Hanomir's page

These items were called Ioun stones in D&D and in PF1, if that helps.

Giving credit where it belongs, TSR lifted both the idea and the name from Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories as with so many other things. I'd recommend grabbing a copy of the short story "Morreion" (usually found in the compilation "Rhialto the Marvelous") which explains the origins of the stones (which I'm not spoiling, it's too good a read). While obviously not set in the Starfinder universe, you could and should adapt Vance's idea to SF games, it's an easy enough fit.

Personally, I'm not greatly impressed with the mechanics or the existing fluff.

The game engine leans into many of the things I liked least about D&D 3/3.5, the math is very tight for decent character effectiveness (which is why you just read a big list of "traps" to avoid), and the starship combat system has enough problems that I'm currently at 8 pages of notes for FAQ/errata that needs addressing.

The setting just leaves me cold. Both the Pact Worlds and Veskarium feel overstuffed with different species on every single world, like Victorian scifi or Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers. There's plenty of room to expand out in the Vast and Near Space and make less overcrowded systems, but that's not really the game's published setting, its your own work. Also something lacking in the way tech & magic are integrated. The tech part comes through even if its more sci-fantasy than scifi (which is fine, works for Star Wars) but too much of the magic feels weak (pure tech weapons outperform most combat spells) or hidden behind the scenes. Most tech supposedly uses magic in its manufacture, but that's not something a PC will ever see unless the GM writes a scenario around it - corporate espionage to hex a manufacturing plant or rescue a kidnapped wagemage or something.

Honestly, I'd recommend trying a different game if you have a scifi itch to scratch. There's plenty of them out there in all degrees of complexity and covering subgenres from pulp to hard scifi to Horror In Space to baroque to exploring definitions of humanity - and that's without bringing in franchise IPs like teh Expanse, Star Wars, Trek, etc. DTRGP has "scifi" as a genre tab for good reason.

As said, there are at least two PA frames with flight speeds. Not all PA in scifi is flight-capable - see Steakley's excellent novel Armor for examples. You'll like it, the combat trooper suits are ground-bound tank suits like most SF suits are and die horribly because of it, while the protag's scout suit is jump-capable and built for speed and that's what keeps him alive.

Linked plasma (average 26 dmg) from the small ship/tiny swarm is probably less effective than either using a mix of linked busters (average 27 against shields) to strip shields (making your hacking attacks more effective) and open up the hull to the other part of the swarm with linked chain guns (average 30 dmg - 42 if you're using adamantine alloy). That will put damage through every round - the DR doesn't apply to shields, so the busters are good for 7 each even with adaptive shields applying after the round where they're torn down initially, and even with -20 damage from adaptive the adamant chain guns will beat the DR reliably.

Alternately, linked orbital death knells hit even harder (average 33 dmg - 39 with adamant against downed shields), do the same base damage against both shields and hull, have better range brackets, and don't suffer an accuracy penalty against something this big. Why someone would build a bunch of interceptors with linked orbital death knells I don't know, but it probably involves attempted genocide.

I suspect a "balanced encounter" worth of specialized small-frame ram ships with turret-mounted melee weapons (aka Outlaw Star grapplers) and maybe autodestruct would also settle its hash pretty handily.

All of this is very silly theorycrafting, since the Driftmaven would either just leave if it felt threatened - but yeah, it's got plenty of exploitable weaknesses despite its bevvy of unique rules.

That's not what Drift Flower does. It lets you pick any one single orientation that round and fire as though you were facing that way without actually changing your facing. Each weapon has to bear in the right arc based on the orientation you picked. Mostly useful for letting you maintain your facing so you can move off in teh same direction next turn while you shoot at something on your flank or rear, or for making sure that your best guns are (temporarily) pointed at the target you want dead most. It is kind of clumsy, after all.

Mind you, it *is* a really strong ship due to its special rules, just not quite that good. Adaptive Shielding should let it reliably win almost any one-on-one fight - 20 points off many of the hits you take adds up quick even at tier 20.

Yeah I definitely agree with the ability scores thing. In pf1 you'd often have something like 18 14 14 12 10 8, in pf2 you might have 18 16 12 12 10 10, and in starfinder 18 14 11 10 10 10.

