Because the scales are different. Starfinder did take into account a small bit of realism with their ships. They need to be big, heavily armored tanks to survive the rigors of outer space. You know, massive radiation pulses, extreme heat AND cold, a speck of space dust that hits your hull while you're going the speed of light, etc.Okay, ignoring the fact that they're literally the same scale...
...no, I can't let that go. A foot is a foot. Like, understand that a Tiny starship is called Tiny because it's being compared to other starships, but if it's literally the same length as a dragon and you tell me "it's possible to target a 40 foot starship with this laser, but not a 40 foot dragon," we have a problem. And don't start with the "giant mass of metal" argument, I know dang well a starship can be made out of ironwood and panes of force, hell, it looks like a starship can be a space whale, so don't tell me all starships are so much denser than all space monsters that only starships can be targeted with starship weapons.
And as for radiation shielding, how hard do you think it is to protect a person from the hazards of space for days at a time? If you answered "such protection can be manufactured for under 100 credits and is ubiquitous on residents of space stations," you'd be exactly right!
Like, Pathfinder had some flaws, but do you know why incredibly large things didn't squash incredibly small things? Two reasons: first, it was very hard to hit them, with a large attack penalty and a large AC bonus (so maybe starships should have a quantified penalty when shooting at non-starships instead of a minus infinity): and second, actually, very small things DO get squashed by very large things. And maybe that's okay. Maybe PCs need to put getting shot by starship weapons up on the list of things like "falling off a cliff" and "getting thrown in the ocean while petrified" that will Kill You Dead, and they can deal with that. Because a number of discussions on the...
This. There are a lot of advantages that Tabletop RPGs traditionally have over video games & "not having immersion-breaking minigames that bizarrely don't interact with the rest of the setting" tends to be one of them - let's keep it that way.
Lol at this guy wilin out.
If it was meant to be a situation that comes up often it would have been address. I think you have been presented plenty of evidence that this is not something that should be happening so often that you need a specific set of parameters for how to handle it.
Perhaps not in your games and that's fine, but some of us are approaching this from a particular set of source material (Star Wars, Firefly, Guardians of the Galaxy, Stargate SG-1, etc), where these sort of situations happen often enough that it's a thing we'd like to have a fleshed out ruleset to model.
Again, if that's not a thing you want or will end up using in your games, that's okay - simply don't use that option. Heck, there are loads of optional & modular rules in Pathfinder that not everyone uses - not everyone wants psionics or firearms in their games - but it's not gonna hurt them if somewhere else, someone else is playing a psychic gunslinger, is it?
It's okay to let other people enjoy other things.
I can't see how this kind of system would realistically work.
What sort of accuracy penalty should a human get for shooting at fast-moving spaceship?
How long should it take for someone with a hand weapon to destroy a huge battleship from the outside?
If the party are fighting a CR-appropriate enemy outdoors, and one of the PCs is in their spaceship providing artillery support, should that provide a minor advantage, or completely annihilate the target in one shot, or what?
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While nice to have, ship-to-ground combat is not necessary for any of those settings. What instances occur can be handled narratively, or with existing rules.
Not every GM is going to find it fun by essentially handwaving certain situations because the rules for them aren't good enough. There's nothing wrong with creating new rules for these situations and giving the GM the option to use them or the older ones. Why should it stay the way it is and encourage GMs to stay away from those circumstances?
Assume the Starfighter in this example is X-Wing size
GM: The enemy is trying to get away as they enter their Starfighter and start it up. They're about to take off!
Player: I shoot at their cockpit with my Missile Launcher!
GM:Yeah, that's nice... Anyway, they enemy takes off and flys out of sight.
Player: WTF was that?! *Looks through the Starfinder rulebook*
Starfinder: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe not to you, but this situation looks pretty weak, if you ask me.
Yeah I think the problem would lie in the blur between the largest creatures that are non-ship and the smallest ship. The cross between those two makes the rule seem a little odd. also yeah weapons meant to be fired on ships. would have to give weapons like that special rules for when fired on ships.
While nice to have, ship-to-ground combat is not necessary for any of those settings. What instances occur can be handled narratively, or with existing rules.Not every GM is going to find it fun by essentially handwaving certain situations because the rules for them aren't good enough. There's nothing wrong with creating new rules for these situations and giving the GM the option to use them or the older ones. Why should it stay the way it is and encourage GMs to stay away from those circumstances?
