Hanomir's page

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.