It definitely makes it harder to have a unique feeling character when you don't have any excess ability points to put in elective choices. You're stuck with filling the basic requirements and it's not until level 5 where you get those optional points to customize your character to be different then every other 1st level character of the same class.

Starfinder still feels very new to me, but if I played it a lot I could definitely see felling like yup, already made one of each possible character. I guess which one do I feel like repeating for this game.

You make an excellent argument for rolling stats rather than using point assignment. Which I approve of, at least with 4d6, drop lowest, assign as desired. The OSR's 3d6 in order fetish struck me as masochistic even in 1975. This game's math is not so exacting that every PC needs an 18 primary stat at character generation, and it's pretty generous with stat bumps as you level up compared to its ancestors.

I would suggest two homebrew changes with rolled PCs:

1) Just give everyone 4 base resolve points before level, feats, etc. RP budgeting is tight enough, and one of the main arguments for starting with an 18 prime.

2) When bumping stats at level 5 and later, if you select a stat whose current score is less than 10, that stat increases by 3. Lets the unlucky "fix" negative stat mods more rapidly if they want to, although a truly awful score has always struck me as a roleplay opportunity more than a direct handicap.

Sounds like they can squeeze in just about anywhere, then - mesh screens excepted, and even those might be something you can get past if enough bugs can mass up to apply combined pressure.

Technomancer bug swarm is an interesting idea. With the spell cache feature being so loosely defined (it can even be a tattoo, for ex) you could do something really characterful like declaring that the swarm includes a few variant individuals ("brain bugs" or albinos or ones with special markings that emulate arcane circuitry or something) that collectively make up the cache. Wouldn't be much easier or harder to "break" than a tattoo would, albeit with more squishing involved. :)

This would probably be better placed in Rules Questions than here. My own FAQ/errata list for SOM is over four pages at this point, and I haven't even gotten to the pre-built ships yet. Will post them if I ever finish the job.

That said:

1) Spotted that as well, almost certainly indicates a mistake somewhere considering how careful they were to make all other ECM improve slightly from class to class. Simplistic fix is to make the heavy version range Medium, while leaving the others as written. That way all three tiers have something to differentiate them.

2) Array is free, but I'm not sure that's broken as-is. It comes with the significant penalties of (in ascending order) forcing you to shoot at everything in arc, including friendlies and neutrals, a -4 to hit penalty baked in, and using up two weapon slots. Might be worth more than x1.0 but it sure isn't worth much more, especially in a game where the expected norm for starship combat (at least involving PCs) is one-on-one duels an awful lot of the time.

What does worry me about Array as a tack-on trait is its interactions with other things - like the Line trait, or ECM. Those kind of interactions raise some concerns about balance regardless of cost.

3) Deployed is written poorly at best and the mechanics are iffy. The drones are extremely slow and relatively fragile (although shots at them aren't shots at your ship, so that's a plus) and their accuracy is poor. There's also the question of whether they were trying to say the launched drone effectively has the Automated and Limited Fire 3 traits, or if the weapon you've applied Deployed to gains Limited Fire 3 (and therefore a limited drone payload) and Automated (in which case the gunner can presumably just punch Go and leave it to produce one drone a turn till it runs out). Until all that's clarified talking about the cost is difficult since we may be operating from an incorrect interpretation.

4 & 5 are beyond where I've gotten in the book editing. I will say that while the RAW for Linked is definitely direct fire only, I've never been able to see why the restriction is needed. Tracking weapons are nowhere near as good as Paizo seems to think in general, and letting a gunner launch two with one shoot action would only help reduce their awfulness a bit.

Don't have whatever book they're from, but the salient point's probably whether their "bioneural network" is a permanent formation or something that can shuffle individual 1" bugs in and out of it at will. If they need to stay as physically-linked cohesive unit to remain sapient, there's probably some lower limit of how many bugs need to be touching another bug at once to not fracture the network - which could be as low as one-touching-one-other.

If it's that low, or if the nets are just a temporary construct, then sure, you could make a long "marching column" of individual bugs and get through ridiculously tight spaces. A 1" long bug is probably quite a bit narrower than 1", although a mesh screen would likely stop them cold.

