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First, a note. Ship tier is determined by APL, and a party with more than 6 characters is treated as APL+1. 8-9 level 1 characters would thus by RAW get a tier 2 ship. You would still need to make some difficult design choices, but it's technically enough to get a functional 'destroyer' if you really wanted to. Not all ships are new ships, after all. Not all ships are in good condition either. Maybe they got it at a discount. Maybe there's a reason it had such a nice price.
Pact Worlds give us the launch tube, which lets a medium or large ship carry a single tiny ship. If you don't have Pact Worlds, you can get almost the exact same effect by just letting them carry a shuttle bay that can only carry a tiny ship; they function almost identically, save that the launch tube has special rules for in-combat docking. In either case, a medium frame with a tiny support ship gets you 8 crew slots, so there's only a problem if you actually have a 9th person. And if you really wanted, you could stick another launch tube on, though you've now used four expansion bays. Alternatively, as you noted, you might just give them a pair of comparable ships rather than a larger and smaller one.
In either case, you're now dealing with the problem of how to build multiple PC ships. There are a couple ways to handle that, if you'd like to go that direction.
Another option would be to just ignore max crew size for the party, at least on their initial ship. If you don't want to hand them a technically-functional but underwhelming destroyer, you can just let them cram a couple extra crew actions into an explorer or transport. If you're the GM, you can just do that sort of thing if you want.
I'm pretty sure there's no rule saying that a ship *can't* use more than its standard crew complement. Just make sure there's more than one gun mount, lest the extra couple PCs all be stuck doing spare Engineering and Science Officer actions.
Maximum crew is the most characters that can take actions in starship combat, minimum is the minimum. A medium ship cannot have more than 6 roles filled, no matter how many gunners, engineers, or science officers you have available. A large ship cannot fight at all unless you have at least 6 people willing to assume a role or assist someone in a role.
You could switch the DC calculation to actual APL rather than adjust APL/tier, yes. I'm not entirely sure that's necessary since the DCs have been revised, but it may be worth considering.
There are no particular guidelines for actually building multiple PC ships, unfortunately, but the CRB has ship encounter guidelines on page 326 that include how to calculate effective ship tier for multiple PC ships when designing encounters. For this, it can be basically be summarized as two equal tier ships being equivalent to a single ship of that tier+1. Reversing that and applying it to ship building, PCs who would normally have a ship at tier X could instead have two ships both at tier X-1.
But that's not the only way to handle it. Your proposed tier 2 with tier 1 could work, if you're okay with it. You might do a tier 2 with an even lower tier fighter, or even a tier 1 with the same. Pick your preference.
As for the post Metaphysician slipped in while I was typing...
In a base frame stat block, these entries note the minimum and maximum number of characters who can take actions on that vessel during starship combat.
How does combat for a tiny fighter work? Does the single occupant perform duties for pilot, engineer, science officer, and gunner all by himself? Can he do things for each role in a given turn? Hm
Look up minor crew actions. If no one is primary gunner or primary pilot you can do a weaker version of those as a minor action. So generally you'd act as the pilot or gunner and use a minor crew action to do a nerfed version of the other role. In a two seater pilot you either cover the gunner/pilot roles and ignore the others, or you can have someone act as an engineer or science officer and minor action gunner/pilot.
It may not be the most efficient solution, but you could have a tier 1/2 explorer with launch rails and a tier 1/3 or 1/2 fighter; the two ships are equivalent to a single tier 1 ship, per page 326 Multiple Ships. This will allow two PCs in the fighter and six PCs in the explorer to act in starship combat.
Where does it say max crew limits number of actions a crew can take?
Insofar as I can tell, you just need to add more passenger seats/beds and make sure you have enough guns for everyone. My reading was that you could only ever make one check per role (whether as an individual or as a team), but that you could have as many gunners, and gunnery checks, as you have guns.
Where does it say max crew limits number of actions a crew can take?
Insofar as I can tell, you just need to add more passenger seats/beds and make sure you have enough guns for everyone. My reading was that you could only ever make one check per role (whether as an individual or as a team), but that you could have as many gunners, and gunnery checks, as you have guns.
The max crew limits the number of participants in a combat, and each participant can have at most one role in combat (less for most crew on large ships who don't get independent roles).
If you have more passengers than max crew during combat, they might be able to watch what's going on via a screen, but the ship doesn't provide enough consoles (or engineering space) for them to help out.
I thought it was clear you could have more than one gunner though. What did I miss?
I'm guessing on the larger ships, you can't make the appropriate checks unless you have the teams supporting you in the first place.
Not so much everybody using aid another (which I don't believe is even allowed), so much as "you need the support teams to even use the complex systems of such large ships properly."
If I have a group that is 8-9 people, all starting at level 1, what sort of ship do you think they should have? According to the rules, if they have a medium ship, only 6 of them will be able to perform actions during combat... on the other hand, having a Destroyer-class ship at level 1 seems a bit silly, and it will have almost nothing on it, since most of the BP will go towards the ship frame.
Any suggestions? Should we have 6 people on the main ship, with like 3 smaller fighter types or something (but they can't dock on the medium ship?)? Or give them the destroyer? Or something else, entirely?
Perhaps break the group up into 2 medium ships? Hmm...
Thanks!
I’d just give them two ships (at their tier) and adjust the enemies accordingly.
You’re already having to build larger off-ship combats than a “usual” campaign, this just extends that.
I would go with a multi ship set-up - one destroyer and 1 or 2 fighter crafts (maybe one 2-seat fighter).
For the destroyer I would use at least tier 2, but would build it myself, to make sure it's not to strong/weak (the group got an old scrapped destroyer from the Vesk-Wars).
The fighter would be Tier 1 and my player are free to customize them as they like.
Additionally I would add free "Fighter-Docks" to the hull of the destroyer (no BP/PCU costs).
Once they reach level 3 they then can modify their main ship too.
Of course this would mean that I have to adapt the ship encounters
accordingly. But I would start with a really easy one and then learn from this one how to build Up the next and so on. I think with such a big group the normal encounter building rules doesn't really count anymore and you will have to wing a lot.
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Pact Worlds had a ship system that you could buy that allows smaller ships to share certain information between them (can't remember the name at the moment, but from the ABallonian ships). I seem to remember that all ships in the network allowed them to use the same science/captain actions amongst all of them, reducing the penalty for everyone being in smaller ships.
Pact Worlds had a ship system that you could buy that allows smaller ships to share certain information between them (can't remember the name at the moment, but from the ABallonian ships). I seem to remember that all ships in the network allowed them to use the same science/captain actions amongst all of them, reducing the penalty for everyone being in smaller ships.
It's called the Data Net, and yeah it's pretty sweet. I'd like to think it makes squadron combat pretty viable.