Assume the Starfighter in this example is X-Wing size
GM: The enemy is trying to get away as they enter their Starfighter and start it up. They're about to take off!
Player: I shoot at their cockpit with my Missile Launcher!
GM:Yeah, that's nice... Anyway, they enemy takes off and flys out of sight.
Player: WTF was that?! *Looks through the Starfinder rulebook*
Starfinder: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe not to you, but this situation looks pretty weak, if you ask me.
Ok, going for that example, and existing rules, maybe on the top end: Level 20 weapon: Reaction cannon, paragon, does 12d10P damage, penetrating, , divide by 10 because adjustment to starship scale gives 6 points of hull damage, penetrating.
Now on to the starship. I don't want to build up a starship from hand now, so I'm using the stats of endbringer devil in Starship form, a tier 14, so a rather easy opponent, unless I'm mistaken. Further assuming it hasn't powered up it's shield yet, it has: HP 255; DT 5; CT 51; so no matter the penetrating ability of the reaction cannon, that blow doesn't do more than scratch the paint.
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While nice to have, ship-to-ground combat is not necessary for any of those settings. What instances occur can be handled narratively, or with existing rules.Not every GM is going to find it fun by essentially handwaving certain situations because the rules for them aren't good enough. There's nothing wrong with creating new rules for these situations and giving the GM the option to use them or the older ones. Why should it stay the way it is and encourage GMs to stay away from those circumstances?
Assume the Starfighter in this example is X-Wing size
GM: The enemy is trying to get away as they enter their Starfighter and start it up. They're about to take off!
Player: I shoot at their cockpit with my Missile Launcher!
GM:Yeah, that's nice... Anyway, they enemy takes off and flys out of sight.
Player: WTF was that?! *Looks through the Starfinder rulebook*
Starfinder: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe not to you, but this situation looks pretty weak, if you ask me.
Ok, going for that example, and existing rules, maybe on the top end: Level 20 weapon: Reaction cannon, paragon, does 12d10P damage, penetrating, 12d10, divide by 10 because adjustment to starship scale gives 6 points of hull damage, penetrating.
Now on to the starship. I don't want to build up a starship from hand now, so I'm using the stats of endbringer devil in Starship form, a tier 14, so a rather easy opponent, unless I'm mistaken. Further assuming it hasn't powered up it's shield yet, it has: HP 255; DT 5; CT 51; so no matter the penetrating ability of the reaction cannon, that blow doesn't do more than scratch the paint.
Right, and what is this supposed to tell me, exactly? A tier 14 starship is one of the highest tiered starships among the example starships. The only one higher is a tier 16 colossal dreadnaught.
An X-Wing sized Starfighter would be much, much lower than that. Take a racer frame starship with 20 hull points, the example you used would exceed its critical threshold in a single attack. That's only with a single attack and ignoring that you could potentially have 2 more.
Right, and what is this supposed to tell me, exactly? A tier 14 starship is one of the highest tiered starships among the example starships. The only one higher is a tier 16 colossal dreadnaught.
An X-Wing sized Starfighter would be much, much lower than that. Take a racer frame starship with 20 hull points, the example you used would exceed its critical threshold in a single attack. That's only with a single attack and ignoring that you could potentially have 2 more.
So you have an answer, within the rules, without a stretch.
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So you have an answer, within the rules, without a stretch.Right, and what is this supposed to tell me, exactly? A tier 14 starship is one of the highest tiered starships among the example starships. The only one higher is a tier 16 colossal dreadnaught.
An X-Wing sized Starfighter would be much, much lower than that. Take a racer frame starship with 20 hull points, the example you used would exceed its critical threshold in a single attack. That's only with a single attack and ignoring that you could potentially have 2 more.
Yeah, with some reverse engineering. I noted this in one of my earlier posts in this topic. There are too many things that have grey areas. What attack rolls do ships use against living targets (non starship scale)? Do they target EAC/KAC? If you simulate a starships attacks as environmental hazards, but I remember they use CRs on a chart with its attack and damage next to it, but what is the CR of a starship? Would a starship and a normal target trade attacks, despite them having their own measurement of time in rounds? Do starship explosives have saving throws? Would all creatures necessarily have a 1/10 damage conversion on a starship despite that some monsters could be much larger than most starships?
