How should I stat NPC starship crews?


Rules Questions


So I was looking at radiation weapons and starship combat this week, and I decided that rolling all the dice myself was going to be tedious. My solution was to spend an evening writing a simple program to do all the heavy lifting. It's working now but I've run into a problem: there is no information on starship crew stats beyond the number and bonuses of the officers.

The simple input option on the program assumes that people have armor equal to their level, that the officers are all of a level equal to the ship's tier, and that the crew doubles the number of people while halving their levels untill the roster is filled. For example, a level 10 ship with 3 science officers and 20 crew has the officers at level 10, 6 level 5 crew, 12 level 2 crew, and 2 level 1 crew. This seemed fine untill a few trial runs with the tier 16 ship in the main book showed that they lost about half their crew to thee medium radiation hits.

Now having that tier 16 ship have almost 400 16th level crew seems off, and having them be lower level but with high end armor ignores all the level based assumptions in the npc rules plus it doesn't actually solve the problem. So how do I figure the levels and armor of starship crews so that I can figure out the effects of radiation weapons?


It's more complex than that! You also have to decide if there's a spellcaster with Remove Radiation either known or on a spell gem to cut the duration down. And do crew members self apply healing serums after the first hit? How does that disrupt starship actions, since presumably not every single crew member is necessary and there's some redundancy?


Don't forget also that ship combat does not occur on the same time scale as personal combat.


Metaphysician wrote:
Don't forget also that ship combat does not occur on the same time scale as personal combat.

Yeah, I'm considering that. Sometime this week I'll sit down and hammer out the complex crew input (actually simpler from the coding pov because it makes the user input everything) and a csv file format and upload. After that I'll consider adding a gui and variable time scale if there's any interest.

But having starship rounds be longer than one combat round means that the lingering radiation lasts longer and kills 'faster' in starship time.

It's just... I mean... three grazer hits frag half the crew and risk dropping a dreadnought below minimum crew without ever breaching the shields. You could pay an extra 5500 cr. per crew member for the minimum armor to make them immune to medium radiation but that won't help when the capital ship heavy rad weapons fire. You can't model the spells that remove radiation because they affect areas and there's no info on areas of the ship or anything like useful ship sections. I don't have the pact worlds book yet, in there any info in there?


The only useable ship combat radiation rules in Pact Worlds are that every radiation hit on a living ship (introduced for Xenowardens) delivers a crit.


I suspect the eventual Starship Supplement will provide additional crew actions to cover stuff like onboard combat or radiation control. Basically, you won't resolve stuff like that via the standard infantry time scale, but with rules not dissimilar to mass combat.

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