When your Ship master decides that the best way to clear a drop site is to buzz the enemy in a battalion scale drop ship and burn/irradiate everything in the way with the thrusters..........

When two of your player characters spend the entire campaign trying to assassinate each other and their father to try to inherit the control of the rogue trader dynasty (with the father taking it as youthful hijinks) with the following methods so far having been used (not exhaustive):

• Scorpions in the bed
• Courtesan is secretly an assassin
• "Accidental" weapons "malfunctions"
• Poison blow darts
• A musk enraged Giant Grox being unleashed in someones private quarters
• An exploding crab
• Bees
• "the carrot of death"
• Grenade Monkeys
• Exploding Courtesan
• Reprogrammed servitors

Bees- my god!

i would have gone for "scorpions in the courtesan"

Or even "scorpions in the bees"...

Oh, come on, you know it makes sense!

No no- Exploding bees!

bzzzz bzzzz BZZZZZZ BOOOOM!!!

Bees armed with Shotguns shooting exploding Scorpions?

- When you smash through an Adamantium-Bulkhead with your will and your bare fists because "NOBODY DENIES MY AMBITION!" then remember you have a power fist and start joining the boarding-party.

- When a Forge World is under attack, you take a few atomics with you, "just in case". You also don't care about security, cause you can always get more.

- Void Master drops one of said bombs, forgets to set the timer right, rides the wave, returns with what is essentially a burning wreck of a Marauder, lights up a Lho-Stick at the still glowing flyer "I admit, I almost broke a sweat."

Now i wonder what Han Solo would look like as a rogue trader.

Imperial agent: why yes, lord Solo we would love to trade with you, but there are rumours that your first mate is a foul hairy xenos!"

Solo: "you have a problem with that?"

Imperial agent: "Well of course the emperor sez all xe-"

Solo (shoots first)

Solo: "Sorry about the mess"

The ship component bonus for hit and run is higher than their actual command stat.

The first thing a player says after reading about gland warriors is " can I get this for my noise marine in BC?"

-This idea is one of the least broken of the night.

-The most broken was one that involved rituals to move planets, kill ships and an excessive amount of virus weaponry.

Think fire ships...but on planetary scales.

The first thing a player says after reading about gland warriors is " can I get this for my noise marine in BC?"

How about for guardsmen in OW?

When you make a pact with a daemon who is wanted for mass murder.

When said demon is wanted by OTHER DEMONS. Khornite ones at that.

> When your players jump on rumors from Footfall about a magnificient warship ladden with archeotech roaming the Expanse...
and they discover that they were chasing their own tails and rumors about their OWN shtarship.

> when their reaction to this has been nicknamed " the Second Defenestration of Footfall".

> when no one dares to speaks about the first one, least they might triggered a third...

>When you decide that you have gathered enough awesomeness to found a new sub-sector all by yourself.

>When you arrive at a Feral World and order your people to levy half its population without actually knowing how many people are in there... or pretty much anything about the planet itself. And you don´t care at all.

>When Lord Sector Marius Hax writes a letter to you once a month.

>When Karrad Vall burns a planet only looking for you.

>When you dismiss the loss of one of your ships-of-the-line as a "Insignificant matter unworthy of my attention".

>When you realize that acquiring Titans can´t be that hard at this point of the story.

-An encounter with Rak'Gols is considered a promising business opportunity.

When one of the player's first reactions to seeing the corrupted craftworld of Lu'nassad is "Do you think we could capture and recommission that for our fleet?"

The first thing a player says after reading about gland warriors is " can I get this for my noise marine in BC?"

-This idea is one of the least broken of the night.

-The most broken was one that involved rituals to move planets, kill ships and an excessive amount of virus weaponry.

Think fire ships...but on planetary scales.

You know what? I think I have some (theoretically) feasible plans somewhere for moving planets around. Granted, it wasn't something you could do if you wanted to crash (for example) Venus into Terra, but that was because it was designed to shift gas giants (surprisingly, that's easier to do than move a rocky planet, at least with this trick). In simple terms- a structure (called a "candle", because you burn it at both ends), with equally powerful rocket engines pointing in opposite directions, oriented so one is aimed directly at the planet's core, with essentially a giant hoover so it could draw up the planet's atmosphere as fuel. If the engine pointing down is strong enough to maintain a constant altitude, then you can consider the candle and planet to be one object, so the other engine can gradually push the planet around. Slow as hell, but let's face it, it's not going to be easy to stop a gas giant. Add some attitude thrusters along the side, and you can move the candle around to steer it.

I could dig out the details, but suffice it to say, it's not really designed for interstellar hi-jinks, except maybe at seriously slow generation-ship type speeds. And let's face it, building the warp drives and geller field systems to loft Saturn through the Warp to wherever you want to crash it is a seriously non-trivial task, even when you consider the scale of building a practicable engine to move it.

That said, it's almost ideal as an encounter as a macro-scale colonisation project from the DAoT (if the candle is at the north or south pole, then any moons should have come along for the ride, and anything on the side of those moons closest to the candle should have survived). Or as a doomsday weapon (imagine crashing Saturn into Mars... actually, if you were to try this in Sol system, there are four candidates for firing candles, so you could either try again if you missed, or hit your target planet of choice with Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. At the same time)!

Could you draw that please?

If you had a rocket powerful enough to use in that method - you might as well just point it at the planet you want destroyed and ignite it. You'll obliterate everything on it much faster that way. The amount of energy you'd be bombarding the planet with would be... astronomical.