Anybody can figure something out that makes some sense in the game, but it really should be the job of the game to do so without telling the player to basically treat all starships as massive objects (which is essentially indestructible) and leaving you with just that.
What if a GM wanted to convert a Pathfinder space dragon as a space encounter? The GM would have to handcraft the entire encounter since no form of guideline exist other than educated assumptions at best.
Ouch. Calling my defense of the RAW half baked is kinda rude don't you think?
...
So there. Until the official rules come out, you have the basis for a system. Could we please keep this civil?
I called the RAW "half baked" because I'm a longtime Paizo customer critiquing a product, and IMO, they are. There's no need for you to take it so personally, bub. What, a customer expressing an opinion on a product is "rude" now? I took a look at Starfinder, b/c the idea of "Pathfinder in space" intrigued me at first, but b/w how "video-gamey" it seems (equipment levels? O_^) and now how spaceships are essentially their own separate mini-game because arbitrary reasons, that's why, I'll probably pass on buying anything from this particular product line unless I see major revisions down the road.
Your defense of it (and similar arguments made by others, so I'm not singling you out) I called a "cop-out" which is, IMO, what it is, when your argument amounts to "the RAW is the RAW, and that's that, and if you don't like it, write your own material."
I mean, your argument (and again, similar arguments made by others) seem to hinge on the is-ought fallacy , that because things are a certain way, they should be that way.
I have been keeping this civil, I haven't personally attacked anyone, haven't (AFAIK) violated any community guidelines - I'm not interested in drama, I just poke my head in here every once in a while to chat about RPG stuff b/c I don't have that much time to do this sort of thing, and I see this website is still slow - so kindly don't try to involve me in any drama, thank you.
Assume the Starfighter in this example is X-Wing sizeGM: The enemy is trying to get away as they enter their Starfighter and start it up. They're about to take off!
Player: I shoot at their cockpit with my Missile Launcher!
GM:Yeah, that's nice... Anyway, they enemy takes off and flys out of sight.
Player: WTF was that?! *Looks through the Starfinder rulebook*
Starfinder: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe not to you, but this situation looks pretty weak, if you ask me.
I've literally had games where the (sorely inexperienced) GM pulled this sort of b.s. & I called him out for it, and... suffice to say that person & I are not friends anymore (for a number of reasons, but instances like that didn't help).
This. Is. Why. When. Players. Point. Out. Obvious. Holes. In. The. Rules. Those. Holes. Need. To. Be. Patched. Instead. Of. Telling. Those. Players. To. Shove. Off.
"You see a set of other fighters, curled and ready, no doubt designed to be piloted by the Astrolich's NegaGuards, had they not fallen at your hand."
Players: "Can we steal them and pursue?"
GM: "Hell Yes! Let me grab my X-Wing miniatures"
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spaceships are essentially their own separate mini-game because arbitrary reasons
The reasons seem pretty clear to me.
They're separate because balancing the two concepts is really difficult. (And if you disagree, feel free to make your own system.)
D20 combat gameplay and spaceships flying around firing death rays at one another do not go together well.
If they produced one harmonious system where:
(a) spaceships can be bought and sold for the same currency as handguns, and
(b) there are rules for a fight where a guy with a missile launcher exchanges fire with a dreadnaught,
then the chances are the system would be horribly unbalanced in one way or another.
You'd probably get one or more of the following scenarios:
A party can't afford a spaceship until they're at least level 10.
A party that chooses not to buy a spaceship will save so much money they can afford to buy whatever gear they want.
A party that captures an enemy spaceship will be so rich they can afford whatever gear they want.
The party realises that the best thing they can do is stop buying personal gear, buy the smallest one-man spaceships for everyone and fly around everywhere, shooting holes in walls to get around, because this is far more cost-effective than any other way of defeating humanoid foes.
A character with a rocket launcher can blow up an enemy Starfighter in a single shot, so the best tactic in space combat is for all your crew to jump out into space and use hand weapons.
A character with a rocket launcher can't do significant damage to an enemy ship, so while there are rules for shooting at enemy ships, they're pointless. "The enemy is trying to get away as they enter their Starfighter and start it up. They're about to take off!" "I shoot at their cockpit with my Missile Launcher!" "You knock off one twentieth of their hit points. On their turn, they move forwards at maximum speed. They are now eighty miles out of your range."
