It seems to me that statistic is irrelevant to combat and it’s so rapid outside of combat it’s not really going to build any tension within the story.
What am I missing?
Shield recharge, 1 minute to engage drift engines, and 10 minutes to recharge limited fire weapons all fit awkwardly with combat. Their only plausible use is as a GM guideline for what can be done between closely spaced sequential combats.
Of course, it’s by no means obvious to me that it should take a missile less than ten minutes to even reach a target under some conceptions of apppropriate scale of combat.
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If I had to make a guess, some early version of starship combat had combat rounds at X minutes each and had the hexes at a fixed size, but then someone did the math and the speeds were all wrong and to fix it they made the rounds and distances 'whatever'.
All of the stuff about starships outside of the combat section is done in minutes. It's really a lot of work and weirdness to make them congruent with one another consistently.
I figure the reason they were left in was for roleplaying/skill-based scenes (and for battle-lull-battle sequences). However, I can’t really see much scope for that in practise - shields seem to me to recharge too quickly for it to really matter.
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If they didnt, there would be a Rules Question thread asking about it instead of this one.
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I wouldn't expect it to be relevant very often at lower tiers. When you have a total of twenty SP to work with, you either have someone tasked to keep the shields up or you're dead, pretty much. There's not a ton of wriggle room.
It could quite easily become relevant at larger scales, though. I can easily see constructing race-against-time scenarios for a ship with SP in the hundreds. It might well not be the players' ship at issue.
For instance:
"The crew of the Sunrise Maiden are glumly waiting for spaceport clearance on Verces after a rather officious Steward frigate pulled rank on them, claiming urgent business planet-side. A few minutes later, though, they're watching in horror as an internal explosion shakes that very ship and its systems seem to go dead... all save a desperate distress call from its burning bridge, pleading for help.
"A scan by the Science Officer shows the situation is dire. The vessel's shields, engines and life support appear to be down and it's headed fast toward Verces' atmosphere. A quick conference with its captain confirms their chief engineer is not responding and shields will not recharge themselves quickly enough to keep the vessel from burning up on entry.
"Swallowing his pride, the Constable-Captain grits his teeth and says: 'We need your help, Starfinders. Please.'"
Et voila. You have an orbital rescue encounter with a nail-biting time limit. Just one possibility.
Heck, I might actually use that one. ;)
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I wouldn't expect it to be relevant very often at lower tiers. When you have a total of twenty SP to work with, you either have someone tasked to keep the shields up or you're dead, pretty much. There's not a ton of wriggle room.
It could quite easily become relevant at larger scales, though. I can easily see constructing race-against-time scenarios for a ship with SP in the hundreds. It might well not be the players' ship at issue.
For instance:
"The crew of the Sunrise Maiden are glumly waiting for spaceport clearance on Verces after a rather officious Steward frigate pulled rank on them, claiming urgent business planet-side. A few minutes later, though, they're watching in horror as an internal explosion shakes that very ship and its systems seem to go dead... all save a desperate distress call from its burning bridge, pleading for help.
"A scan by the Science Officer shows the situation is dire. The vessel's shields, engines and life support appear to be down and it's headed fast toward Verces' atmosphere. A quick conference with its captain confirms their chief engineer is not responding and shields will not recharge themselves quickly enough to keep the vessel from burning up on entry.
"Swallowing his pride, the Constable-Captain grits his teeth and says: 'We need your help, Starfinders. Please.'"
Et voila. You have an orbital rescue encounter with a nail-biting time limit. Just one possibility.
Heck, I might actually use that one. ;)
Report-back, for the sake of completeness: I actually did run this very encounter with my group in our last session, with the ship in question being an interplanetary luxury liner.
It was super-fun. They got to use the Interstellar docking music as they boarded the ship :) -- our Captain player had it all ready to go, he'd apparently been waiting for a scenario like this for months -- struggled their way through a panicking crowd and did battle with a group of terrorists on a heavily-irradiated engineering deck as they tried to restart the ship's engines (they had five turns total to get it done) all while the ship was in a flat spin, its "inertial dampeners" inoperative and its spins throwing all the combatants this way and that from turn to turn, with more Bludgeoning damage each turn.
Incredibly tense and satisfying, I recommend it.