If anyone has read any of my other threads about my group, you know that they've got a large number of ships available to them, and that it tends to bog down the space combat a bit. So, in conjunction with my hybrid rules set that I'll be posting tomorrow, I came up with a quick and dirty solution to multiple vessels.

Vessel SP is subtracted from PF as long as that vessel remains in the Primary Fleet. Only the starting ship is exempt from this rule.

EX: Your group has a nice cruiser, but needs a bit more cargo space, so they outfit and purchase a trader that totals 30sp. After they look it over and decide that it's alright their decent PF of 70 now only counts as 40 PF until that trader is either destroyed or removed from the primary fleet.

Why the distinction between primary and secondary fleets? The primary fleet is the one that takes risks, it's the one the explorers have to fund out of pocket to go off into the unknown. Any ship that's not in the fleet is probably doing something to make the dynasty money or at least pay for itself, so there's no PF hit. Is that open to abuse? Yes, it is, but a canny GM can make the PF negative hold over till the other ship is back in regular station or if it was damaged, gets repaired fully (which would be exceedingly hard to do with the reduced PF).

Why not the starting ship? If you look closely at the starting PF and SP table, the numbers are almost directly interchangeable. So it stands to reason that the dynasty is already shelling out for the beginning ship in some form or fashion.

I like this a bit better than the burning PF rule upon acquisition I came up with a while back as it represents a constant drain on resources and is very likely to keep fleets down to 1-3 ships at the most: a cruiser, an escort and a trade ship. And even that is likely to be reducing PF by 80-100.

Thoughts and comments are welcome.

That's a little harsher than I run, I confess, but at the same time I basically was pushing my group to expand their fleet.

I run the rule that the group cannot sustain more ships than the bonus of their profit factor (They're sitting on 76 atm, so 7 in this case). Cruisers and larger count as 2, transports don't count towards ship numbers. More than that stretches resouces too far.

Yeah it is a bit harsh, but PF tends to "run away" if your group has stacked a ship right. It's mainly for a lower powered game, and that's what my group is asking for. Check back later today for the other rules I'll be putting up.

it seems a bit harsh to me. after all, having a fleet should really help you to gain more profit factor, instead of bog it down. maybe a quick drop at first, but nothing that cant be regained fairly easy.

If you have problems with running big battles use squadron rules from BFK

Your solution sounds good, albeit (as previous posters already commented) a little harsh. At the moment I am thinking about giving just an achievement penalty for each endeavor, to the tune of about -100 achievement points per 35 used SP (other then those used for the group's original vessel). In this way the group will have to work harder to achieve their goals and will earn less bonus PF if they do. This (hopefully) will make them more likely to leave ships at home as soon as they notice that less ships (or just the one) will also be capable of handling their objectives. I haven't tested this out yet so I don't know how this affects the game.

That should work rather well, and you can always adjust on the fly. In my experience, at the level of 35sp per -100 AP you'd cut out 2-3 per extra cruiser. If your group figures it out though, they can super specialize each extra ship and only bring it along when it's bonus AP is more than it's negative.

If the players start thinking about the composition of their fleet to maximize their profit (especially when a certain amount of roleplaying is involved in doing this) might not be a bad thing. On the other hand, if it does become a problem you can rule that any ship not engaged in a permanent way (e.g. a transport ship that is ferrying goods from one planet to another, a warship patrolling a subsector, an explorer vessel on permanent detail to chart a star system, etc.) would count towards the achievement penalty. In other words: even if they would leave a ship "at home" it would still incur an achievement penalty because it would still need to be maintained, and because it isn't doing anything profitable to pay for itself.

And to update my rule I posted yesterday: instead of -100 per 35SP it would be more fair and more elegant to make the achievement penalty equal to 3x the SP cost.

With rules like these, players will sooner or later realise that they can never ever be equal to the likes of Winterscale or Saul, both of which have dozens of ships.

While I do advocate a certain PF penalty per ship, I'd let player accumulate as much of them as they are able to. But when zipping around the Expanse with a sizable fleet they should encounter the same problems as all fleets: Some ships emerge sooner from the warp, some weeks later. Some enter realspace almost in-system, some of them way out in the depths of space. Stragglers will be ambushed by pirates. Stuff like that. This will make players consider how many ships exactly should accompany them without imposing undue PF penalties.

I also wouldn't limit the number of ships they can have , just the number of ships they can take with them. And there isn't a hard limit, it's just less profitable to have a larger fleet for the same objective. Meanwhile all other ships will be engaged outside of the fleet on money making tasks.

I can't say I'd ever go with penalising the players' profit factor just for having more ships. What I'd consider is a soft-cap based on their Profit Factor Bonus. They can have that many ships active in their fleet before there's a chance of things going wrong. Vessels lost in the Warp, delayed transmissions, spoiled cargoes, and what have you.

Or use the system as intended and have the players only able to maintain their starting ship for free, with regular upkeep tests for all other vessels that were purchased or they paid to have refitted after salvaging, basically anything that involved them investing the Dynasty's wealth and resources into maintaining the ships.

This could mean that at important points in the campaign, that new raider the players had sent off to scout ahead of their cruiser has had a warp drive failure and is stranded for a week while it is repaired, or a space port refuses to let their new transport ship undock till it has been inspected by the inquisition after suspicion of having xenos on board.

Basically, the more things the dynasty invests in the more chance of things going wrong there should be…