"The enemy Starfighter turns around in the launch bay and fires a volley of laser blasts at you." (Rolls some dice.) "OK, the entire party is dead."
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Hey I take offense at that VTM comment My Malkavian is happy AF.
Its alright he probably wouldn't know to care anyways.
spaceships are essentially their own separate mini-game because arbitrary reasonsThe reasons seem pretty clear to me.
They're separate because balancing the two concepts is really difficult. (And if you disagree, feel free to make your own system.)
D20 combat gameplay and spaceships flying around firing death rays at one another do not go together well.
If they produced one harmonious system where:
(a) spaceships can be bought and sold for the same currency as handguns, and
(b) there are rules for a fight where a guy with a missile launcher exchanges fire with a dreadnaught,
then the chances are the system would be horribly unbalanced in one way or another.You'd probably get one or more of the following scenarios:
A party can't afford a spaceship until they're at least level 10.
A party that chooses not to buy a spaceship will save so much money they can afford to buy whatever gear they want.
A party that captures an enemy spaceship will be so rich they can afford whatever gear they want.
The party realises that the best thing they can do is stop buying personal gear, buy the smallest one-man spaceships for everyone and fly around everywhere, shooting holes in walls to get around, because this is far more cost-effective than any other way of defeating humanoid foes.
A character with a rocket launcher can blow up an enemy Starfighter in a single shot, so the best tactic in space combat is for all your crew to jump out into space and use hand weapons.
A character with a rocket launcher can't do significant damage to an enemy ship, so while there are rules for shooting at enemy ships, they're pointless. "The enemy is trying to get away as they enter their Starfighter and start it up. They're about to take off!" "I shoot at their cockpit with my Missile Launcher!" "You knock off one twentieth of their hit points. On their turn, they move forwards at maximum speed. They are now eighty miles out of your range."
"The enemy Starfighter turns...
Maybe it's just me, but I'm having a really hard time making sense about everything you wrote.
First off, why would it be so difficult to have a system where players can meaningfully interact with a starship, other than piloting it? It's only difficult when you make two entirely different systems and combine them together.
So what makes it incompatible? That players are capable of damaging a flying metal object that can shoot lasers? Like that makes any less sense in Pathfinder how you can fight against world ending monsters or 100+ft. high robots made out of adamantine that can shoot rockets and disintegration beams. Unlike this game, they didn't tell you in Pathfinder that "yeah, you can interact with those monsters, but you're just wasting your time."
Also, I got to say that I'm getting really tired of people taking one extreme (current rules) and using another extreme to prove why they think they're right. I never said every starship should get one shotted by a rocket launcher, but I would like some meaningful interaction between the two. Even if this were the case, yeah, go ahead and get out of your starships mid combat in the middle of space. Let's see how well that works.
Also, so what if a tiny starship gets one shotted by a missile launcher? Firstly, that's why someone should invest in shields for their starships. Secondly, stuff like this happens in all sorts of fiction. Do you think that people, after seeing a small starship get destroyed by a shoulder mounted missile launcher, raised their hands to their cheeks and went "oh my god! They destroyed a whole starship with a single rocket! How could this be?!"
Where did anyone imply that portable artillery should be more effective than starship mounted weapons. All that's being said is that there probably should be some sort of middle ground.
Also, it's not just "people and rocket launchers" it's everything that isn't a starship that interacts with a starship, like if a 100,000 ton Aspidochelone somehow belly flopped on a 30 ton hollowed out unshielded metal object, that would still do nothing it.
I don't know where you get the idea that giving players the possibility of harming a starship in any meaningful way somehow ruins the entire game's economy, that you have to explain more.
If they decide to do mechs in this game, I really, really hope they don't make their rules based off of a very narrow minded, short sighted assumption that "players can't fight giant robots with lasers" or whatever nonsense that would probably be agreed upon, which is evident in this thread.
Aaaand on that note I'm done here. I've given multiple ways for using the RAW, I've given a few ways to tweak it yourself, and still people are not happy.
