how little we're getting paid. And, ****, I'm tired of tripping over that Xeno Artifact). Expect repair times to be longer as piles of stuff have to be moved around to get at important components. And if any part of the ship is damaged, expect to see your priceless treasures floating out into the void.

IIRC, to do an endevour objective with a type, you have to have something that is applicable to the type. I read that as, if you dont have a cargo hold, you cant do a trade objective.

At all....

Personally, it would entirely depend on the game that we wanted to play. If we were playing a cruiser based combat campaign, then the holds would be less important. With a mercantile game, that same ship would belong to House Krin pretty quick....

korjik said:

Some Endeavours might require specific components, but this is hardly universal. There are a number of Trade objectives that don't require any cargo carrying capacity (most of these involve making the deals as opposed to hauling the load). Lacking a component might just mean that the RT has to go about it in a less than ideal way - and that's why they can still attempt it even though they don't get the extra Achievement Points.

Same with my players: they took a Frigate, put in 2 laser batteries, armoury, tenebro-maze corridor, murder-servitors, retroboosters...needless to say, they took all 42 space and 45 power they had..but no cargo hold.

I'll allow some loot to be stored somewhere 'safe' i.e a small locked room to hide a little plunder, but if they find the mother load (either old ship or riches on-planet) they won't be able to haul it back, short of having it lying in the corridors, where the ratlings will have sticky fingers.

I like the idea of having longer repair time to move things around; and the fact that having a hull breech will have some of the loot flying off into space. Perhaps also some problematic if they get boarded; hard to move around agasint an ennemy when the hallways are lithered with riches.

My players currently have such an unoptimised ship that their cruiser has a broadside weapon slot on each side empty and they've totally used up all power and space.

On cargo bay components. As mentioned, a lack of a cargo bay component does not mean the ship has no cargo space. Thats daft. What it does mean is that the space it does have is small, not optimised and not as generally useful. You can still loot an alien world, you simply won't be able to cram as much stuff aboard as a ship with a cargo component.

Any cargo bay component should automatically be assumed to come with excellent access from the lighter bays (our cruiser has a railway system linking its cargo bays and its ship bays for smooth loading and unloading of cargo), not to mention loading cranes, specialised heavy lifter servitors and so on. Its also significantly more masive than the cargo space available to a ship with no cargo bay component. Ships lacking cargo components should be correspondingly slower to load and unload cargo and it should be a more disruptive and troublesome process, your rogue trader might be in orbit for a few days while all the loot gets bought on board and securely stowed. One with a cargo bat component can ge it done in a quarter the time ad far more efficiently.

Gribble_the_Munchkin said:

Hence the bonus points to certain types of Endeavors.

-=Brother Praetus=-

I don't think that barring someone almost completely from looting a world would be unreasonable, and I don't think it's "daft" to say that the ship doesn't have spare room for anything other than maybe several crate-loads of stuff if you don't have a supplemental cargo hold.

The ship's pre-existing cargo holds are there to serve the purposes of the ship. To store food, water, munitions, fuel, spare parts, etc. The point of the extra hold is to store stuff you might either want to bring along supplementally or to put stuff you find on other worlds in. The exception I'd make is Munitoriums, which are dedicated armories and so can serve to fit out a small battalion or regiment if need be without a cargo hold.

Finally, I think the issue is one of perception. In my interpretation, when you fulfill a trade objective by looting a xeno-world clean of artifacts, you're not just bringing back a single treasure chest full of trinkets, you're bringing back a cargo hold full, by the ton. Mountains of artifacts, or maybe one a few really huge ones. Your ship doesn't have room for it in anywhere except maybe the underdecks, or strapped to the hull like a hood ornament.

I beleive the cargo bay components represent additional dedicated holds (and equipment) used for transport of non essential goods. But a ship does still have vast cargo areas for fuel, repair gear, crew maintenance, and of course weaponry. There's also going to be some given over to 'empty' space for carrieing extra cargo.

The reason the cargo components give you a bonus is because you now have even more room specifically dedicated to loading huge numbers of containters in a very organized and efficient manner. Basically onboard warehouses with the servitors and cogitators to manage it all. If you don't have them you'll still have cargo areas, but they'll be small and or dedicated. Places like the ship's magazine, that one hold no one has gone into in a hundred years, or vehicle fuel bunker are not the best spots to store that eighteen megatons of giant cow equivalent you just brought on board.....but you work with what you have.

On the larger ships like cruisers there's still going to be a lot of dead space as these things are built with an eye to a semi modular construction (makes it easier to refit and salvage them) or are often used as transports for more elite units.

Honestly I think the problem most have when designing ships is that they're either unfamiliar with how endeavours impact the part, or they simply don't want to play that way. I imagine it's more the former than the latter, as not everyone reads the Game Master sections as thoroughly as rules pertaining to what they'll be playing as.

Incidentally I made sure the frigate the party began with had a compartmentalized hold as well. It meant giving up space for the trophy room, zero-g dodgeball court, and the jewel encrustred washrooms but it came in handy during our first few outings.

As for your idea of dedicated cargo holds acting as supply extenders, that'd be perfectly reasonable to me. Heck I'd even say that's why you get a bonus to the endeavor, as you don't need to buy as many supplies from elsewhere and can keep working without returning to port as soon.

Say an extra month of goods for every 25 points it'd give for trade if you're only engaging in military and exploration objectives?

Fortinbras said:

Well, as long as you don't get into combat that might not be such a bad option. Of course, it might cost you a bit of rep, and of course if you do get into a battle, you can bet your bottom throne that it'll end up as so much scrap.

