Howdy!,

I bugged all you fine fellows about a year ago with some questions for running my first games. Sadly, that was also the last time we played. However!, we recently did get a session down and now that the mad Navigator is locked up (player also hasn't gotten back to me about returning…), the players can pick up from where the Navigator left them (Lost In Space), and continue to try and make money.

My current worries right now are getting some numbers down. I think it works best for the group and myself included to know what they have. With that said, I vaguely remember asking atleast one of my questions before but I can't seem to access the old post, maybe it got deleted?

Anyway, if a ship doesn't have any of the Hangar Bay components, how many craft are they assumed to own? I seem to remember being told it was like 6, I assume a few would be haulers and perhaps one or two would be guncutters?

Looking at the Rules of War section in the Battlefleet Koronus book, I'm trying to get some numbers down for their military. I remember seeing in a few places where people don't like these rules, but for the time being I'm thinking it'd be best to use something concrete-ish. I also remember being told that a vessel had about 10% of its crew as combatants. Is this correct? I've gone through the books but can't seem to find a source for this either. Their ship is an Endeavour class, which puts their population at 67,500 which would make their armed forces 6750. This seems a bit much to me, so does anyone have any better information or ideas? I'm thinking I now take this number and divvy it up into Units? I'm also thinking at the moment their poor household can't afford much more then conscripts and the such, so my idea was to just make several Units of Medium Infantry. Still, the numbers seem like a lot. Any clarificaiton here would be awesome!

Goodwin said:

According to Battlefleet Koronus, if a ship does not have Launch bays then the general rule of thumb is that it has one lighter, shuttle or heavy lifter for every 5 points of Hull Space, and an additional four vehicles for every cargo hold that the ship has. I gave my ship a handful of guncutters and halo barges, as well as a warning that if they started to try to do fancy things with this invisible system of resupplying their ship I'd start thinking of ways for it to go wrong.

Regarding Armsmen, the rule I've used that has worked out pretty well is that you figure out your maximum crew population, and then ask your players how many you want to kit out as Armsmen. They have that number, but because of their new specialized training, whatever percentage of crew population became Armsmen now counts as a crew penalty (round up). Thus if your Endeavour now has 6,000 Armsmen then that's approximately 9% of the crew population, which means your maximum Crew Rating takes a penalty of 9. If your vessel has a Barracks then you can ignore up to 10 point sof penalty from having dedicated troops on board.

If you don't have dedicated troops I believe that the Frozen Reaches has rules for converting ship officers into a unit. Assume that one-third of your crew is competent enough with weapons to grab laspistols or stub revolvers and know their way around a fight, but they only use two-thirds of their crew rating when making attack rolls.

Hey Erathia,

Thanks for the speedy and helpful response!

The vehicle bit is great. Apologies on having missed it, I was looking through the Battlefleet book but managed to miss it.

For the Armsmen, would you allow your players to instead raise/purchase a few Units using the acquisition rules instead of having them take a hit on the population? This would likely require a Barracks to properly house them though, I'd think. I'm going to write down that rule of yours and use it either way. I like those ideas.

The situation at the moment without going into too much detail is an infestation of orks on their ship (via a Krooza crashing into it). I've houseruled the scenario so that while the orks are attacking two locations at a time they have the opportunity to go and repel one themselves, and to send a "unit" to try and repel the other. The unit then does pretty well a skill challenge against the orks to see how well it did. Everyone was having fun, even with my shoddy house rule, however, I just wanted something we could all look at and say "Okay, you've got 3 Companies here, what do you do?" Kind of thing, if that makes sense.

Goodwin said:

Nope, that makes sense. If they raised or purchased a few Units (as my players did), then they can have trained Armsmen on the ship that function at the full Crew Rating, or maybe even better if they hire a group of specific Mercenary NPCs. Ultimately the question it boils down to is space though. If they keep the number of mercenaries below 1% of their maximum crew population then you probably don't have to worry about it, but eventually your ship will either run into a problem where there's not enough room for everyone, so either your regular crew has to go (population loss) or your crew has to start squeezing together (morale loss).

If you're transporting units to and from a location then any Main Cargo Bay will work, but if they want a long-term Military presence then they should have a bunker for the long run. Expecting to keep thousand of trained Armsmen on board without a dedicated facility for them doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. On the other hand, these are flamboyantly awesome Rogue Traders who can do whatever they want, but there should be some sort of realistic consequences is my opinion.

When resolving background endeavours like that (as I've run into something similar), before sending the NPCs out, each PC has a chance to make one single skill test that is relevant to the mission they're being sent on. For your Ork example, your Rogue Trader decides to make a Command Test to his troops, and gets 2 degrees of Success giving them a +15 (+5 for the success, and then +5 for every DoS after that). The Arch-Militant then briefs them on Tactica Imperialis, but gets 1 Degree of Failure giving them a -5 (nothing for the failure, and then -5 for every DoF). The Explorator attempts to salvage the situation with her knowledge of Orkish psychology and gets 5 Degrees of Success on Forbidden Lore Xenos, giving them a +30 total. I then make a skill test with the Ballistic Skill rating of my troops (42) with a combined bonus from the PCs of +45 meaning they now roll against an 87 for this mission. You can work out a further bonus or penalty if you're sending in more troops than they're facing or vice versa. If multiple people try the same skill (lots of people have Command) they can either Aid each other in one giant test, or else make multiple tests but only the best test counts.

Oh yeees!

That helps a ton, and is much better then what I was doing. It ended up just being a bunch of roll-offs that wasn't very entertaining.

Thanks for all the help! I think I'm good for now!

Well I forget what book it was in, but I saw a breakdown of the crew of a ship:

For every 100 crew on a ship:

10 Armsmen

1 Officer

10 Warrant officers

79 Generic Crew

Now all of these different crew would have their own quarters with quality equal to the ships quarters component. Also I would assume there is an officer club and possibly and NCO club. Also there have to mess halls and rec areas. For the armsmen there is probably at least one precint house for lack of a better term at the moment, along with at least one arms room.

Sor for total amount of armsmen on a 85,000 crew ship, you would have 850 as all ships would have them,a nd that seems like a good number. If you want more "fighters" then assume X% are competent with small arms. So while the armsmen would have the crew skill rating, maybe a tad higher, any additional would be below crewt rating as theya rent trained for the new "job".

So using that as a base, adjust as needed.

I handled the need for arms-men and other kinds of specialists that the Explorers can call on for aid while planet side by giving them 500 house arms-men based off of the profile for the Adeptus Arbites naval arms-men with appropriate modifiers to skills, gear, and stats. They started out as weaker than their source but this made them up gradable for the players.