Yes, Paizo rushed it. Is it perfect? No. But if they introduced everything that people wanted to do, the core book would be utterly massive. The developers had a limited amount of pages to work with, and IMO, didn't polish the system enough. But they did what they could. There's still tons of material still left to publish, and us non subscribers haven't even gotten our alien archive yet.
So you guys, girls, and hosts can all sit back and complain that your magical book doesn't have the content you want, all you want. But you still have three options until expanded material comes out.
1. Use RAW. Be happy.
2. Fix it yourself or with advice.Be happy.
3. Go play VtM where you are surrounded by characters as pessimistic as you. Be melancholy.And that's it. Everyone on this thread, I hope you have a nice day.
I don't know about everyone else, but don't lump me into a group of people that don't appreciate your contribution. I do, and your ideas are fine. These sort of house rules are useful for handling situations where rules don't seem to be present. The arguing I'm doing is when people tell me that starship mixed with monster combat is a no-no.
I don't know where you get the idea that giving players the possibility of harming a starship in any meaningful way somehow ruins the entire game's economy, that you have to explain more.
I was describing a system where you can interact with starships both physically and financially. It's equally unrealistic to not be able to sell a ship and buy a rocket launcher as it is to not be able to shoot a ship with a rocket launcher.
Anyway, just write the rules you want. All your need is a way to calculate hardness for ships, then divide the damage by something, and an accuracy modifier. And something similar for the ship shooting back. Shouldn't be hard to come up with something that feels realistic.
My guess is that such a system would prove horribly unbalanced one way or another or Paizo would have done it, but feel free to prove me wrong.
I'm still not entirely understanding the correlation between self defense against a starship and the economy.
If it's to stop players from stealing starships, that's going to be an issue anyway. If an NPC is in his landed starship, what's stopping a PC from using a Knock spell to open the ships door, invading the ship, killing the crew, and proceeding to sell it? Sorry, but inventing bad rules about a landed starship isn't going to save the game's economical integrity. This is a game that still has spell casters in it, and rendering all starships immune from all forms of non starship damage isn't going to save it from money hungry casters.
A wrecked starship may not even prove to be that useful. The game easily could encourage the GM to rule that the starship you shot down is insalvageable garbage after it crashed.
Starships could have easily been big Pathfinder creatures with multiple actions per turn and special high move speed rules.
Creatures and Starships are not integrated because Paizo thought a better game would have more handwavy nonsense to streamline play.
Starfinder as a whole is a gamble on basically being sci-fi PF but with more things you handwave on but less than 5e.
Now excuse me as a roll 1d6 inches of snow fall per hour of a blizzard.
Starships could have easily been big Pathfinder creatures with multiple actions per turn and special high move speed rules.
Creatures and Starships are not integrated because Paizo thought a better game would have more handwavy nonsense to streamline play.
Starfinder as a whole is a gamble on basically being sci-fi PF but with more things you handwave on but less than 5e.
Now excuse me as a roll 1d6 inches of snow fall per hour of a blizzard.
Yeah it definitely makes space combat better off by giving it its own grid and methods of combat. It just somewhat frustrates me a little since that was as far as they wanted to take it.
Vehicle scale is far too disconnected from "on-foot" scale that marriage between the two would require too much work for the small payoff.
Many games where vehicles and on-foot experience is more closely interwoven are the kinds where it is less shooting at massive dreadnoughts in the sky and more about shooting at the car with your assault rifle.
Okay, since a lot of people are getting the idea that I'm trying to create an entire subsystem, let me start over and explain what I, at the very least, was expecting. This is the last time I'm going to explain this.
SIDEBAR: SHOOTING STARSHIPS
Starship weapons and regular PC-level weapons work on different scales and aren’t meant to interact with each other. If characters choose to shoot at a starships with their laser rifles (or cast a Spell on it) while it is on the ground, the GM should treat the starships as an object (a particularly massive one, at that). At the GM’s discretion, if starships weapons are ever brought to bear against buildings or people, they deal Hit Point damage equal to 10 × their listed amount of damage. However, starships weapons are never precise enough to target a single individual (or even small group) and can, if the GM decides, be simulated as deadly hazards instead of weapon attacks.