If you need larger numbers of links to retain the network, the "column" might need to be double or triple or more the thickness, limiting access to some really tight openings. More of a braided cable of insects at that stage. Still be pretty versatile - your equipment (if not abandoned) is more likely to be the limit of where you can go than the biological components of the swarm.

A Technomancer Spathinae that can just ditch its junk and use magic hacks to make temporary guns and gear once it's gotten where it needs to be would be a really annoying infiltartor.

Add on deflector shields and you might have a quasi-invincible ship.

They'd jack the already ridiculous AC up and the DV would reduce heavy weapons to being impotent until they hammer the deflectors down with multiple hits, but eventually you'll chop through just like regular shields. Probably depends mostly on how many individual weapons with anti-deflector traits (buster, line, array, vortex) the enemy is packing.

Of course, that assumes you subtract the DV before checking to see if the DT triggers. Eg, take 60 points with DV 20 and DT 44 and you'd take nothing but some DV degradation. If it's supposed to work the other way around, then you'd check, see that 60 exceeds the DT, and take 40 HP past the DV and DV would degrade as well. So still impactful, but regular shields might be better there.

Really kind of a moot point, since this isn't a "real" build.

Checking to see if I missed anything on this:

Ultranaught starts with DT 20. Hypothetical 15 ranks of Adamantine armor adds +15 to that (for a "mere" 405 BP, which is why this just theorycrafting). Vanguard with 28 Con as Captain with the Mitigate TIM adds another +9.

Totals up to DT 44. Quite immune to hull damage from light weapons, and fairly resistant to heavies. Even capital guns bounce on a 4 or less, which is pretty unlikely but hilarious when it happens.

Is that everything you can stack up on this, or is there some other DT adder I missed in an AP or something?

And before anyone says it, this is just a thought exercise. Although I might look at what you could do with a 2-level Vanguard multiclass with some class that's natively good at being a captain to see what an actual PC ship could look like mid-to-late game with that combo. It's a fascinating TIM, trying to stick Vanguards in a role they aren't super-good at.

Yeah, thats what I said in my post before that. Rules wise there is no reason to tie tier with size for the most part, but the game still links it which leads to there being no strong small ships for no explainable reason and leads to the mentioned problem that the carrier is stronger than all the fighters it carries combined or that in an engagement there is practically no role for destroyers or even cruisers.

That's not actually true. The tier of a ship isn't actually tied to to the level of the crew operating it. I'm going to guess you're talking about their tier 14 Skyfire merc carrier in SOM and their tier 2 fighter brood. Yes, the carrier might beat all 16 of them as written, but the encounter guidelines (which are the closest we've got to a balancing system and still aren't very good) says flat out not to use crews with more than 4 levels of difference between them. Take those tier 2 ships, replace the crews with level 14 guys to match their carrier, and the brood will murder the crap out of their carrier in a straight up fight. They'd probably wreck a battleship or dreadnought up in tier 16 or so, although they'd lose a lot more planes doing it.

Those little tier 2 ships with higher level crews are AC 30, TL 29, and have something like a +20 gunnery and +30 piloting. Put even eight of them up against their carrier and the carrier's in trouble. Sixteen will smash it flat. They'd struggle against ships with high DTs (something SOM really enabled) but outside of that those little 3d8 attacks add up fast.

The conversion work to swap around crew levels is trivial. If you want dangerous but still somewhat fragile tiny ships that you can use in multiples it's probably better to do that instead of trying to build a tiny ship on a tier 14 BP budget. It's probably not balanced but I'm not sold that any of the CR/APL guidelines are to start with. You'll just have to do some playtesting on encounters to get a feel for what is or isn't a TPK in Space.

Starship Operations Manual does touch a very little bit on the First World, Heaven, & Hell(there are ftl drives that work basically the same as drift engines, except taking the ship through those planes instead).

