Has anyone done up a guide for ship design so that new players aren't overwhelmed by options? I don't mean some min-maxer's guide, just a general advice guide so that new Trader groups don't end up packing their ship full of semi-useless junk or overload on weaponry and then not have any room for cargo.

You can find very nice pre-made ships for the players to take in both the Core and Into the Storm.

If you want that your players get involved and build the ship from scratch themselves, just use the Core and ignore all other supplements. That reduces the overall quantity of options available to them.

This tips also help:

1) What kind of Dynasty the players have? Do they get their Profit from war against xenos, merchant operations, searching archeotech, the cold trade, etc?

This helps you a lot to choose the Hull you need. A Frigate or Cruiser to lead wars against pirates or xenos. A transport of you are a merchant. A Rider if you are an explorer or a smuggler. Etc.

2) First choose all 8 Essential Components, since purchasing them is mandatory. You don't have many options here, and is very straightforward if you are only using the Core.

3) Once you have all your remaining Space and Power, choose at least one Weapon. Even if the players want to be merchants or explorers and hope to run away from most combats, having at least a Macrobattery installed on your ship is almost mandatory. If your ship has a Keel weapon slot, put your most powerful weapon there since it will allow it to shoot in 360°. Dorsal weapon slots are the second most important, since they can shoot in every direction save backwards (if your players hace a Cruiser or Light Cruiser, the Prow weapon slot has the same range has Dorsal... for all other smaller ships, Prow only shoots to the front).

Don't waste Ship Points, Power and Space on Lances if you don't have at least one Macrobattery, and even then I won't recommend them unless you have a Frigate or bigger ship. If you want more than one weapon, better to have two Macrobatteries to shoot a salvo (although this is just my opinion, because I like big quantities of raw damage rather than Critical Effects).

4) Once you have at least one weapon. Check the Supplemental Components that give AP Bonuses to the type of Endeavours the group is going to do more. If you want a merchant dynasty, Cargo Holds and Luxury Quarters are a lot more useful than Barracks or a Munitorum.

My two cents. I hope it helps. =)

Maese Mateo said:

That seems fair enough - I was mainly looking for general advice like some of the more detailed character-building guides for DnD I've seen. Like listing out the options and saying "if you want your character to be good at/fill party role/concentrate on X, then you'll want to look at things like these...".

Maese Mateo said:

Those are really helpful tips. I don't have any RT group at the moment (don't know anyone here in Toowoomba that plays it or any of the 40k RPGs) but I will keep these in mind in-case they'll come in handy.

EDIT: Incidentally - I just re-read the premade ships in Into the Storm and saw that the Sovereign Venture (a Tyrant-Class Cruiser on page 168) was only 31 SP. I checked the errata and it says 70, but I used a ship building spreadsheet (can't remember if I found it here on the forums, on Dark Reign or somewhere else entirely) to double-check and I got 75 SP. Is this ship just cursed to always have the wrong SP cost printed, or did they lop 5 SP off the cost so that Dynasties who got very low Starting Profit Factor could get it?

If you check the "Class" entry under the ship's name, it says "HEAVILY MODIFIED Tyrant-class". That means it's not exactly the same Tyrant-class Hull the book has, but a modification of it. For example, it only has 75 Space, while the Tyrant-class has 77 normally. I'm sure it has other modifications to reduce the base Hull cost, so that the ship costs 70 SP rather than 75.

Ah, didn't think of that, thanks.