Okay, what's wrong with this right here? It tells me if I attack it with a weapon or spell, basically, that a GM should treat it as an object, and a massive one at that. What does that mean, exactly? What object is being made here, and how does someone make said object? It could mean treat it as a vehicle, but I feel like that's not what it's saying. So do I just make an object out of ship walls and call it a day? Let's take a look at walls for starships:
Since there is no real direct quote I can use, I'm going to just say its statistics: 3ft. thickness, 1440 health, 30 hardness, and a break DC 45. So yeah it's a pretty tough wall. This is also per section.
So what does a person do to make this object? Do you just put a bunch of walls together and add their health total, for a 5,000-10,000 health behemoth for even a tiny starship? Don't make a health total at all, and just treat any attack as only affecting that side, but then what does that mean in the overall condition of the ship? Are there other things that have health totals? Like the internal components of the ship? I don't see them anywhere. Where are they? Notice a theme so far? That everything has been very vague, so far?
Continuing on, we're at the part where a starship attacks people. It does x10 the amount of damage. Good, that's nice to know. It certainly would have helped if there was some sort of conversion when a player attacks an object, instead of "massive object" and whatever that was supposed to mean.
Alright, so, how does a starship weapon attack people? Do they roll against EAC/KAC? It doesn't say anything about that. It wouldn't be the most far-fetched assumption, but it'll be nice if that were clear. Now someone would say "it says treat it as an environment hazard." Okay, I'm glad we're on that point, since I looked at said chart. Let's look at it together. I'm not going to put the whole chart up, since it just takes up space at this point.
TABLE 8–4: HAZARD ATTACKS AND DAMAGE
CR Attack Bonus Damage
1/4 +3 2d4
1/3 +4 2d4
1/2 +6 3d4
1 +8 4d4
2 +9 5d4
3 +10 5d4
4 +11 5d6
5 +12 5d8
6 +14 6d8
7 +15 6d10
8 +17 7d10
9 +19 8d10
10 +20 9d10
Anyone see the problem with this chart? I'll give you a minute...
No? Okay, then. What's the CR of the starship that correlates to this chart? Can anyone find it? No, because it's not there. So even then, the GM doesn't even know what the hell to do here with out making a guess.
So what is the assumption here? That starships can in no way attack people because they're too inaccurate? No matter with what weapon, too, right? Not even if it's a heavy nuclear missile launcher? Man, these guys must be the most drunken, half-asleep, incompetent, high as a kite pilots I've ever heard of. They make Storm Troopers look like Lars Anderson. Now it's not just people that have this problem. What about monsters? Do they get treated the same as "people?" An Oma, for example, counts as a medium frame starship with a starting Hull Points of 70. So a 1/10 health conversion isn't fair, either, unless the Oma has 700 health, which it doesn't. What about when a monster attacks a ship that's landed or about to take off. How does this resolve? Take up way more time than needed to come up with stand in statistics using object rules? Handwave the whole situation?
Other D20 games, such as d20 modern, had statistics for all types of vehicles. Vehicles like tanks, such as an M1 Abrams tank, fighter jets, such as an F16. An F-16 was equipped with miniguns and sidewinders, but a player can shoot one down just fine if he can pull it off. Just like a tank, they're tough as hell, but a good shot can damage it or even destroy it. They worked just fine, no one complained, from what I've seen.
All my examples with a rocket launcher were all in situations with the cheapest, unshielded starships that this game provides. Not against several mile long dreadnaughts that everyone keeps bringing up for some strange reason.
I think we can do a little better, here.
Who wants to do collabrative homebrew to patch up this glaring hole in the system. We can include stats for starships in monster style and conversions of cr to enviromental hazards.
Do we set up a new thread or do it here?
I'd be down with it, and it probably would be best as its own separate topic, so at least people will know what the intention of the thread is, unlike this thread that went all over the place, haha.
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Like dramatic artillery bombardment, it auto-misses until it auto-hits when it is appropriate and most likely insta-kills its targets.
Starships shooting at party members is a narrative device, not a combat device. That seems to be intention of that sidebar.
Ok here is my question to this. If the system was done lets like Palladium games where they added MDC which is kind of what the side bar in the core rules kind of identifies (ship weapon damage is = to 10X roll in personal damage)then what stops a character from taking his tiny space craft into a dragons den for example and using the ship weapons to defeat a CR 20 dragon for example, in a Tier 1 or 2 ship: which equates in the SF Core to a level 2 party. Personally I think the fact that they say ships can't attack players or players can't attack ships with personal weapons is a balancing mechanism. Trust I deal with players that would actually do this, heck I had a player able to take down a Star Destroyer in a Z-95 headhunter in base d20 Star Wars because he understood the rules presented in starship combat.
