Should releasing your own anchoring weapon be a Minor crew action?


Rules Questions


1 person marked this as FAQ candidate.

This may be an FAQ candidate, but I see a possible unintended interaction with the Anchoring weapon property described in the Starship Operations Manual (SOM) and the Minor crew action rules in the Core Rulebook (CRB).

The SOM introduces some melee class starship weapons and the Anchoring property on tether weapons ties ships together mainly for boarding activities. The rules discuss how to break free of someone else’s anchoring weapon, but mention that your own anchoring weapons are easy to detach. The entire last paragraph for Anchoring states:

Starship Operations Manual page 13 wrote:
A starship’s gunner or engineer can detach any number of their own weapons’ anchors as a minor crew action.
However, on Minor crew actions, the CRB says
Core Rulebook page 326 wrote:

Minor Crew Actions

Minor crew actions are computer-aided actions that allow a starship limited functionality if it doesn’t have the necessary crew to fill all the roles (for instance, the lone crew member aboard a Tiny starship might always be the pilot but may need to fire one of the vessel’s weapons in an emergency). You can take one minor crew action per round regardless of your current role, but only if no other action was performed this round for the role associated with that minor crew action. A minor crew action can be performed only once per round and doesn’t count as your action.

I take that to mean if there’s no one acting in the gunner role that round (as on a one-person fighter), you can have the ship’s computer do a Snap Shot action for you as an automated gunner, but not if there’s someone else on the ship actually filling the gunner role by taking a gunnery action.

If detaching an anchoring weapon is a gunner’s or engineer’s action, does detaching your anchoring weapon then mean you have to forego either all Engineering or all Gunner actions that round? (Because of the bolded text on Minor crew actions.)


To put it briefly, I think they meant to say

Anchoring rule should be wrote:
A starship’s gunner or engineer can detach any number of their own weapons’ anchors as a free action in addition to their normal action that round.

But it's probably safest to call this a houserule until clarified.

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