I've been making ships for quite a while, but I'm still a little stumped over which starship weapons would be best in planetary assaults against say, tanks, walkers, etc.
Starship can only hit starship stuff.
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Starship can only hit starship stuff.
That's an exaggeration.
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 starship with their laser rifles (or cast a spell
on it) while it is on the ground, the GM should treat the starship as
an object (a particularly massive one, at that). At the GM’s discretion,
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. However, starship 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.
You can't accurately target PCs or person-sized monsters, but big vehicles and kaiju are fair game.
OK, in my original post, I mentioned that it would be targeting vehicles (and forgot to mention cities, massive monsters and the like). What would be the best weapons for a "ground attack" fighter or dropship/gunship?
Purely by the rules: A vehicle armed with vehicle weapons. Or a starship with a very high tier anti-personnel weapon installed.
Going outside the rules because those answers are boring:
Arc mounted direct fire weapons are somewhat difficult to properly bring to bear against a small ground target. (see pg. 292)
So, more indiscriminate weapons are called for, and for medium and large ships, you probably want them on turrets. Explosives, array weapons, and point weapons are all good candidates for attacking ground targets.
Tiny fighters with torpedoes or tac nukes.
Small fighters with several gyrolasters installed
Medium transports and large destroyers equipped with a variety of heavy laser arrays and point defenses.
Those are the kind of starships one would expect to engage ground forces beyond the usual 'nuke it from orbit' tactic.
But PCs should not be doing this, nor should they have this done to them.
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Starship can only hit starship stuff.That's an exaggeration.
You can't accurately target PCs or person-sized monsters, but big vehicles and kaiju are fair game.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 starship with their laser rifles (or cast a spell
on it) while it is on the ground, the GM should treat the starship as
an object (a particularly massive one, at that). At the GM’s discretion,
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. However, starship 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.
Creature size is not a consideration. It says you can't target them, but you may instead simulate them as hazards. The only reference to hazards in Starfinder's core book is found in the Vehicle chase section of the book. How you handle it is up to you, afterwards.
I really wish the devs took the time to make this more intuitive. The fact that this question gets asked millions of times out of confusion is a failure on the devs end.
By and large, handling starships vs. ground targets should probably done narratively, not by building an actual starship.
Any NPC starship attacking ground targets should happen 'offscreen'. You should endeavor to keep the PCs from getting the idea to shoot ground targets with their starship.
Building a ground attack starship is an interesting thought exercise, but should probably be limited to a thought exercise, and not a statblock.
What Garretmander said. The rules aren't built for what you're talking about.
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Creature size is not a consideration. It says you can't target them, but you may instead simulate them as hazards. The only reference to hazards in Starfinder's core book is found in the Vehicle chase section of the book. How you handle it is up to you, afterwards.
I really wish the devs took the time to make this more intuitive. The fact that this question gets asked millions of times out of confusion is a failure on the devs end.
You're being very technical and losing sight of the bigger picture. It doesn't say anything about not being able to target vehicles. You can't target small groups, implying you could target large groups. And probably also creatures that are as big as large groups. Targeting vehicles bigger than small groups, and creatures bigger than small groups (say, a creature with a 4x4 or 6x6 or even bigger footprint) is cinematic and probably fine. Any creature portrayed as a starship in Alien Archive is certainly fair game.
It's actually narratively useful, in that you could have a scenario where you take on Godzilla with your spaceship but have to get outside and use your own guns to take on the crazy cultists.
The whole sidebar reads to me like "don't let people hijack your entire campaign by taking on all enemies with a spaceship". In practice during books 1-5 of Dead Suns we've done it once, when we basically nuked a monster's entire lair with it in it. Most of the time, we're just walking through jungles or buildings and suddenly run into monsters, and it's not possible to do the orbital bombardment routine. Also often we need the site where the bad guys are somewhat intact.
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Yeah, you should never just tell your players 'No, your particle beams and nukes do nothing to godzilla, now get out of your fancy spaceship and fight him hand to hand like real adventurers'.
You should write your stories so they come up with the idea to charge godzilla with a doshko on their own. He's in a city that's still populated, the devourer cultists that summoned him have a fleet in orbit that you can't beat with your one ship, etc.
Pg. 292 is a guideline for when your players still do the thing you tried to make them not do.
A planetary assault ship is therefore whatever you want it to be. Choose which weapons you think work best, then use it where you need it for a story.
Maybe it's clearing a path through an army so the PCs can get to the BBEG. Maybe it's bombarding a city and keeping the PCs stuck in the shelters so they don't go outside.
Ideally, you never actually need it's statblock.
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Yeah I think what the whole sidebar is trying to get at is that when you run things of really different scale against each other, it's not a conventional combat. A starship's movement race and distance at which it can attack are completely off the scale of a guy with a gun. He can't really hit the ship, but for the ship it's like trying to swat a fly - quite hard to actually pin him down.