Also:

Elemental drives, which are mostly used by planar natives because material plane folks and ships have trouble dealing with the conditions on the elemental planes. Hard to achieve FTL in Elemental Earth Plane if you can't swim/phase through rock, for ex. :)

Shadow drives use the Shadow Plane too, although there's no details beyond it hurting. A lot. The whole time. Despite that, arguably the closest competitor to Drift Engines in overall terms, at least with the planar aperture drive ultra-super-top-secret-you-can't-have-one unless you're working with the Tetrad/witchwyrds.

Triune's little toy is still the best option for FTL for cost, versatility and top speeds, though.

Why is tier tied to size?

It isn't, except in the sense that it would be difficult to usefully spend all the points of a Tier 20 ship on a Tiny frame. The premade ships they've showed us so far have mostly followed the "higher tier = bigger" motif with the silly effects you noted (carriers hauling fighters that they could easily defeat themselves) but the rules don't oblige you to do this.

Important to note that tier mostly defines your BP budget, for NPC ships the quality of their crew, and a number of other things mostly related to DCs. BP does not reflect actual combat performance worth a fig or you wouldn't have to pay for totally noncombat features like lab bays, workshops, crew quarters, etc. You're paying BP for things that are only relevant outside of starship combat, so you can't use them as a "point value" to balance battles through direct comparison. I'm not even convinced that the tier-based encounter building guidelines are much use for that, but it's what Paizo has given us to work with.

Like it or not, we really can't easily derive a simple starship combat board/minis game from Starfinder's rules. They just aren't built for, unlike (say) the old FASA Star Trek RPG and its Tactical Combat Simulator boardgame spinoff.

It doesn't seem likely that they'll define this clearly, even over time. Leaving the details, well, officially undetailed makes it easier for a GM to establish their own campaign's norms. Some people probably want Star Wars or Honor Harrington-style massed fleet actions in their games, others may prefer having capital ships be few and far between and the loss of even destroyers or cruisers be a serious blow.

FWIW (which is very little) the Armada combat system in SOM insists on calling a single capital ship (probably at least Gargantuan, but even that isn't specified) a "Capital Fleet" while a "handful of Large or larger" ships is a "Destroyer Fleet" and a "dozen or more Medium or smaller" ships are a "Fighter Fleet." About all that indicates to me is that they aren't using anything akin to the common naval parlance that military scifi often employs. Armada is so abstract it's functionally useless for guessing at the number and sizes of ships a given force or faction might field, which is probably intentional.

It's not realism that's the problem or I wouldn't be talking about Savage Worlds. Honestly prefer systems like Star Wars (*any* Star Wars) to hypothetically-hard-scifi accounting like you see in some editions of Traveller and even some GURPS setting books, although there's a lot to be said for GURPS' approach to grounding everything in real-world values whenever possible. And I certainly don't expect realism in the game with techno-wizards fighting space goblins on a giant starcology that's replaced a missing planet. That wouldn't really fit the setting, after all.

What bugs me is the fact that the game does such a very poor job of handling what are obviously different "scales" of combat, ranging from personal to ground-based vehicular to small starships to capital ships (and maybe to doomsday super-ships/stations beyond that). The rules we do have are mostly handwaving the problem as CR-appropriate hazards, and they feel very much like tacked-on afterthoughts rather than something that was integrated into the design from the start. It's an enormous turnoff for me, and I hoped SOM would take a big step toward improving that.

That didn't happen in any meaningful way, and the introduction of Orbital weapons that are so very accessible to even small ships just emphasizes the problem. I'm baffled by the design choice involved there, frankly. They restricted "carrier" role ships to huge (for shuttles) and gargantuan (for fighters) but though planetary bombardment was fine for starting group to have access to?

And yeah, I know a GM can and should restrict that sort of thing, but it's not my only problem with SOM by a long shot. Boarding (at least the abstracted system) doesn't seem at all balanced even when you add that missing 10 to the BR formula, the squadron rules seem to emphasize how weak a single larger ship is against multiple attackers in what should theoretically be a level appropriate fight, and the armada system probably isn't going to satisfy many people with its level of abstraction and very poorly thought out special abilities rules. Heck, I'm still not even sold on core book tracking weapon rules working properly at all.

