Telok's page

My experiences with SF have been distinctly tepid. It's basically PF with more guns, less magic, fewer options, and a paint job of "but it's in space!" covering up problems.

Space combat is boring. I've never gotten to be a gunner or pilot, those always go to soldiers or mystics who had no other way to participate. My turns have always been pick an action from a menu, roll a d20, tell someone else they get a small bonus or add a few shield points. The new SOM stuff might have helped but we stopped doing the space combat because it was bad and just don't care any more.

I'm really curious how that meshes with the temperature of space. In the real world, the background microwaves left over from the big bang give our empty space a temperature of approximately -455F. Perhaps the Starfinder universe has a bit cozier temperature than our own but going from a few degrees above absolute zero to -20F is a colossal jump. It seems to go against the game design idea that you can freely go into space in your armor if it doesn't protect you from the cold of the vacuum. Unless the temperature of space is between -20F and 140F which seems like it would bring on even more issues.

Vacuum is actually a really good insulator. Most heat loss that we ground pounders are familiar with is due to us transferring heat from warmer massrs to colder masses through some form of physical contact. Atmosphere has mass, that's important. In a vacuum you can only disperse heat through black body radiation, that is literally emitting photons of infrared radiation. If anything your problem will be shedding excess heat that you generate through biological processes.

I will note however that -20F is medium-heavy wool/down coat weather (mostly dependent on the wind chill factor). Throw on a good hat, warm scarf, long underwear,cotton sweater, in addition to the coat and you can start overheating just walking around.

The enemy ship had a laser net in a turret. I rolled 5 straight 14+ and blocked all the attacks. The player's ship had 4 critical hits on it before the destroyed the enemy ship.

Please realize that five rolls of 14+ is about a 1/200 chance. Meanwhile failing all five rolls is slightly better than 1/10 (specifically 11.6%). Your most common result in that is going to be one or two missiles blocked (approx 30% channce of either).

My experience has been that no matter how many point defense weapons there are they block about 1.5 missiles per enemy ship because you only get one shot at any incoming missile and nothing can enhance the automated point defense attack bonus.

I'd say that this also involves the character building ability and rules mastery of the people you play with.

I've played in a group where juggling more than a page of ship action wasn't going to happen. Where the at 13th level the eng/sci slot was filled by a mystic with a +15 total in those skills and a 16 dex soldier was the gunner. Can I build a operative who can do everything better than that? Sure. How would that make them feel?

But even they got the biggest shields they could, put twin linked big guns in the turret, and got a +6 mononode for the gunner. They knew that if you put the guns in the front arc and have the gunner sit there that when the enemy came up in a different arc then the gunner didn't get to do anything that turn.

Then, check some math. If you're giving someone a +/-2 its relevant 1 time in 10. If you're changing 1s to 2s on 30d10 worth of damage rolls you've spend the round doing, usually, +3 damage out of around 150. Piddly bonuses are weak and boring. Rolling once a turn to have a 1/10 chance of being relevant is basically admitting that you're useless. Did you successfully taunt the enemy ship? Great, they have to make more than five checks in the 1d4 rounds before you have more than a 50% chance having been totally useless. If you rolled a 4 that's a pretty good probability, not so much if you rollled a 1.

And rescan? Never been useful here. It's more common for the enemy to balance shields than not. If that's true then it doesn't matter because you're shooting them whereever anyways. And it means you didn't give your gunner that mighty +2, or balance your own shields. And if it's almost always unavailable or a waste of time then why bother?

Isn't that like saying you made a soldier and your regular combats are just making your full attack then leaving to watch TV?

....
That's not to say starship combat is perfect, or even good, but there seems to be a lot of issues with how people are choosing to approach it, too.

No. Its more like being a armless, legless,slowed envoy.

Not the pilot so I can't move. Not the gunner so I can't shoot the real guns. Don't have computers, engineering, or magic so locked out there. Don't get diplomacy as a class skill so fall behind on those dcs.

Suppose I could go take one of the point defense weapons over and hope something gets close enough to shoot at with that. Character is great in and out of combat, even (usuallu) contributes the extra actions and +4s for the first six rounds. Its just really boring to roll once say someone gets a bonus and wait until the next turn.

Still, its better than the guy doing the shields. I did that the game before. Boring and tedious.

Is there a name for Absalom Station's law enforcers that doesn't result in an embarrassing acronym like "Absalom Station Security" would?

Probably not. The acronym is probably accurate based on how they're represented in the APs.