Now when you run into something that is on the scale of your ship, then using it is fine. If you're a level 5 party, good luck even scratching Godzilla with your starship. You sure aren't gonna do with your pistol.
If for some reason I did need aerial bombardment as part of my story - from one side or the other - then I would probably do it using the vehicle rules. A huge vehicle isn't that much different in size from a tiny starship.
So, I guess it would be more like the Air Force rather than a space fleet.
Now if the players want to use their starship to attack ground targets, I would generally have to do something to try and prevent that (there may be some rare exceptions that I can't think of at the moment).
One problem is that the number of HP and damage reduction is quite a bit different between starships and vehicles. Another is the range of the weapons. People could fight back against an airplane attacking them. Shooting at the starship would be ineffective at best, and even the highest powered sniper weapons would likely be out of range to hit a starship in orbit.
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The best reason to come up with excuses to make starship weapons largely ineffective against ground targets is just symmetry. There's nothing inherently wrong with playing a game where problems can be solved with orbital bombardment, but it means that the players are a problem that can and eventually will be solved with orbital bombardment.
The result is not necessarily going to be a bad game, with a group of players whose mindset is suited to it, but it could go pretty badly, if people aren't ready for that.
To the people that are responding to my post, no one said get out of your spaceship and fight them on foot. All I said is that the rule is treating your attacks as hazards against creatures at best, which is a form of an attack in itself. It just uses lower numbers, not instant kill X10 numbers.
It doesn't say anything about vehicles because the devs probably didn't have it in mind when writing that block. It's missing tons of stuff it probably should mention.
Look, not for nothing, if you disagree that's fine, but I'm not going into another argument about Paizo's shoddy ruling about starships against ground targets. I've had this argument thousands of times, in and out of game, and I'm not interested in it anymore, so I'm not responding after this. If Paizo doesn't care, why should I, you know? It actually made me resent Starfinder, to some degree, because it's such a common problem that they didn't feel like was necessary to ever address, and that's mind-blowingly bad design.
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The best reason to come up with excuses to make starship weapons largely ineffective against ground targets is just symmetry. There's nothing inherently wrong with playing a game where problems can be solved with orbital bombardment, but it means that the players are a problem that can and eventually will be solved with orbital bombardment.
The result is not necessarily going to be a bad game, with a group of players whose mindset is suited to it, but it could go pretty badly, if people aren't ready for that.
The thing is, in five books it's only once been the obvious solution to our problem (a monster that needed to die that lived in an acid lake on an asteroid nobody cared about). The other time when we wanted, Eox air traffic control didn't want to authorize agents of its own government to do it.
Much of the time as an adventurer, you're already out of your starship and in combat, so bombing isn't an option. Or, there might still be loot there which you'll also destroy.
It's really rather rare that players have a good case for bombing, so I don't see the need to knee-jerk institute global rules against it as if it were a pandemic.
The best reason to come up with excuses to make starship weapons largely ineffective against ground targets is just symmetry. There's nothing inherently wrong with playing a game where problems can be solved with orbital bombardment, but it means that the players are a problem that can and eventually will be solved with orbital bombardment.
The result is not necessarily going to be a bad game, with a group of players whose mindset is suited to it, but it could go pretty badly, if people aren't ready for that.
The thing is, in five books it's only once been the obvious solution to our problem (a monster that needed to die that lived in an acid lake on an asteroid nobody cared about). The other time when we wanted, Eox air traffic control didn't want to authorize agents of its own government to do it.
Much of the time as an adventurer, you're already out of your starship and in combat, so bombing isn't an option. Or, there might still be loot there which you'll also destroy.
It's really rather rare that players have a good case for bombing, so I don't see the need to knee-jerk institute global rules against it as if it were a pandemic.
Dead Suns did a good job, you almost always wanted evidence, more loot, had possible collateral damage, that sort of thing. PCs tend to not make the devourer cult look like pacifists if they know they won't get loot.
To the people that are responding to my post, no one said get out of your spaceship and fight them on foot. All I said is that the rule is treating your attacks as hazards against creatures at best, which is a form of an attack in itself. It just uses lower numbers, not instant kill X10 numbers.
It doesn't. It says 'deadly hazards' it doesn't say look at the vehicle hazard chart. You can use a level appropriate chart, like NPC attack damage, trap damage, vehicle hazard damage. You can use starship weapon damage x10. You can use 'you got hit by a laser beam three times as big around as you are tall, you die, no save'.
All are appropriate, and should be selected according to the story you are telling.
So far, my PCs have tried it once. I gave them an exceptionally hard time actually hitting their target, and they kept making massive sections of melted/vaporized asteroid that did more damage to on-foot PCs than their target. They eventually 'hit' and insta-gibbed the enemy, getting no loot. They've never tried again.
Anyone ever play any Star Control? Who wants to zig-zag around like an Arilou ship? Come on, let me see those hands.
Haha. Loved it!
I've played several different versions of that game. All awesome!