That's the thing- if you do the math it doesn't actually take that powerful a rocket*, as long as your "down" motor can maintain altitude. It just takes a ridiculously long time to do anything, as even the largest practical engines aren't going to get anything like 1g of acceleration when they have to shunt around that much mass. Hell, they'd be lucky to get 0.001g . But if it can run for long enough...

Tenebrae- my drawing skills are hardly what I'd consider up to the task, although I may well give it a go. Luckily, there does exist something of a thumbnail of such a candle in action here . Not the best of images for the design, I grant, but the best I know of floating around the 'net.

*Ok, it's still powerful enough to seriously mess up whatever biosphere you point it at, but the same can be said for basically any practical interplanetary/interstellar drive system. Remember the Kzinti Lesson: "a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."

The problem of basing this on a double-end candle method is dispersion. If the engine is not physically attached to the planet in question (which would be a whole different issue when talking about a gas giant) then your relying on the projected particles from the engine to bounce off the planet your pointing it at. The equivalent of putting a sail in front of two fans (one pointed each direction). Except your not going to "Catch" the wind, the planets massive atmosphere will. Chanced atomic interactions will cause the high-velocity particles to scatter almost at random, removing just shy of 100% of your directional efficiency. Also include the amount of energy lost due to thermal transference (the exhaust simply warming up the atmosphere due to increase in random motion, likely to be caused by repeated bounce). That's not including the suction effect of your fuel/air intake, which is likely to encourage turbulent, lateralized motion. Even if you succeed in transferring some directional motion from the exhaust to the atmosphere, even more of that energy is going to be lost by being transmitted around the planet via atmospheric exchange and cause particles to be kicked out the far side of the planet's atmosphere. (Like those line-of-balls physics toys).

Also, you would need a lot more then "small maneuvering thrusters" you would need side thrusters powerful enough to counteract the atmospheric friction (your in the atmosphere for fuel, remember) to push the entire vehicle the entire orbit around the planet once every 'day' (which for Jupiter is just over 9 hours, so 10,000 mph) or you wouldn't be able to maintain thrust in a single 'direction' that isn't directly pole-word.

This isn't even considering the mathematical complications of trying to keep the **** thing in one place or, likely, a dozen other thing I haven't thought of.

Is it possible, maybe, but it'd be so phonemically difficult and inefficient it doesn't make any sense for someone to do. I'd wager you could fly every rocky body in the solar system to Alpha Centauri for the energy it'd take to move even Neptune there, and in less time.

-You know your playing RT when talking about moving planetary bodies actually sounds like a feasible plan

-And the Seneschal evens does a cost projection and proves it so

- and when the RT got the briliant idea to sell the idea and tools to do it to different competitors, as well as a nice little system where they could pull their gas giant there, spreading carefully rumors... and many film crews.

-and when the RT will then have the ability to reply, next time he interacts with Eldars : "you controlled the birth and death of stars ? Bah ! Humbug ! I am organizing a gas giant race accross the void just for the heck of it !"

...the Rogue Trader looks over his cargo manifest and asks "Don't we have ANYTHING legal to sell?"

you host an auction for some archaeotech and & people bring these things as trade bait:

ITEM of RENOWN ~PF

Source of the Finest Coffee (Secret) 57

Exact Coordinates of all 13 Stations of Passage (Secret) 48

Mobile Inquisitorial Academy (Starship) 65

Hereditary Title of Commander, Protac. I.G.Division 52

Gas Mining Transport (Starship) 60

Deed to Kenov Star System 92

Platinum Thrones {15,800} ₤ 45

15% Stake in the Junos Clan, Halkazi Cartel 45

Psi-Sword (Artefact) 56

Deed to the moon Hadarak Six 40

Yacht/Cruise Liner (Starship) 55

Six Xeno Toenails 32

Finest Attorney in the Sector (Person) 48

7500 Certified Slaves 38

the Haunted Tank 88

1 Robotic Xeno Carcass 34

Super-Tanker (starship) 55

30,000 Kroot Hounds 54

Hover-Craft Mech Infantry (Battalion) 70

275 Melta Cannons with Ammo & Tech Crews 46

Golden Thrones (250,000) ₤ 75

Continental Fiefdom on Tygress 2 52

Rak-Gol Plans (Secret) 64

Sculptors and Architects School (University) 56

Membership in the Tyrantine Cabal 90

Wreck of the Cruiser Balaclava (starship) 61

+1 for the Balaclava.

If, following your fine leadership example, members of your house troops scam the Sororitas contingent on board into appearing in a bikini calender.

If your astropath has, following a significant bribe, also agreed to appear in said calender, in a slingshot.

If the only reason the Rogue Trader knows any of this happened is that the magos biologis was upset she DID NOT appear in said bikini calender and started a project to appear less disturbing to the crew without impacting her other abilities. Which in turn led to the seneschal being asked to procure '20 pairs of the finest breasts available'. Which in turn led to some questions about what exactly was going on in the Medicae Deck.

If, following your fine leadership example, members of your house troops scam the Sororitas contingent on board into appearing in a bikini calender.

If your astropath has, following a significant bribe, also agreed to appear in said calender, in a slingshot.

If the only reason the Rogue Trader knows any of this happened is that the magos biologis was upset she DID NOT appear in said bikini calender and started a project to appear less disturbing to the crew without impacting her other abilities. Which in turn led to the seneschal being asked to procure '20 pairs of the finest breasts available'. Which in turn led to some questions about what exactly was going on in the Medicae Deck.

If the daemonhost you have as your personal adviser is ALSO mad he didn't get to appear in the calender. Also, the daemonhost is a daemon of khorne.