Okay, long question,

One of my new players wants to be a navy pilot, now she needs Pilot (Military) that is obvious, but my questions are:

To fire a Missile/Autocannon/Lascannon fixt to the ship, does she need the appropriate Talent (Heavy Weapon Training etc.)
and...
What about if she wants to fire a turret based weapon from, say a Guncutter?

Please feed me info...

(Yes I have aphocrypa, couldn't find it...)

GrtZ,

S.

Santiago said:

IMO, yes, the weapon training talents are needed. Using the weapons is as much a matter of knowing how the gun will fire as anything else, and you would (for example) lead a target differently with a lascannon than you would with an autocannon (as the las-blast crosses the invervening space far faster than any autocannon shell).

And what about turrets controlled from internal targeting chairs (for lack of better term), would Tech Use be the skill to go on?

I'd still go with standard BS and Heavy Weapon Training, though Tech Use would certainly be useable for aiding the gunner.

Also, as long as she's just the pilot of the vessel, she doesn't necessarily need to know how to fire the big guns efficiently - she's probably got control over a nose-mounted heavy SP weapon (and Heavy SP is available at second rank anyway, so there's no harm in giving it to her), but other weapons might be controlled by specialist gunners.

Even for nose- and spinal-mount weapons, I'd require BS and the Talents simply because the Talents indicate familiarity with the ballistic (or energetic) properties of the weapon being fired. However, spinal weapons I would rule as not imposing a penalty to fire while piloting, since the operation of a nose weapon would be flush with the piloting action.

I would think the machine spirit of the vehicle could be programmed to confer those talents on the user, at least in more high-tech (higher-tech? high-tecker?) vehicles

Action_Carl said:

Sure, but that'd be a special feature of either the weapon or the vehicle. We're talking about general vehicle rules.

With that option the pilot would require a MIU

For weapons that are fixed mounts, I would say piloting skill would cover firing them.