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A book on the Armada would add tons of new ships and NPCs. Since the Armada is made of starships, makes it easy to pick and chose what an MG wants to use, and many of the ships and NPCs in it could appear from time to time at other systems or planets. Could be a little like the Grand Baraaz for Starfinder but not limited to just merchant ships. Not thinking of ships here as just combat stats but actually setting locations you can visit.
Do you think this could be a useful book? What would you add to it?
I dunno Metaphysician. The Armada consist of a hundreds possibly thousands of ships.
I can imagine a book dedicated to it. At the same time, I can also imagine a product on Absalom station covering the really important ones, and maybe rules for generating random ships, with captains and crew motivations to flesh them out a little.
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Actually on thinking about it you're right. It's probably a matter of detailing the 10 most important ships in the armada and then having a resource to randomly generate the rest.
Something I am interested in is if there are any generational or seed ships that would have been sent out prior to the drift being gifted to the universe from Triune.
To my knowledge there are some places that developed other methods of faster than light travel prior to that, but that they weren't as "safe or reliable" and they might not have those kind of ships, but I think those kind of giant ships would be very ripe settings/locations for stories.
That though, would be a different book from one about the Armada or Absalom station.
Maybe the Idari, it's unclear whether it left before the Kasatha had knowledge of the Drift. In the Pact Worlds the Signal went out three years after the end of the Gap there.
At Kasath we know that the Witchwyrds convinced the Kasatha to head to the Pact Worlds "shortly after" the Gap ended, but we don't know if the Gap ended the same time there as at the Pact Worlds. It could have been earlier, giving many more years to design, build, and outfit the Idari before the signal arrived.
Alternatively, they'd started building it without drift engines, didn't trust or know how to scale up drift engines in time once the Signal arrived and decided to just keep to their original plan rather than delay or trust to this new, untested technology.
Or maybe they just built it, recruited crew, loaded and left in a really tight less than three years, with everyone in statis or crew beyond communications reach once the signal appeared and made their centuries long voyage unnecessary.
Non-Idari, one interesting issue from the Pact Worlds perspective of pre-signal exploration and colonization is that the Veskarium is the closest star to the Pact Worlds. Surely they made contact during the Gap with some of those other interstellar drives, but those results are lost to the Gap. (Maybe that's how the Formians ended up there.)
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I dunno Metaphysician. The Armada consist of a hundreds possibly thousands of ships.
I can imagine a book dedicated to it. At the same time, I can also imagine a product on Absalom station covering the really important ones, and maybe rules for generating random ships, with captains and crew motivations to flesh them out a little.
.....
Actually on thinking about it you're right. It's probably a matter of detailing the 10 most important ships in the armada and then having a resource to randomly generate the rest.
The big question is what level of detail. In the Starship Operations Manual, ships only get one page. That would work for adding the armada to a book on the station. In the Grand Barazzar, each shop gets 2 to 8 pages, with the typical shop having around 8 unique items it sells, a full-page description of the shop owner, and another page for the shop description, and adventure hooks. It's not just random treasure or shop charts, but those could still be useful to have.
Considering how important it is in Starfinder to constantly upgrade your equipment a book like this could make that part of the game much more interesting. For an Armada book, I wouldn't limit it to just ships with things to sell but all so offering services and entertainment.
from the Pactworlds description of the Armada:
"Ships
constantly raft together to make black-market deals and some
of these conglomerations have become permanent." So using that maybe an Armada Grand Bazzar type book might focus on just one or two of those black markets.
Well, each ship also has a half-page art spread in SOM. If you restricted them to statblocks and maybe a paragraph of explanatory text you could probably get 2-3 per page.
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Statblocks aren't even needed for a Grand Bazaar-style description of a ship in the Armada. I'm thinking of ships as adventure locations to visit not for ship-to-ship combat. "Lost in the void" from Drift Crisis would be a good example of that type of ship description I'm thinking of. It's 4 pages long which is the average size of a shop descript in the GrandBazaar, and like the Grand Bazaar, it also includes new items available there.
If you just want random ship stats, that's already available online.
starship-generator..