Quick question, and I may have read up the answer before but cannot seem to recall, how does Tier and BP work for a party with 2 ships?
To put this in a realistic example, the PCs have a medium Explorer class vessel and devote 2 expansion bays to a Launch Tube, which would allow them a tiny Racer class ship as well. How does the BP work? Would both ships pool the APL BP despite being separate ships (and both becoming lower tier), do you use CR calculations and build them with their own tiers and BP? Just not sure.
And while I'm on that topic, the second part. Can the captain of the medium vessel through comms, still encourage, demand, etc. the pilot of the tiny vessel when it is not docked on the medium ship?
I am a little confused. There's no expansion bay called a Launch Tube. There are Hangar bays, but they can only be installed on Gargantuan ships or larger. So I don't think the rules as written support this. There is also the "shuttle bay" but that can only be installed on Huge or larger ships and takes two bays allowing a small or smaller ship to dock. If that's what you're looking at, it can't be installed on an Explorer.
There aren't really any rules covering the "multiple ship" scenario. So everything is now just "advice".
How many PCs are you talking about here? I wonder why they want to do this at all. The overall action economy seems to favor a bigger ship with more crew rather than multiple smaller ships. (Unless of course you have 7 PCs on an Explorer frame in which case someone is idle.)
Assuming you're allowing the launch tube in the first place, I would simply say that the APL gives you a total build point budget and both ships must fit within that budget. As for remote captain, I think that's allowable personally. The racer is going to be pretty constrained as it is given action economy.
Frankly, if you have 7 or 8 PCs and are concerned about everyone being able to participate, I'd be more inclined to do some kind of house rule allowing more active crew.
I am a little confused. There's no expansion bay called a Launch Tube. There are Hangar bays, but they can only be installed on Gargantuan ships or larger. So I don't think the rules as written support this. There is also the "shuttle bay" but that can only be installed on Huge or larger ships and takes two bays allowing a small or smaller ship to dock. If that's what you're looking at, it can't be installed on an Explorer.
The Launch Tube is in Pact Worlds. It's pretty much shuttle bay for a medium craft that allows holding one tiny craft for 2 bays.
6 PCs plus the potential for an NPC or two is the thing. Plus we've got multiple capable pilots (Operative, Mechanic Ace Pilot, Envoy Captain). The major reasoning for it is the ship I like actually has a tiny ship docked on it, so if it's the out of the box ship we end up taking (around tier 10) we have to figure out how the BP work for the shuttle. Added, the ship in question doesn't have and port, starboard, or aft mounted weapons, so the turret missiles and the highly mobile fighter are the defenses against being broadsided.
D'oh sorry - I only checked the core book. (Odd - that really makes a lot of overlap between the shuttle bay and launch tube.)
That group sounds like mine but we only have 5.
I'd try to go with what I mentioned before with the total budget, but honestly I'm not sure how how viable that is without roughing out a couple ships and trying it. It might result in two underpowered ships.
It's made extra weird because the rules seem to take into consideration that the PCs can have multiple ships.
If the PCs have more than one starship, use the highest-tier ship’s tier as a base and add 1 to this value for each additional starship within at least 2 tiers of that starship. If none are within 2 tiers, add up the tiers of all the additional starships and add 1 to the base value if the total is equals or exceeds the base starship’s tier. Use this modified value when determining the encounter’s difficulty. If there are multiple enemy starships, treat every pair of enemy starships of the same tier as a single starship of the pair’s tier + 2 (and every trio as a single starship of the trio’s tier + 3). If there are a number of ships of different tiers, use the formula for multiple PC ships to determine the final difficulty. For example, if the enemy consists of three tier 1 starships, a tier 4 starship, and a tier 7 starship, the final result would be a tier 8 challenge.
So presumably, assuming you were playing an AP and had set starship encounters, if you were to hit your equivalent tier challenge with 2 ships, your larger ship should be tier -1 with the other within 2 tiers. If we look at the ship I was mentioning with the Launch Tube for the tiny ship, it's tier 10. So with the tiny ship tier 8-10 they'd ve equivalent tier 11 for AP challenge reasons.
However, there's nothing to say it needs to be a lower tier. The rules imply multiple tiers, possibly for battles where the PCs have to escort ships or other such things and would thus have the additional firepower. However, I think a perfectly reasonable idea to patch for now would be sacrificing a level of tier to gain another ship of the same tier. So complicated but example:
"When upgrading your ship, you can choose to reduce your primary ship's tier by 1 to gain another ship at the same tier as your primary ship. Keep in mind the number of PCs required to pilot additional ships, or having the appropriate bays to store smaller ships."
So the PCs could have 1 tier 11 ship, 2 tier 10 ships, or 3 tier 9 ships (and so on) and still up to a certain point viably be able to keep up with encounter challenge? It means you could also have the Star Fox team method where you have one large dropship that carries four tiny or small PC fighters for combat.