If I want crew (veteran) where to go to aquire them, and what is(are) the test(s) to aquire them from competent crew after the character creation?

If I inquire loses where to go so the crew maintains quality and what test should I do?

I don't want to make any tests more difficult than there are written in the books. It is possible to aquire a veteran crew or the penalties are so big that is virtual impossible and from what level of profit can this be done relativly easily? Can you please tell me in what books should I look for rules?

Eesh. Every single time with this question... Why oh why couldn't the rules for crew improvement have been in the core book?

Okay. There are no concrete rules for increasing your crew rating. A veteran crew is most likely to come from either a world renowned for the quality of its pilots and starship crews like Glavia, the Imperial Navy, or some other such entity like mercenaries. The Acquisition test would be the something along the lines of Vast Scale, Good Quality, Scarce/Rare Availability for a better crew. Call it -30 to the Test.

Unless you've suffered massive crew losses, you should be able to replenish your crew at any human-inhabited planet. Hive or penal worlds are best for an influx of new crew.

With any luck we'll have better rules in Battlefleet Koronus.

Sorry.

And if I replenish the crew(relative moderate) loses from a hive world I would not loose my crew rating? The modifier is aplicable at what commerce skill?

Can you train your crew? In how many weeks and what would cost me?

Page 226, Core book for replenishing crew. Unless your crew has been utterly decimated, it's presumed that the remaining crew train the new crew in their roles, keeping the crew rating the same. As to training, there are no official rules about it. Feel free to make something up, I guess. Personally I tend to handwave it away, simply stating that the Explorers don't have the skills or training to similarly educate tens of thousands of crew in any reasonable timeframe. Your mileage may vary.

I agree with Errant. If your crew population hasn't been decimated, then the new people will be trained and adapt to the high level of skill of the rest of your crew. As for training the crew yourself, it just isn't going to happen. You'd have to train thousands or tens of thousands of people, Your character won't have the time, and shouldn't really have the inclination to spend that much time with rattings. Your character is an explorer and adventurer and profitter of the farthest reaches of space. Your character isn't a tutor.

So, unless you have a few decades you want to spend training people, you're unlikely to make any headway on improving crew rating that way. On the other hand, experinced crew got experinced somehow. Perhaps your GM might let you raise your crew rating by 1 point for every few battles that you are in and don't suffer huge crew losses from.

What about spending 1Profit Point to get 1 crew improvement so if you spend 5 or 10 profit points you increase the rank of the ship crew? In this way I was talking about training your crew.

Into the Storm, Page 163: The 'Crew Improvements' Upgrade. If you 'buy' the best-craftsmanship Crew Improvements, you'll get +5 Crew Rating (and a permanent Morale Boost). The Availability is 'Average', but you have to count in the best-craftsmanship, I think that was -30. I guess you could get this upgrade more than once, but maybe your GM (or you as GM) wants to increase the difficulity for the aquisition, once the crewrating is above a certain level or simply cap it at that value. Otherwise you'll end up with a legendary crew that is better than all of the explorators...

gomme said:

It specifies (in the begining of the section) that all the improvements can only be bought once unless it says otherwise in the description.

Oh, thanks. Well, at least you get a +5 Crew Rating and some Morale. Of course, you could houserule it, too, so you could get it more than once, with rising difficulity, I'd suggest.

I can't remember where I read it, but I seem to recall you could boost crew rating at ship creation for 10 SP, or alternately reduce it from competent for an extra 10 SP at start? This would seem to indicate that at the very least, crew rating upgrades are an expensive proposition.

Fortinbras said:

Page 193

Its 5 ship points per 10 point upgrade or downgrade at ship creation.

If you were just going to go and out and out buy upgrades to the crew I would do it like this.

I suppose you could buy a 10 point crew upgrade as a 5 SP ship component (extrapolated up to 5 from page 207).. making it a near unique component. It would fall under structure as it does not obviously fall under any other component (page 274). Quality would depend on just how high the rating it would be, I would say going from 20 or 30 would be common, going from 40 would be good and 50+ is best.

So if you had a PF of 70 and wanted to upgrade your crew from 40 to 50 you would need a 70 - 50 + 0 - 10 = 10 or less on your roll. Plus whatever situational modifiers you would want to apply.. Orbiting an Agri world... good luck. Orbiting a hive world with a naval base and comerce hub.. probably a better shot.