My players ended up with a Cruiser, one of their very first acquisitions was a Transport to haul their stuff around with. Their ideas of a flotilla was a bit of a bust, but that did work out in their favor.

George Labour said:

These are covered by the Extended Supply Vaults component.

HappyDaze said:

Yes, but there is no reason that you couldn't store food as opposed to simply leaving it empty. Depending on the exact cargo hold in question , it might not hold as much as the vaults, and might be more susseptable to theft, but I don't see any reason you couldn't use it to store the extra food. The best part is that once you've eaten all the food in the hold, you get to use it for loot again.

Cargo bays may not be fitted to preserve the food properly, and perhaps they don't store the other supplies needed. I don't recommend allowing cargo components to substitute for the supply vaults except in a very limited way or you risk invalidating that component.

Of course how does the reverse sound? Would you use extended supply vaults to store crates of delicate alien artifacts? I doubt that the pantry would do a good job at housing a payload of dormant necron warriors let alone powering their stasis tubes with triple-layered void shields....especially if you want it kept a secret.

Very interesting thread.

I run a RT game for my group, who also opted out on Cargo Holds. The rationale was that they just weren't as much fun as the guns, runecaster, murder servitors, etc. I was worried about this as a GM, and told my players about it. Their idea was to earn money by escorting other ships with cargo space. So we started off down that route, but I made sure their second ship had plenty of space on board.

I think that how important the holds are, Endeavours aside, comes down to how strict the GM is with space. I'd let my players jettison food, ammo, etc. to store Xenos treasures, but would make sure that such decisions had consequences (morale for one). But I think another GM would be within rights to refuse this as an option, There is also a compatibility issue. In a previous game, our Lord Captain wanted to transport two-hundred non-oxygen breathing basilisk alien creatures. However, without cargo-holds, there was no part of the ship that could be sectioned off to support them - they certainly couldn't use the kitchens, gunnery bays, etc.

Peace!

Exoviper said:

Considering the dietary habits of the Imperial elite, and the amount of money they can throw at such things the pantry may actually be the best place for just such a task. ^^

Saygah said:

Nice transport. Too bad all those shiny toys on their flagship don't extend to it! (KABOOM)

To toss in my two cents on the issue, while my group was building its ship there was some discussion of how the ship would operate without the cargo and lighter bays. The conclusion we reached is that the bays serve as as warehouses, with workers that take the inventories, stock and restock, clean, etc. Without taking the option, the ship still has plenty of space to PUT stuff, but that space tends to be in between the ribs of the outer hull, or in the officer's manors and such; and the various launches the ship carries with it don't have a well maintained hangar, they sort of just have an airlock that they're parked in.

Cargo holds are specialized modules that replace the normal less efficient in built system.

All ships have basic ammo storage, food, etc.

A specific cargo bay simply gives you a bonus towards so specific objectives. Also it is my understanding that cargo bays modules are always considered full of products to trade (hence the +100 aech. pts) from food, to electronic products etc.

Any cargo is breach prone by a crew of plasma cutting torch, the only real deterent being trained guard personnel, etc. You should not specify a cargo is imprivious to looting from sticky fingers, that is the job of the soldiers.

crisaron said:

So's repelling boarders. We still roll for it on a probability table. I know what the rules state about cargo bays. It's my assertion that the rules are poorly written and endeavour bonuses in general are pretty worthless and GM-dependent. A GM that hands out profit factor like it was candy might as well just tell them to skip the cargo bay. I'm looking for some sort of objective "universal" plus to putting a cargo bay on a ship to help encourage munchkins and min/maxers to take it instead of simply going for the MOAR DAKKA build.

korjik said:

I don't see this in the rules.

Note, you get the bonus per Objective, not per Endeavor, so they can really pile up. Lure of the Expanse had 12 objectives. While not all were trade, a bunch were.

A Ship in arrears also is by Objective, not Endeavor. With a ship like that, you need a number of bonuses if you want to come out ahead.

A trophy room gives +50 to Trade objectives (among other types). It would indeed be silly if you could not get a trade route going because you didn't have a cargo bay, but came back later with a trophy room and it was no problem.

Fortinbras said:

And I would assert that one of the great things about RT is the simplicity of abstraction, so that I don't have to worry about statting out every nook and cranny of the ship and figuring out where my players are going to stow their cargo, and so that the players don't feel cheated out of opportunities because their ship lacks a certain component or something. Cargo Bays provide extra storage (hence the Space cost) with added convenience and security (hence the Power cost and Ship Points cost, for stasis fields, locked doors, alarms, lifter sentinels, and in my opinion probably additional cargo hauler shuttles like the Arvus Lighter or Halo Barge) so that cargo can be stored and secured even more efficiently resulting in higher profit. Personally I like that the players can still gain Profit Factor regardless, but will gain a little bit extra with the right components (a bonus is always better than a requirement for player fun); the bonus Achievement Points from components also help to funnel the players' interests into the type of Endeavours that will help them wring the most out of the bonuses granted by components.

P.S. FYI, canon-wise, the Imperial ships are so huge and underpopulated that entire decks can lie unused and uninhabited (except by dangerous things like Hull-ghasts, grues, ghilliam, and whatnot) for centuries. Even the smallest Raider-class ship is underpopulated compared to say Nimitz aircraft carrier and has unused Black Holds like just about every Imperial ship. As others have pointed out - space is really not the issue, efficiency and security are, and that is what Cargo Bays likely provide.