If you are in starship combat and you want to bring your ship to a dead stop, it seems that you would choose 1/2 speed and then make a check to lower that down to zero. Is that correct?

If then you want to remain stopped, do you have to continue to make this check every turn to keep the ship from surging forward against your will? That seems kind of weird. Do you have to leave someone on board with their foot on the brake when you dock at Port Wander?

As an aside, what is half speed for a ship with a listed speed of 7? Do you round up, down, or not at all?

Yes you'd have to continue to use the "Adjust speed" action every round. I believe it's that the ships main engine is always on and it's reverse thrusters that are slowing it down. It doesn't make complete sense rp'ically but mostly it's to balance out ship combat and realistically shouldn't be that hard to do if you just go half speed and have a decent pilot.

As for the half speed question that's going to be up to your GM. I would say it's 3 as you're not making the full 4 spaces but you, or your GM, may differ.

An object in motion wants to stay in motion. An object at rest wants to stay at rest. I'd say that if you end your movement phase with a Speed of 0, you can choose not to have your vessel move under its own power the next turn. This would of course make it far more difficult to turn the ship, but that's a different kettle of fish.

I round down in my games.

When my players asked this question I pointed out that the Engines also power the entire ship. If they wanted to stop at any point during combat I'd let them, but they'd turn off the void shields, weapons, etc.

They decided to just try and roll for stopping.

Thanks for the input everyone. I'm going to add a house rule that if a ship starts its turn at zero speed then it may remain at zero speed. For docking at space stations and such out of combat, it can just be handled narratively anway.

Ki_Ryn said:

Larkin said:

Do you turn your car off at traffic lights?

Errant said:

That might make sense if a space ships forward momentum was dependent on turning wheels that pushed it along a surface. Needles to say theres no brakes and little to no friction to slow a ship even after it turns it's engines off. As for reverse thrustering and keeping the "gas off" that isn't really plausible either as you're speaking about something that's pushing something the size of a large hive city around, the engine is massive and extremely complex, I doubt it's something you can turn off and on in a matter of moments. More than likely it would take several strategic rounds to do so.

Yeeeees, but in his example he seems to imply that if a ship is not moving it is literally dead, completely unable to power any of its components.

Anyway, in search of evidence to corroborate my statements, I appear to have snookered myself:

When a starship takes its Manoeuvre Action, it chooses to
move directly forward a number of VUs equal to its Speed value
or half its Speed value. This is the default action of a starship—
since starships are huge vessels with immense momentum, players
do not have the option of simply not moving their ship.

Errant said:

Errant said:

Because he was suggesting that his players, if they wanted the ship to just stop (rather than rolling for it) would need to turn off the engines, which in turn would turn off everything else, since the engines power everything else.

This, of course, ignores the fact that the ship would continue under it's own momentum, regardless of whether the engines were on or not.

MILLANDSON said:

Power was off to just the important combat components since the engines have to power down enough that the retro-thrusters could slow them enough without a roll. Which also answers the point of momentum. It also makes sense that out of combat situations you don't need the massive output that the engines are capable of, so when docking or other non-combat situations you can sit still easily.

The whole system is sailing in space instead of flying in space. Once you realize that it makes rationalizing everything else much easier.

When sailing, if you furl your sails you only have what momentum you had to maneouver until you unfurl them again. This is how the maneouvering system in RT is built.