Hello, I have some doubts concerning small craft and capital ship combat, could you please help me interpret the rules? I have not posted this in the Mechanics topic because I do not have any suggestions as to clarify them...

Let’s assume the players (3) are aboard the Shell Cracker, which has a pílot, a gunner and a co-pilot position. That ship is in combat with two Rival Fighter Pilots, each maning a single fighter.

Since the players’ ship is silhouette 4, the rules applied are from the small craft rules and it could benefit from up to two Starship maneuvers per turn, correct?

1. How do we handle initiative?

As I understood from the rules, initiative is player based and not ship based. Am I correct? So, there would be Five slots in that combat... three for the PCs and two for the NPCs....

2. How do we handle maneuvers and actions?

This is where it all gets fuzzy....

Let’s suppose the pilot is the first player to fill a initiative slot... He uses “Fly” as a maneuver and as converts his action into a second maneuver.... The ship has commited two Starship maneuvers in its first turn, right?

Now it’s the gunner’s turn. Can He also make a Starship maneuver and a Starship action or must his actions and maneuvers be at personal level?

I understand that pilot only maneuvers are Starship maneuvers that only pilots can accomplish. Personal maneuvers are those in the combat section of the book.

Given that, If a silhouette 1-4 ship has more than one crew member, would all these crew members get one Starship action and one Starship maneuver in their respective turns?

S o, If the Shell Cracker has two kinds of weapons and its co-pilot and gunner each spend a Starship action to fire one of these, it would attack twice a round, correct?

3. How do these rules differ from capital ship combat?

In my perception they only differ in the quantity of Starship Maneuvers per turn (or is it per round)

Let’s assume we are with the same players, in a silhouette 5 ship, how would the rules differ in that same example as above? Would only the pilot be able to make Starship maneuvers or would it all work as per the above example?

SHips maneuver when the pilot has it maneuver. Guns fire when their gunner/gun commander has an action spent on attacking.

Only ships of Sil 1-4 can get a second maneuver - if done by a second pilot (also called a copilot - but the movement rules don't use the term copilot, and the ship list does), it's 2 system strain. If done by the pilot, it's two system strain and two stress on the pilot. If done by use of opponent threat, it's still two system strain.

Hmmm my early reply to this seems to have gone AWOL..

1) yep.

2) the key thing is the Pilot Only part to the starship maneuvers thing. So as aramis said, if the pilot performs two maneuvers and burns the strain, that's it. The copilot, gunners, flight engineers, comm operators, and other crew can perform other starship actions and maneuvers, just not ones marked Pilot Only. (This is why the Y-wingis actually pretty neat, with a pilot,copilot/gunner, and an astromech all performing maneuvers and actions those bonuses can really start to stack up if they do the right things in the right order.)

3)With Sil 5 ships you've got the maneuver restriction you noticed, also take note though that most Pilot Only starship maneuvers are limited to Sil 4 and smaller. So the choices for Sil 5 is a pretty short list...