Millage varies of course.

How to boost the chances for the aquisition roll outside increasing the profit? Does the modifiers for comerce and rogue trader/senechal talents help, and if so what are those relevant talents or skills?

gomme said:

i would also say that in addition to getting the -30 modifier for best craftmanship you would also have to use the Vast -30 modifier for getting over 10000 ppl.

That is -60 it is not too much that the player will never be able to get or will always fail to pass the test?

Cyric313 said:

Per RAW (page 162-163 into the storm): the acquisition rolls are straight rarity modified by quality (similar to ship components). So a best quality ship upgrade, crew improvement would be a -20 to your profit factor. Plus whatever situational modifiers the GM feels are correct. It would give +5 Crew Rating and +3 Moral. It can be purchased once.

It should be pretty hard to improve crew quality. Many crews are multi-generational, and the knowledge is handed down, so there just may not be anyone that can really up the training level very quickly, and even if you put more skilled guys aboard, they get rapidly diluted amongst the rest.

thor2006 said:

Only things I can think of that will give you a boost is an opposed commerce test with every net DoS giving you a +2 bonus, and permenently burning PF for a +5 bonus per point burned.

And I don't think scale would apply, because it never does for starships.

Karoline said:

Actually it is +10 per point burned.

Page 223 Into the Storm

Well, you could also talk to your GM. During your campaign, your Crew Rating could improve simply by not losing too many men. Something like, if you manage to keep up your Crew % above 50 over a given period of time (I don't know ... 6 months or so), you make a Command Test and gain +5 to Crew Rating. The reason for this is, that you most likely will do drills and manoeuvers all the time during your flight through the void. And that improves your crew's abilities. Maybe you can focus on one aspect only at once. You choose your next "project" and after 6 months you get to improve a single value of your crew, for example Ballistic Skill or Pilot(Spacecraft). Of course, you'd have to keep track for every characteristic seperately, which will slow down things.

gomme said:

Indeed I would suggest some sort of home rule method for improving crew rating.

We use a system where over a week or so the players attempt to train the crew. Each player can pick one skill to try and train the crew with. Command and Trade (Voidfarer) are required. However any other skills that the gm feels are appropriate, such as tech use, medicae, navigation, etc,etc. can also be used in addition. The players then make a roll, you tally up the levels of succeses and if they get at least 10 the crew rating will go up by one point. (dificulty of the roll is determined by current crew level. Also by using aquisition rolls you can buy successes, these represent live fire drills against asteroids etc. This will work up till level 50. Past that you need to do the same and make additional evaluate, inquiry, and acquisition rolls to find the deadwood in your crew and replace them with highly capable personnel. For us a level 30 crew is completely average, 40 is well trained, 50 is highly trained and experienced, above that you need crew who are naturally talented, highly trained, and experienced.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

A week to train a crew of several thousand? Well, you'd only have to train the relevant portion of the crew, but that is still alot of people. And a week is like no time at all, especially when a normal warp jump can last a few months. You could have a sector class crew by the time you go from one port to another with weekly training sessions.

Karoline said:

Your characters are not personally training the entire crew. The rolls represent your characters and other highly skilled members of the crew (under character direction) leading drills, evaluating and improving current training programs, providing personnel attention to restructuring the people below them (promoting the more competent). Though there may actually be some personnel instruction even that would be to a group and meant to be filtered down (Train the Trainers).

As to the time.. not so much of a problem when you consider that the character has to be free.. Time in the warp is not always free time for all of our players (or the crew for that matter). If it is they already have 101 other uses for it. Also relating to how long it takes the 10 levels isn't all that easy to get especially past 40... I don't have my notes with me or I would post the modifiers. Unless they are willing to burn acquisition rolls (which are rigorously controlled) it will take quite some time to get a huge crew rating.

Things to remember the time is tailored to our game, and they are by no means assured of success on any given week.

The one possible shortcut would be acquisition rolls, but they don't get a lot of large scale ones (we have set up a more detailed system for how many acquistion rolls they get) and there are a lot of demands on them.

To date the progress of the crew rating has been vary slow maybe 1 or 2 points an endeavor (and slowing as the rolls get harder), they want to pump it up but they have a lot of other things to do.