Our games runs it as the real security being heavily armed neighborhood watches and personal bodyguards. Station/national security tends to only be able to deal with the most incompetent and lightly armed criminals. Police forces in SF are probably all just cr 1 and easily intimidated or bribed.

Tier 1 comp, mini to L bulk, add artifical personallity, 60cr.
Teir 1 cyro pistol with control module, L bulk, 132cr.
Two gear clamps (depending on DM, maybe only 1) 200cr. Both L bulk.

About 400cr for a 'clip it to your shoulder' throw away sentry gun.

Or there are the rakmodoi computers which are magical, self powered, and can have legs for a 30 climb/walk speed. A similar version with that runs almost 200 (300 if your DM requires you to clamp the gun to the computer).

Might as well throw in some secure data storage at 1cr each. Keep your voice print and 'allowed commands' in them. Cheap extra security is always nice.

Thus 4000 to 8000 for 20 of them. About what a level 6 to 8 pistol costs. Yes they have low attack bonuses and are individually easy to hack. But you can throw piles of them at people, mount them on a shopping cart, have them provide covering and harrying fire. Or upgrade them to blast weapons.

Edit: actually, I'm pretty sure they do that last one. The drift is probably crowded around absalom station, and I'd bet the pirates hit incoming traffic somewhat often.

That would mean that there is a 1 to 1 correlation of drift locaton to space location. That requires you to place ships in the drift for law enforcement and war in the same manner a normal space for the same reasons. It enables fleets to congregate at a single point in the drift and travel together without linking engines, and to hop back to normal space at the same time.

So if you do that then the whole thing about linking drift engines and being unable to coordinate drift assaults without it goes away. Absalom would have part of it's defenses in that point in the drift, and it doesn't.

The randomness of the drift and the way drift drives work make intentional interceptions really hard. Again, try it from the point of having PCs be pirates or law enforcement and ussing the drift/space rules how do they find and catch other ships outside AP scripted encounters.

What I'm wondering is what ships the pirates can even find to attack.

Even the lowest end drift engine is really cheap and faster than regular thrusters for in-system travel between planets/stations. This apparently means that ships are hopping from orbit to orbit via the drift. That would mean that the pirates have follow the ship into the drift and attack there.

The problem of course then is that the pirates have to pop into the drift in the next 3 to 5 minutes before the ship warms up it's engines and leaves the area. There's nothing in the rules to support it but if we assume that two ships entering the drift within a few minutes of each other appear near each other in the drift, then that could work. Except that sensors max out at 100 hexes for active scanning and the other ship could be beyond that range (where you're scanning at up to -8 anyways before countermeasures). A ship moving at speed five exits that range in 2 minutes, so there isn't much time to try to find them.

Of course if the target doesn't have their engines on they can always just pop their drift engine again and, having not moved at all, probably end up pretty close to where they left from. Which, with a not-suicidal captain, would be somewhere near competent law enforcement. Then you just report attempted piracy, upload your scan of the pirate ship, and enter the drift an hour later without anyone following you.

There's no point in attempting piracy on arriving ships because you can't predict where they'll appear. The pirates would have to hang around in planetary orbit, near the local law enforcement, and wait until a random ship appeared nearby. Hope it's not a military or anti-pirate ship. Then they have to fight, capture, loot, and enter the drift before anyone responds. Plus if they've been hanging out in orbit for a while it's likely they've been scanned and IDed by, again, any non-incompetent law enforcement.

This can all be gotten around with corrupt and incompetent law enforcement, but then law abiding and lightly armed cargo ships will avoid that planet or station. Plus there's always the risk that the Hellknights or whoever just pack a bunch of troops and big guns into a cargo ship with high countermeasures, flying through known pirate areas and waiting to be attacked.

It doesn't seem like pirates can reliably get other ships. They're too mobile and random, being able to to and from the drift pretty quickly. I would think that pirates actually tend to mostly raid lightly defended settlements that are outside the sphere of influence of law enforcement. The problem being that those don't tend to be valuable.

I'm not sure that they would be able to afford to build such a base. I mean, turn it around a little bit: the PCs want to go pirating other spaceships, using the rules how do they do that? How do they get away with it more than two or three times?

Don't think of it as how little it pays you to do your boring day job, think of it as how cheap it is to hire someone to work for you on your ship.

Our DM banned us from hiring NPCs when we tried to hire a +30 piloting skill NPC for those 60 creds a day.

Given that in Starfinder an asteroid just a couple miles in diameter can have an atmosphere, normal liquids, and apex predators (although no plants or herbivores) I'd have to say that the number is higher than the number of star systems with rocky orbital bodies in the range of 0.1 to 10 Earth masses.