Combine that with a completely non-inertial movement system and no 3D elements even vaguely emulated and there are just too many common starship combat tropes that aren't doable under these rules. The chase rules certainly do not produce the kind of excitement you'd see in movies and tv, even an old chestnut like Last Starfighter. The standard combat rules have none of the "we're fighting in space" feel of Firefly or Babylon 5. About the only thing it does evoke is TOS or maybe TNG Star Trek with their small ship counts, fairly stodgy maneuvering and heavy reliance on shields.

Even the setting's most unusual aspect - the combination of magic with tech - doesn't come through much. The TIM systems help some, but the Mystic weapons are just a different type of regular gun. Even Spelljammer knew enough to integrate their ship combat 100% with the existing magic system, even if the ranges were extremely short. Where's the technomagical gadgets that let a caster channel spell effects (beyond "take hull damage") on a starship scale? Such a wasted opportunity to do something exciting with the mechanics.

Think I'll fiddle with the rules a bit yet, but I'm so dis-enthused by SOM I doubt I'll stick to it long enough to resume playing after the COVID situation finally clears and lets us play face-to-face again. My online groups are all fantasy-oriented and I don't feel the need to pressure them to change.

Gotcha, reported. Thanks.

Definitely a typo. BR is intended to be a DC, so it should be equal to 10 + all those modifiers.

There an email or forum page I should be sending "probably errata" posts to? Be nice if this got an offical fix at some point, and better sooner than later.

TL;DR: Starfinder's mechanics and the real world don't exactly mix.

You're doing a really good job of convincing me to go play either GURPS (which does "mix" with the real world just fine while retaining the versatility to do just about any setting/genre) or Savage Worlds (which handwaves realism in favor of cinematics, is just as versatile and easier to play).

So, you want to sell me on sticking with Starfinder? I was willing to give it a chance while I waited for the SOM book to come out, much as I did with Star Frontiers and Knight Hawks decades ago. Now that I've seen it I'm starting to think its time to walk away. What's the appeal of it to you?

There's a sidebar that points out that even with a moderate 150 point build, its possible to have a character that can blow up 50 square blocks around them...sitting immobile in a hospital bed. (he's fine though because he's of course immune to his own power)

How nostalgic, I haven't heard anyone reference Supernova Man in years. I preferred one of the other examples from that "we know you can do this by RAW and we expect your GM to stop you" sidebar - the Landlord. He spent his points on a super-base large enough to contain the entire universe and technically owns everything and everyone in it. :)

My personal ruling would be: If you add array to an orbital weapon, the base radius of destruction (250 ft, 500ft, 1 mile, etc.) is one hex, an array weapon also hits all hexes adjacent to that hex. Essentially all it would do is double the radius of destruction.

That seems like a reasonable benefit for the trait combination, although hitting a whole "megahex" (to dredge up some old school wargame terminology) would be more like three times the radius. Double is probably sufficient. Array (as a starship combat trait) is probably not expected to be shooting hundreds of targets at once, and in practice it rarely gets to shoot (rather badly, with teat -4 to hit) at more than half a dozen enemies. An awful lot of starship encounters are one-on-one battles from what I've seen, at which point the trait is nothing but a penalty.

Note that even a 3-mile radius (for a spinal mount hitting a full "megahex") is fairly tiny if you're trying to scrub a whole planet clean. To give a real world example you'd have to shoot Manhatten at least two-three times to wreck the whole borough, even allowing for the massive secondary damage the orbital bombing of a dense urban area would produce. Starfinder's rules for orbital strikes are really, really tame, although they'll certainly do the job for small outposts and isolated colony worlds.

Still not a good argument for Array hitting the whole hemisphere though. :)

To be honest I really wish I could duplicate how star trek's ship phasers can be fired in single shots, pulses, beams, multi-array spreads and even dial its output for anything beyond stun this city to melt this planet. Literally in the original series they tried to stun an outpost to make reclaiming hostages easier but it had energy dampners that nullified the low power blast and high power risked killing the hostages.

Starfinder's approach to starship design has kind of a lot of holes, 3D combat aspects and that style of versatile weaponry among them. Admittedly, allowing starship weapons to stun whole city blocks from orbit (looking at you, Piece of the Action) has some problems for RPG play, but I suppose you could always just play one of the various Star Trek RPGs out there.

