Yeah the scales are separate. Can't remember off the top of my head but they said every 1 damage from a ship equates to 10x that amount to a PC but that ship weapons are too inaccurate to accurately target a person. I suppose you could reverse engineer that and divide any player damage to ships by 10 but I don't think it'll get you anywhere.
It says that attacking starships is basically attacking incredibly huge objects, so it's probably not going to do much.
The smallest ship weapon does 20-80 damage to characters if it fires on the area that they are in. It doesn't say anything about what the attack roll is or if there's a reflex save or something.
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If a player wants to use their ship to shoot someone, I figure it'll be harder to hit them, but if it does hit, it's almost certain to kill them.
If a player wants to shoot a ship with a personal weapon, it'll be easy to hit, but almost impossible to do any real damage. (Unless the ship is really far away, obviously. Then it's pretty much impossible to hit, too.)
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I just want an NPC to be able to say "how bad@ss is that Free Captain? He took out a gunboat...WITH AN AXE!" and it actually be something doable.
I just want an NPC to be able to say "how bad@ss is that Free Captain? He took out a gunboat...WITH AN AXE!" and it actually be something doable.When was the last time you heard of someone taking out a moving car with an axe? Let alone a Navy Destroyer or a B-52 bomber.
Can we reference comic book characters?
Well, not an axe...
In melee combat EVEN!
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Everything I've heard on this topic from the developers is that you can't target people with shipboard weapons ... yet. There wasn't space in the core rulebook to deal with all the aspects of ship level combat Vs PCs.
While nuking the dungeon from orbit may sound like a good idea, it breaks the game's theme. And several interstellar conventions regarding cultural sites, use of WMD, etc...
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If you really need to use this for a home game (eat coilgun dragon!) the various Battletech games have scaling damage for people Vs Mechs and Mechs Vs space naval assets. A Mechwarrior 2nd edition character has roughly 30HP, single short range missile does 2 points to a Mech or 10d6+6 to a person. That same 2 point missile needs 4 more friends do 1 point of capital ship damage.
The answer is pretty much the same, firing ship scale weapons at unprotected people is overkill.
While nuking the dungeon from orbit may sound like a good idea, it breaks the game's theme. And several interstellar conventions regarding cultural sites, use of WMD, etc...
You mean something an evil party (because there are going to be evil games, particularly with the Azlant Empire being a thing, as well as the empire that Hell has on the Material Plane) wouldn't care about, or is SF assuming only good-leaning parties?
Or a neutral-ish party against a major threat? Because (Dawn of War II spoilers)|
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Orbital bombardment is a staple of science fiction. "Nuke the site from orbit, its the only way to be sure" can be the correct answer to some problems. Viral outbreaks, massive colonies of undead, disassembler nanite swarms are all great reasons to evac and reduce the a city or continent to ash. I suspect most ships won't have the firepower to do more than a few city blocks worth of destruction at a time but I could be wrong.
It is not a Good answer in terms of alignment. The default assumption about Pathfinder and Starfinder is the PCs on average are somewhere between Neutral and Good. Indiscriminate destruction is always a Chaotic act and often Evil as well.
I just want an NPC to be able to say "how bad@ss is that Free Captain? He took out a gunboat...WITH AN AXE!" and it actually be something doable.
It's totally doable, but not easy. A level 20 solarian, with the right kind of axe, can probably do around 200-300 damage per round (more if you really min-max); since starship rounds are supposed to be longer than 6 seconds, throw in say five rounds of this and you've successfully killed a tier 3-4 spaceship.
I really don't see a reason why there can't be some character/starship scale overlap at the smaller scales of starships and the larger ends of character weaponry.
The Fighter and Interceptor are both size "Tiny" (20–60 ft.) - that's comparable to various IRL military fighter planes, which is what they are meant to parallel, but in space.
Now why can't I use one of the massive cannons in the heavy weapons section to deal damage to (even a grounded) fighter? You know, like we have man-portable anti-armor/anti-air/anti-materiel weapons to do exactly that IRL right now?
As for starship weapons targeting characters, why not have a way to assign area-of-effect & Reflex Save DCs?
IMO, saying "if starship weapons are ever brought to bear against buildings or people, they deal Hit Point damage equal to 10 × their listed amount of damage. " but neglecting to include rules for how that might be done was kinda half-arsing it.