**Warning Science below this**
No I must say there is a flaw comparing a M1 or an F16 to an actual starship. First of in empty space it truly isn't empty. You have micro-meteors that travel 100k to 1m miles per hour or faster that the naked eye can't see so just imagine how thick and type of material would need to be used to try to stop something going that fast. The reason our solar system doesn't see a lot of this happening is because Big Brother Jupiter has a high enough gravity to either pull them into it or alter the trajectory enough to keep it from impacting earth's area, though there are instances that the international space station is hit by these Micro-meteors. Earth also has a magnetic field that and atmosphere that protects us as well so we don't this happening while we are on earth. If the ship isn't armored enough to stop that a bullet sized Micro-meteor could completely destroy a ship with only a hole the size of a centimeter. I don't think we could ever make weapon that could emulate what these Micro-meteors can do without a very strong power source.
In conclusion I think how the game designers kept character and ship combat separate simplifies and balances the game system. They...
Well, if the system were a little bit more fleshed out, taking your tier 2 starship into a CR20s den would result in getting yourself and your party killed. Since the game's gives no real reason to believe that would happen (an Oma is two size categories higher than a tiny ship, lower than CR20. Endbringer Devil is considered tier 14 in space, CR19 on ground)
Also, I'm not sure about vehicles, but flying in space in either Pathfinder or Starfinder was never modeled as being nearly indestructible, as starships in this game seemingly are on ground. There are monsters that can make a trip in a solar system in 1d6 hours, but that's treated as its own separate ability, completely unrelated to a monsters statblock. If you tell me "well it's just magical flight, it's not really doing it on its own like a starship can" then we're seriously reaching, here.
Not sure why I didn't mention it, but starships do exist in d20 future. Yes, they are tough, but the game never artificially made them invulnerable. If you can somehow hit it hard enough, you can bring it down. These are the 20-60 foot long ships I'm talking about, mind you. The 1,000 ft. ones were a lot tougher. Nobody thought the idea that you can possibly damage a small sized starship was silly at all. Never once have I read that.
Ok so creature size and ship cross paths some but again there is a difference on what materials make a creature and what makes a starship. Nature does things differently then how "man" makes things. Creatures that did not evolve in space would be different then if they did. So again weather the size cross in some way does not define the same material needed to make a starship that has to survive the rigors of space travel. You would not make a "space fighter" the same way as you would make a "terrestrial fighter".
Not for nothing, but I think it's important to be consistent when taking the assumptions of the game into consideration. You don't build a space monster "differently" because it has a different make up. What material a ship is made out of compared to a monster makes no mechanical difference, as they take up a hex space, move a number of hexes a round, and possesses hull points, such as an Oma, just like any ship does in space. The only difference is they decide to allow the monster to have mounted spacecraft weaponry or not, or at least an imitation of such and just as effective, such as the Novaspawn, such as an Endbringer Devil.
Again there are rules in Starfinder that explain why a creature could jump to different places in the solar system. The Creature goes into a different plain of existence to travel that distance that is similar to the Drift plane. So that ability is kind of moot. The Endbringer I don't know the stats for it because I don't have AA yet but I know earlier in the thread someone stated it has to transform to into space flight so when it transforms it alters it state down to the molecular structure making his material as dense as what some starship material revamp his circulatory system to manifest the amount of energy needed to power a ship category weapon. Again I may be understanding it wrong but with the info that I have I can only come up with a theory. Also Magic is a viable reason in starfinder not a cop out reason, so if it is magical flight so be it, because starfinder has magic.
It would help if you can quote said rules, as they could be very useful in this discussion. So, it's only moot if the game explicitly states if that's always the case.
Magic could be a viable reason, but not the only reason. It's only a cop out answer if someone attempts to refute everything I'm saying with just "it's magic!" Especially when several precedents exist in the game itself.
The Endbringer Devil, I don't think it "weakens" its physical make up, rather than altering it, because that just wouldn't make any sense, whatsoever. Why would a creature power down on land when it's trying to kill and destroy. To be fair?