Potential Errata for the Starship Operations Manual

[Xenocrat]

1. Gravity Generator (Light) and Gravity Well Generator (Heavy) have the exact same mechanical effects (short range and identical effects) because unlike the Hacking and Nav-Scram ECM weapons, the Gravity Well property does not list any special perks or effect upgrades for using a heavy or capital version of this weapon type. The Black Hole Generator (capital) has medium range which does distinguish it from the other two.

But as of now there is zero reason to pay the increased costs for the heavy Gravity Well Generator instead of installing the light weapon version to save BP and PCU.

2. The Array weapon upgrade cost on pg 17 is probably wrong at x1. It allows much better weapons (higher damage, long range) to be converted to array weapons at a very similar BP and PCU cost as the CRB array weapons.

3. Deployed might cost slightly too much at x2 - it does worse damage than a x1 cost weapon being fired six times by a gunner every round over the full six rounds and three gunner actions that a deployed version of the weapon would take to be fully deployed and then exhausted. Not sure all those limitations (higher cost, inferior damage, low endurance) are worth saving some gunner actions in rounds 4-6.

4. Atech Resolute, pg 98: It has fortified hull (steel composite), which should add 4 to the critical threshold of a large ship, but the HP 160 and CT 32 do not reflect those bonus CT. Should be CT 36.

5. Erroneous linked tracking weapons: Only direct fire weapons can be linked (this is still true in CRB 3rd printing, pg 301), and three ships in this book purport to have linked tracking weapons. These are the Sov-El Korinath (pg 99) with "linked tactical nuclear missile launchers," Compent Those Who Are (pg 116) with "linked light torpedo launchers," and the Inheritorworks Redeemer (pg 118) with "linked magic torpedo units." All of these can be fixed by simply removing the linked aspect, which means there should be a some free BP to add some other features to these ships if they were built on a strict BP budget.

[Hanomir]

This would probably be better placed in Rules Questions than here. My own FAQ/errata list for SOM is over four pages at this point, and I haven't even gotten to the pre-built ships yet. Will post them if I ever finish the job.

That said:

1) Spotted that as well, almost certainly indicates a mistake somewhere considering how careful they were to make all other ECM improve slightly from class to class. Simplistic fix is to make the heavy version range Medium, while leaving the others as written. That way all three tiers have something to differentiate them.

2) Array is free, but I'm not sure that's broken as-is. It comes with the significant penalties of (in ascending order) forcing you to shoot at everything in arc, including friendlies and neutrals, a -4 to hit penalty baked in, and using up two weapon slots. Might be worth more than x1.0 but it sure isn't worth much more, especially in a game where the expected norm for starship combat (at least involving PCs) is one-on-one duels an awful lot of the time.

What does worry me about Array as a tack-on trait is its interactions with other things - like the Line trait, or ECM. Those kind of interactions raise some concerns about balance regardless of cost.

3) Deployed is written poorly at best and the mechanics are iffy. The drones are extremely slow and relatively fragile (although shots at them aren't shots at your ship, so that's a plus) and their accuracy is poor. There's also the question of whether they were trying to say the launched drone effectively has the Automated and Limited Fire 3 traits, or if the weapon you've applied Deployed to gains Limited Fire 3 (and therefore a limited drone payload) and Automated (in which case the gunner can presumably just punch Go and leave it to produce one drone a turn till it runs out). Until all that's clarified talking about the cost is difficult since we may be operating from an incorrect interpretation.

4 & 5 are beyond where I've gotten in the book editing. I will say that while the RAW for Linked is definitely direct fire only, I've never been able to see why the restriction is needed. Tracking weapons are nowhere near as good as Paizo seems to think in general, and letting a gunner launch two with one shoot action would only help reduce their awfulness a bit.