In the last two sessions of the RT based game I'm running two glaring issues have reared thier heads. The Rak'Gol are abysmal as the big scarry bad guy of the Expanse, and Competent crews are just about as useless as Incompetent ones.
The Rak'Gol problem is simple, they don't have any weapons listed with decent penetration. While they will tear through opponents using Flak armor or worse, anyone using Carapace armor or better is essentially invulnrable to them. Since the average person probably doesn't have very good armor if any, the Rak'Gol are the terror they are supposed to be for most NPCs. But against PCs, who can pretty easily get Carapace armor if they want it, their attempts to kill them were laughable. No really, when the Rak'Gol had to resort to trying to use breaching charges against individual PCs (which failed spectacularly due to a critically failed roll) the players really did laugh and facepalm.
Against opponents as well armored as the PCs the PC's crew would also be hard pressed to hurt them with thier las-carbines and shotguns. But they could then call up specialists with hellguns, plasma guns, or inferno pistols to deal with such hardened targets. The Rack'Gol do not have any equivilent to this second tier of weaponry that I could find, and they badly need it if players are ever going to take them as a credible threat beyond the starting ranks.
At the same time I've noticed that NPC vessels have consistantly been underwhelming. I chalk this up to the fact that the recomended average crew level of Compentent really isn't good enough in combat. A Compenent crew, a 30% chance of success does have a good chance of landing a hit a round by firing multiple batteries. And while a hit a round is a lot less than the possible maximum it's still a consistant low grade success, which sound's like an apropriate outcome for a Competent crew. Unfortunately. since your average macrocannon needs to hit 3-4 times in order to deal any damage at all (Void shields eat the first one and armor is good enough to nullify the first hit or so) it is very rare for a crew of this level to ever actually do anything of effect. By using the various special actions and having good components on the ship you can get the Compentent crew up to a regular pretty regular 3 hits in 2 round. A marked improvement, but still not enough to actually have an effect. You have to wait for a rare string of good rolls in one round to land more than 3 hits and finally do damage. And even then it may only be single digits if the damge rolls aren't very good. Combat slogs on a long time with multiple NPC ships fighting each other, while the PCs on thier ship are the only rutinely effective ones.
Using lance batteries doesn't help either. While they only need 2 hits in a round to do reliable damage, it takes just as many sucesses to get those hits as it would take to get 4 hits from a macrocannon. Getting those sucesses is the problem.
Clearly the cew percentages need to be bumpped up, the question is how much? I would normally say increase them all by 10, but with the actions like Lock On Target and Put Your Backs Into It (which get you a bonus to hit) even a small increase in overall crew skill can combine to a much larger bonus to hit by now succeeding in those actions more regularly. Perhaps just 5? Has anyone tried anything similar?