So it seems this is a yes per the rules it works but we don't like it and will houserule ways against it.

I think it goes beyond that. Even outside of the Array trait, there's some serious questions about how Orbital weapons should be handled in general, mostly involving just how tough structures should be versus them.

I assume it doesn't stop at ground level and hits sewers, under ground cables and the like though you could if you aren't being conservative like I was take line to mean it hits everything on the planet even the side away from you per shot.

No one is going to let an Orbital Line weapon shoot through a planet. Line effects stop when they fail to penetrate the DR of a target. What's the DR of a planet? Going with "infinite" myself, barring a McGuffin Gun that makes a spinal mount look feeble.

For that matter, while the structure value rules are clearly written for personal combat, Starfinder's kind of awful about differentiating between what HP mean for different "scales" of combat, so I guess Orbital damage is just treated like everything else is. That being the case, it takes about 180 HP to make a 10' x 10' breach in a foot of concrete, which is a reasonable thickness for a street and underlying infrastructure. That capital ship O-gun will do the job easily and a heavy one usually will, but the piddly light version will probably take two shots to start making glowing potholes rather than slagging the street outright. And if there's something sitting on top of that buried bunker or underground research lab I suspect most GMs would have the Line effect end if it fails to breach whatever's on top. If a modern building takes ~75 points to blow a hole in per story, a capital O-gun with Line will punch through ~15 stories and hit whatever's below at full force, but lighter guns might have to spend several shots scrubbing off the "surface junk" before getting at subsurface structures.

Plain old rock's pretty good too. 10' of the stuff overhead is 1800 HP of protection, which should stop the first shot from even a capital Line weapon.

And none of this even considers shields. A ground fortress ought to have shields that make a dreadnought's look tame, and I doubt they ought to be taking 10X normal damage from Orbitals while they're up. Also the question of how fast they recharge, given that starship combat time scale is undefined but orbital bombardment shots are supposed to be ~ten minutes apart.

All in all, the RAW on this is a mess and is going to require significant work from the GM to homebrew fixes - preferably before they actually come up in play. Hopefully we get an extensive FAQ and maybe some examples of how to adjudicate orbital weaponry and structure durability in an upcoming AP or something.

So I was just mucking around with orbital weapons (not really used them) and I think you could devestate a planet with them if this is per the rules.

1) Put an orbital weapon on the weapon mount say a super orbital particle canon.
2) Upgrade it to array (2 weapon mounts).
3) Park ship at long range (100,000 miles) so the planet is in your forward arc.
3) Shoot EVERY target on that side of the planet (every city, every town, every gas station on rural route 9) at -4 penalty.

You'll be doing (2d10 x 10) x 10 to every inanimate structure in a circle nearly a mile across. That's 20 - 200 damage to every person in the area and 200 - 2000 to buildings, cars, roads, infrastructure. Then 10 minutes later you do it again and again and again as the planet slowly rotates.

Am I missing something or would this actually work?

You're definitely missing the fact that the Orbital rules explicitly state that damage to to vehicles, people, and anything else smaller than a building in the blast is modeled by the GM using the rules for traps with a CR based on that parenthetical value after the Orbital trait. The gun in question here has a value of 10, so it's doing ~10d12 if the target fails a save or is missed by the attack, depending on how the GM builds it. So more like a very chancy ~65 damage on average versus a guaranteed ~120 average, which is a big difference. Getting caught in an orbital strike is by no means certain death for higher-level characters.

I strongly suspect GM Fiat will prevent this from working anyway. I certainly wouldn't allow Array to tacked on to Orbital weaponry myself, and the longer I consider what you can do with Array in general the more I'm convinced it should never have been on the "add to anything" list in the first place. There are far too many weird rules interactions with other traits for that to have been a good idea. I understand why it's there - it's the closest way the system has to represent the hail of fire you see off some ships in Star Wars and the like - but they need a better approach to it.

That's certainly how I read it. For added amusement, stick Array on something with Broad Arc (gyrocannon, maybe). You can still only do the Array multiattack in one arc at a time, but you could pick any of three options, with two of them at -6 to hit everything - the latter being a "design feature" rather than a flaw if you're doing risky shots that include allies and have a good enough computer bonus to still have decent odds on the things you really want to hit.

More effective to just use Array on your turret, but I'm not sure I'd actually want to have Array on my precious turret gun(s) in the first place. :)

Drone mining would fit quite a lot of scifi tropes. Has some obvious safety advantages if you're in some kind of implausibly dense and hyperactive Star Wars style rock field too - or if you're somehow or other unsure which rocks might be volatile or filled with magma or something. Shouldn't have bought those cut-rate sensors if that's the issue. :)

The spinal mount weapons they introduced in starship operations are nasty Vortex Devourer (6d12 x 10) does a maximum of 720 points of damage when it hits.

Max 780 if it's the only weapon that gunner fires in a round. And zero if the target has even a single point of shield facing you. :) Myself, I'd stick to something a bit more modest, maybe a Nova Ram for an average of 330/390 damage on everything in a line.

It's really a tragedy you can't get a second spinal mount on anything. Not that I'd want two of them, I just want to be able to make it an Array weapon (for no BP or PCU cost, no less - sheesh) so you can better recreate a wave motion gun firing a cone of doom.

I suppose we'll have to make due with giving our ubernaughts capital-grade Super X-Laser Cannon Arrays instead. It's only shooting everything in the front quarter for a piddling 70-ish damage but it's still got Line so you're probably getting more than one shot on multiple targets as the various firing lines overlap each other. Blibdoolpoolp help an enemy fleet that approaches that in a congo line.

Okay, I don't see any other threads about this, so:

SOM, pg. 40 lists the "Boarding Resistannce" value of a starship when using the abstract rules as:

BR = defending starship tier + security modifier + training modifier.

Simple enough, charts on pg. 41 are perfectly clear. But the attacking boarding party uses this formula to determine results:

d20 + boarders' tier + complement modifier + training modifier

Why is there a d20 in there on the attack but no basic 10 on the defending side? You get 10 for AC, TL, KAC, EAC - really any defensive stat in the game where a d20 attack roll is involved. This whole subsystem's a little wonky, but that's the biggest break with the general mechanics.

Without that 10, even a fairly tame boarding effort (eg a single breaching pod of specialized robots - 11 BP and an expansion bay for that) can be starting with adds that are higher than the base BR, and it only gets worse if there's a major NPC officer leading it or the party can't spare people to actively defend the ship - say, because they're in a starship combat at the time, which is the norm for these rules.

So - typo? Part of the problem is the crazy generous complement modifier chart (defenders have to outnumber attackers by more than 5:1 to apply an actual penalty to boarders) but I'm convinced the lack of a base 10 in BR is the real problem, and wholly unintended.

I have grave doubts about the terms being identical between Starfinder and Pathfinder. They're literally described as situations where only luck comes into play in PF2, where all three examples in the SOM are in the Armada Combat System and refer to checks for officer actions which definitely aren't purely up to happenstance. A highly-skilled admiral, caster, or commander should be more likely to get good results than level 1 cadet - and the commander ability in question would fail 70% of the time without modifiers, making it much better not to even try.

Until I see otherwise I'm playing these as roll d20, add Officer Bonus, compare to stated DC (of 10 or 15). That puts them at a fairly reliable success rate of 65% or 45% to start, climbing to 80% or 60% at 18th level - more, if the Admiral's encouraged you successfully. I doubt you add the fleet check modifier to any of these, since they're all officer actions, but maybe the eventual FAQ & errata will say otherwise. And boy, does SOM need some errata.

That's not how I read it, and the obvious uselessness of the BTH bay if you did need to buy an extra set of thrusters with associated PCU and BP cost is pretty good evidence.

As written, you're paying an expansion bay and 3 BP to get 5 rounds per day of +25% to the speed your regular thrusters. That's fairly reasonable - low cost, limited utility, but enough extra speed (especially on ships with an 8 or 12 speed who go to 10 or 15) to matter in a pinch. Add some horacalcum thrusters and you can get to 16 and watch a bunch of Redshift racecraft designers shoot themselves. :)

The text about needing to buy thrusters separately is confusing, but it's pretty clear it refers to the fact that you still need to install actual thrusters in the first place to get a boost from BTH - it isn't a drive system in and of itself.

Note that you can get around the "not enough crew actions to avoid having to glide/snap shot" issue by spending a few BP on ship VI. They're not as good as actual PCs of their level/tier, but still a lot better than relying on the minor starship crew actions.

So hypothetical scenario... a firefight is going on with the PCs and another army or waves of enemies, something like that. They want to drop their mech in to handle the situation but they'd have to hold them off for 10 minutes.

That's probably not really doable haha, but definitely good to know.

If it's a mech you're dropping it might not be depending on gravity alone for acceleration toward the surface. Given that you'd want an orbital drop to be over as fast as possible (so the baddies have less time to shoot you on the way down) you'd probably use thrusters to get down quicker than freefalling would, braking at the very last point where your technology can handle the impact of the landing without also knocking the crew unconscious or killing them from the gees they're pulling. In straight scifi you might have "inertial dampeners" or something to justify things, but in Starfinder you'd just need some technomage gadget that kills your thrusters (so you're "falling" not "flying") and "casts" a mecha-scale version of Level 1 Flight (aka Feather Fall) the instant you get to 60' above the ground, at which point you just touch down harmlessly no matter how fast you were going.

TL;DR If you're the GM, this is totally doable as a scenario and you can even justify it without a sweat. Just be ready when your players want to use the same trick themselves sometime. :)

While I agree this TIM is probably in need of a rewrite for balance, only the first TIM will cost 3, with later ones costing 4, 5, or 6 BP, plus the extra for any that can be used by any crew position. So maybe not quite as cheap as at first glance. Also the opportunity/BP cost of keeping a weapon mount free.

The text of the TIM says you get the weapon without paying its BP, but it doesn't mention PCU so you still need enough spare power capacity to fuel your choice, which could be a bit limiting. So you'll want an overpowered core, another small BP tax.

You could do this trick with the other TIM that lets some COM-build Mystics create their own starship guns. That would let you have two Magical Solar Superguns on the same ship without having to double up on Solarians in the party. That would need even more extra power and open gun mounts, but you'd also double the free BP you're gaining. You'd also be eating two TIM slots, so another opportunity and BP cost.

And hey, at the extreme, how far ahead does a Tier 20 ubernaught wind up with four of its gun crew composed of Solarians and solar-connection Mystics manifesting whatever mix of guns they feel is optimal for a given fight? At level 20 you could even have someone manifesting a spinal mount particle acceleration gun or hypermass cannon, although that's probably just showing off at that point.

On smaller ships, a "Solar Gunner" crew could even even appear to be a mostly unarmed sitting duck until a fight starts, which is fairly hilarious. "Where'd all those four giant glowing cannons come from?" said the very surprised pirate. Totally worth hogging all four TIM slots?

It doesn't stop you from making an NPC run HQ for later on as your PCs advance.

Agreed. Player-run HQ ships just don't really work mechanically prior to level 8-10, and even later on the GM might be better off leaving them to NPC-ship status. They did allow for this pretty explicitly:

"If an HQ isn’t a good fit for your group or campaign, it’s entirely possible to do without one. Alternatively, in a game where the PCs are part of a larger organization like a military or commercial expedition, there could be a much larger ship nearby that serves as their HQ but is run by NPCs."

Agreed that this isn't well defined.

Considering the size of a starship battlemat, and comparing to ranges in normal starship combat, I think the most likely answer is that the listed range is effectively a range increment. 1x the listed range is short range, 2x the listed range is long and 3x the listed range is extreme.

Agreed. Worth noting that Armada-mode ships can't shoot beyond the -4 "Extreme" range bracket, unlike normal starship combat or personal-scale fights. Certainly not terribly well-phrased though.

The "Numbing" trait appears on a series of "Negative Energy" starship weapons that showed up in Empire of Bones, according to the SRD page. It only appears in SOM on page 130 as part of the Derelict Shade's "Howling Souls" weapon.